Donald Judd (1928–1994)

 ‘I like the desert and the Southwest a great deal … And I wanted a place that would stay empty.’ That is how Donald Judd (1928–1994) explained his decision to settle in the remote West Texas outpost of Marfa in 1992, approximately two decades after his first visit there. In many ways, it was an unexpected affinity. Judd’s roots were solidly Midwestern – he was born in 1928 in a small Missouri town – and, like many ambitious American artists of his generation, he moved to New York at the earliest opportunity. His rise was meteoric: in the early 1960s, Judd’s trailblazing three‑dimensional work opened radically new possibilities for American art. Geometric structures fabricated from raw industrial materials, they engaged directly with their architectural surroundings; in the series of untitled ‘stacks’ that became one of Judd’s signatures, rigorously spaced boxes of aluminium, plexiglass or galvanised iron are cantilevered directly from the gallery walls. In 1968, only six years after he had exhibited the first of these pieces, the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a major Judd retrospective, which was met with widespread acclaim. Barely 40 years old, he was firmly established as one of the most innovative artists of his generation.

It was precisely at this point in his career that Judd decided he wanted more depth and less distraction. He was concerned about the increasing commercialisation of both the art world and the city itself, worried that market pressures were stifling artistic innovation, and tired of the limitations imposed by traditional exhibition formats, where installations were often crowded and short-lived. He wanted a site for genuine experimentation, a place for permanent installations, and above all, he wanted more space, somewhere that he could realise his vision of artworks that would take over not just a single gallery but an entire building or even a landscape. 

The vast emptiness of the Southwest seemed to provide the perfect answer: it was both an escape and a supposedly blank canvas, a field of endless new possibilities far from the fads of the art world or the vagaries of the art market. Judd was not alone in this vision; this was the era of land art, when deserts loomed large in the cultural imagination. Land art often treated deserts as something spectral, metaphysical, even hypothetical. As Robert Smithson put it in a 1968 essay on the movement: ‘The desert is less “nature” than a concept.’ In this sense, deserts have long played an important role in the rhetoric of the avant‑garde. Kazimir Malevich – a canonical figure admired by Judd and Smithson alike – repeatedly turned to the desert as his preferred metaphor for radical abstraction. His vision, as he put it in his 1915 manifesto The Non-Objective World, was one of ‘no more “likeness of reality”, no idealistic images – nothing but a desert!’ Malevich is not known to have ever visited any deserts, so it’s safe to say that for him the desert was indeed just a concept. Yet it was a powerful one, offering a potent evocation of the very foundation myth of modernism: a tabula rasa that would establish a definitive break from history and tradition and allow a new, better world to be built from the ground up. 

In the early 1970s, Judd began acquiring buildings and land in and around Marfa, and he spent the rest of his life remaking them into a series of transformative projects that wove together art, architecture and landscape. His first acquisition was a large parcel in downtown Marfa that he referred to as ‘the Block’, where he transformed a cluster of structures into living and working spaces, a library and a series of site‑specific art installations. In the late 1970s, he partnered with the Dia Art Foundation to purchase an entire defunct army fort on the edge of town, where he went on to create some of the best known works of his career: 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982–86), a series of shimmering metallic boxes permanently installed in two former artillery sheds that Judd renovated extensively for that purpose, and 15 untitled works in concrete (1980–84), a line of monumental concrete frames stretching for nearly half a mile across a former military parade ground nearby. The last property he acquired was a vast ranch he called Las Casas, 80 miles outside Marfa near the US-Mexico border, where he experimented with a series of functional earthworks built from local stone. By the time Judd died in 1994, projects like these had made the West Texas desert an enduring symbol of his singular genius and the radical autonomy of his vision.  

There is also a darker side to this conception of the desert. Judd was obsessed with empty space, which he considered to be one of the constituent materials of his work. This attitude suggests that he might have seen the desert as not merely empty, but, in its very emptiness, as a vast trove of raw material to be exploited; in this sense he was perhaps not so different from a rancher, a miner, or other archetypal figures of the American West. This attitude certainly resonates with the economic structures that allowed Judd to pursue his Marfa projects in the first place. Dia was itself bankrolled by founder Philippa de Menil’s holdings in Schlumberger, one of the largest oilfield services companies in the world. So Dia was literally grounded in the logic of extractive capitalism, and when Judd and Dia eventually parted ways in the mid ’80s, titles to the oil, gas and mineral rights to the land they had jointly acquired became one of the negotiating points between them, putting empty space in play against other material resources the desert had to offer. More broadly, the notion of the desert as a blank canvas replicates the profound problems of the American pioneer myth, which promoted the idea that Western lands were there for the taking, brutally suppressing the peoples, cultures and ecologies already thriving there.

But what if this myth of Judd, conquering hero of the empty desert, hides a more complicated truth? For all his mainstream success, Judd has not always been well served by the critical establishment, which has largely overlooked the idiosyncrasies of his practice in favour of situating him within familiar interpretive frameworks. He has gone down in art history as the premier sculptor of minimalism, despite the fact that he vehemently distanced himself from this movement and categorically refused to describe his work as sculpture, arguing that the term did not do justice to its spatial and architectural dimensions. Judd’s work is also often categorised as ‘neo‑avant‑garde’, meaning that it descends in a more or less direct line from the radical experiments of early-20th‑century European modernists such as Malevich. But Judd understood his own work in relation to a much wider range of precedents. He was fascinated by the history of Indigenous American cultures; while living in Marfa, he collected artefacts from across the Southwest, and at the Block he installed his own works in dialogue with objects ranging from Navajo textiles to Pueblo pottery. He also visited archaeological sites across the region and borrowed from the forms and materials he encountered there, as evidenced in his use of adobe walls at the Block or in his echoing of the ruins he encountered at Wupatki National Monument, an Ancient Pueblo site in what is now Arizona, in the circular stone walls he constructed at Las Casas. 

Such connections raise questions about appropriation and exoticism. After all, many modernists looked not only to the emptiness of deserts but to the otherness of so‑called ‘primitive’ cultures to escape the weight of western tradition. But Judd in Marfa was not Picasso in the Trocadéro or Le Corbusier in Algiers. His interest was deep, sustained and informed. Although this biographical detail has been overlooked by Judd scholars, as an art history student at Columbia he studied the art and architecture of the Ancient Americas with the eminent Paul Wingert, one of the first scholars to argue that these civilisations should be taken seriously by the discipline of art history. Judd kept up with scholarship on Ancient America throughout his life, and his library in Marfa was full of books on the subject.

Judd’s understanding of desert ecology was similarly nuanced. He was an early follower of trailblazing environmentalists such as the ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan, who, in books such as his Gathering The Desert (1986) made a powerful case for the inseparability of people, plants and landscapes, arguing that preserving Indigenous knowledge and ancient cultural traditions in the US-Mexico borderlands could be crucial for learning how to face a future of dwindling resources everywhere. Nor was Judd’s interest in such matters only academic. The history of his collaboration with local engineers and contractors to fabricate the 15 untitled works in concrete is well known. But as activity reports kept by Dia attest, Judd also worked with soil conservation specialists to reseed the field with native plants such as plains bristlegrass, sand dropseed and blue grama grass. Although a forgotten detail today, the native grasses were a constituent part of the piece. 

So the desert Judd found in West Texas was not really empty. It was, rather, a dense palimpsest of history, culture and ecology: a place for radically reimagining the interconnections between nature and culture, and questioning what it means to be an artist and what it is to experience art. Revisiting this understanding of deserts seems especially important now, when it might help us rethink what deserts have come to mean to us. In recent years, as cultural institutions around the globe have pushed to increase their accessibility and diversify their audiences, most urban museums are abandoning their traditional role as arbiters of class and status. But remote destination museums are booming worldwide, presumably because they offer an undercover exclusivity. In an era when the idea of an overtly exclusive museum is no longer permissible, an art installation in a place far away from major urban centres can allow a certain class of cultural consumer to once again congratulate themselves on their elite status – the more difficult to get there, the better. No doubt unintentionally, the spaces that Judd created in Marfa – now preserved as the Judd Foundation and the Chinati Foundation – provided a prototype for this kind of institution, and Marfa today ranks among the premier targets for international art tourism. But remembering what the desert really meant to Judd also reminds us of the radical possibilities of the institutions he founded there, which offer not so much a place to visit but a field for the ongoing exploration of a broader network of cultural practices that transcend the art world and culture industry.