After laboring for nearly a decade to become a painter, Donald Judd looked at his oeuvre and declared it “stupid”. He had a point. Although they were competently made and pleasant to look at, Judd’s abstract landscapes of the 1950s lacked the intellectual heft for which he became famous with the sculptures he began making in the ‘60s and continued to produce until his death in 1994. By referencing the paintings Judd scorned, an important retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and the accompanying catalogue show how profoundly the third dimension inspired his art and how forcefully his work confronted art history.
Donald Judd. Untitled. 1969. Clear anodized aluminum and blue Plexiglas; four units, each 48 × 60 × ... [+]
Even before he critiqued his own paintings, Judd was a professional critic who wrote regularly for art magazines. His constant exposure to gallery shows familiarized him with the latest art, which he assessed in historical terms through incisive reviews bolstered by formal training in philosophy. In a time when novelty was a cardinal virtue and originality was a job requirement, Judd was well positioned to know what had been done and to identify artistic innovation.
Seeing that his abstract landscapes were not especially innovative – and having enough integrity to admit it – Judd deliberately set out to do something that had never been attempted. What is most notable is his intentionality. He worked by process of elimination, reinforced by negation. His work was deliberately not representational, illusionistic, anthropomorphic, or symbolic. It wasn’t grandiose or hierarchical. It wasn’t finely crafted or sculpted by the artist. Most emphatically, his sculptures were not “sculpture”. He insisted that he was making “specific objects”.
Naturally he wrote about them. The critical skills he used to chart all that had been done in the past, and to discern what hadn’t, were deployed to justify his own artistic production and to situate it in the art-historical continuum. He put it at the forefront. In a 1965 essay titled “Specific Objects”, he argued that “painting and sculpture have become set forms,” and therefore not credible. Against this artful fraudulence, which gained status through the agency of frame and pedestal, he set artwork unconstrained by depictive tradition. With the specific object, there was no pretense. “Three dimensions are real space,” he wrote. “A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be.”
Even if Judd didn’t say it, thinking was the domain of writing. Rhetoric was the pedestal. The manifesto was the frame.
The manifesto was hardly new when Judd wrote “Specific Objects”. The Futurists first issued a manifesto in 1909 and continued publishing them for decades. Many of these manifestos were exercises in negative capability, assertions of contrarianism militating against tradition. Moreover, the Futurists often appropriated industrial materials and set art in real space.
Donald Judd. Untitled. 1991. Enameled aluminum, 59″ × 24′ 7 1/4″ × 65″ (150 × 750 × 165 cm). The ... [+]
Judd did not associate his work with Futurism, which would have moored it in tradition (and, even more undesirably, in the tradition of Fascism). And it would be unfair to place too great an emphasis on the Futurists when considering his work. After all, the anxiety of influence – to borrow a term coined by Harold Bloom – afflicted all phases of Modernism. Every Modernist was paranoid about the past almost by definition, and contrarianism was a survival mechanism.
What is distinctive about Judd is the parsimoniousness with which he approached the problem of originality. He didn’t need the sort of bombast that the Futurists used to overthrow the past. A small difference made all the difference when he made three-dimensional space the material of his sculpture, modulated by plywood and sheet metal. His approach to novelty was a triumph of minimalism (and also a paragon of Minimalism even if, contrarian to the core, he resisted being called a Minimalist). A body of work that is satisfying aesthetically and intellectually emerged from a critical reckoning.
It would be easy to accuse Judd of calculated ambition, to say he was less interested in making art than in making art history. But it might be more accurate to say that he enlisted art history – or criticism – to make art. His practice was a Minimalist version of Modernist contrarianism. Even more than the specific objects, smart thinking gave him claim to originality.
