New York Magazine - USA (2020-02-17)

70 newyork| february17–march1, 2020

TheCULTUREPAGES

thesemanufacturedobjectscouldbeart.

Judd’s workisn’t evenspicedwiththe

puckish,riddlingfrissonofDuchamp’s

readymades,whichhisboxesmightother­

wisecalltomindintheirpureobjectness.

It alsodoesn’t havethemessianicfervorof

earlymonochromeartistslike Malevich

andRodchenko,whomadeart outofrules,

metaphysics,andphilosophy oncanvas.

Judd,forallhisseriousness,is lessgrand

and more quotidian—nearer to the

stripped­downwholeness,visuallucidity,

andexistentialabsorptionconjuredby

photographerWalkerEvans.Bothartists

feelclosetotheland,hardscrabble,seri­

ous,dignified,Spartan.

Decadesafterfirstencounteringhis

work,I’mstilloftwomindsaboutJudd.I

lovethetotalityofthisRenaissanceman

whomadepaintings,sculptures,prints,

andfurniture;designedbuildings;created

outdoorworksinhisownlandscapes;

transformedmuseum­exhibitionideas;

andwasperhapsthebestart criticbetween

1959 and1965—whenmuchartcriticism

wasseenbyartistsasalmost universally

bad.(PeakJuddis hisawesomeWestTexas

GesamtkunstwerkinMarfa,itselfnowa

strange,genuineart­worldpilgrimagesite

turnedgenericInstagrambackdrop.)YetI

also hate what Juddrepresents,how

unyieldingandantagonistichisabstract

artcanbe.

Noneofthat intensity cameeasyor

quicklytoJudd.He wasa latishbloomer

whodidn’t stoppaintinganddidn’t really

focusonthree­dimensionalworkuntilhe

wasinhis30s.Thenit tooka few yearsfor

himtofullyrealizetheimplicationsof

thoseideas.Inoneofthebest piecesof

artisticadviceI’veeverheard,hesaid,

“Theproblemforany artistis tofindthe

concatenationthat willgrow.” He meant

theideasandintuitionsthatseemtopor­

tendsomepossiblechainofintercon­

nected orinterdependentthingsthat

might lead to whole new places. He went

on, “The first work that an artist feels is

theirs is not a solution limiting the pos­

sibility, but is work that opens to limitless

possibility.” That the boxes now look to us

like fully formed conclusions, rather than

open­ended, daring experiments, is

another sign that we live too fully in his

aesthetic universe to ever really attain a

proper perspective on his work.

At MoMA, you will see the boxes, wedges,

and lozenge shapes on the floor and other

forms cantilevering off walls, displacing

space like it was water. (Art didn’t do that

before Judd.) Most of these objects are made

of mundane machined industrial materi­

als—metal, plexiglass, plywood, aluminum.

Everything is produced to Judd’s exact

drawn specifications. He sent these instruc­

tions to small fabricators he worked with.

He never touched the work. Yet every detail

seems considered, touched by his mind—as

Richard Serra said, “executed to millimeter

perfection.” All this may sound inhuman

and high­tech, but in the flesh his works feel

very mom­and­pop­shop­made, scruffy,

vulnerable. Size­wise, his indoor floor forms

are often around the arm span of a person of

average height. You look at, around, and

through a Judd box, follow the flowofair

inside it, sense its hollowness, scansurfaces,

perceive how it’s all put together. Serracred­

its Judd as “the first to deal withthecon­

tained interior space and the surrounding

space simultaneously.” Indeed, Judd’spri­

mary material is space.

Sometimes we see our reflectionsinhis

work, sometimes those of the room.Often

you peer through clear or smoky plexiglass;

the sculptures can turn into axiomaticdia­

grams of themselves before your eyes.Judd

wanted you to see the work, its surface,con­

sider the space inside and around it,under­

stand the placement of it in the room,and

ascertain the forces that define these

spaces—all at once, the way youseethe

paint, color, process, surface, and drawingat

the same time in a Pollock (an artistwhose

work he revered even though it waspaint­

ing). For me, Judd is more thana wintry,

plain­fact Wallace Stevens “thing itself ”art­

ist. He’s a little Whitmanesque in theway he

wants to sing the sculpture electricandhave

everything merge into everythingelse.He

extended the sculptural field ofart toits

breaking point. And it broke.

The most withering criticismofJudd

came from his contemporary MichaelFried

in a 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood,”pub­

lished in Artforum. Fried called Judd’sart a

mere “genre of theater.” This is becauseyou

had to walk around his objects. Thisimplied

viewers’ having changing views. Asif that

sort of agency were a bad thingandwe

to be an end point of a sort: not a form of
expression but “the thing in itself,” an art­
historical object emptied of all referential
art­ historical meaning. He wanted his art
to have definite qualities, plain power, a
sense of singleness—to make things that
“aren’t obviously art.” He wanted to create
works that were “neither painting nor
sculpture.” The experience of his art, he
said, should be democratic, available all at
once, never mystical, hidden, expression­
istic, or illusionistic. He was against
weight and mass in sculpture because
these weren’t things you could accurately
ascertain just by looking. He was against
all forms of figuration and certain forms
of authorship—his vision was so much his
own it was revolutionary, yet the works
themselves were produced by machines
or made to look that way, tributes of a
kind to American industrial production.
While he admired Brancusi and Giacom­
etti, he thought their art implied the
human body. He refused to suggest any­
thing outside the work itself.
The problem was as soon as Judd emp­
tied his objects of art history, the world
changed on a dime, demanding the vac­
uum of form he established be filled again
with content. In the era of Vietnam and
civil rights, women’s liberation and the
sexual revolution, the idea of pure formal­
ism lost its currency. A hundred other
types of art sprung up: Land and Earth
art, process art, performance art, video
art, Conceptual art. Many of these made
use of Judd’s form, appropriating or stuff­
ing those boxes with life, politics, history,
biography, science, or biology. First came
Eva Hesse putting squiggly plastic things
into boxes. Then Robert Smithson filled
them with rocks. Michael Heizer gouged
two rectangles out of the sides of a mesa
in Nevada. Félix González­Torres’s stacks
of paper are Judd boxes with social com­
mentary. Jeff Koons put appliances in
boxes and invited us to worship them.
Rachel Whiteread made boxy concrete
casts of negative spaces. Damien Hirst
put dissected animals in boxes. In the
end, Judd was less an end point than a
reset, an end of modernism and a begin­
ning of everything that followed, who, in
trying to invent a form of pure object,
actually ended up producing a plat­
form—or a theater—onto which every­
one else’s ideas about everything else
could be projected.
I first saw Judd’s work in the mid­1970s,
when I was in my early 20s. Even though
it was barely ten years after Judd caused a
sea change, his art already felt like it came
from another world. It scared me, like I
wasn’t up to coming to grips with whether

Judd

is the

ubiquitous

dark design

energy

of everyday

modern life.

THE CHINATI FOUNDATION © 2020 JUDD FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK. PHOTOGRAPH: ALEX MARKS