Donald Judd wanted his work totally empty.
Which allowed the world to make anything out of it.
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You know Donald Judds workeven if you dont know you know it.
Judd is to minimalism as Picasso is to Cubism.
Judds minimalism is the ubiquitous dark design energy of everyday modern life.
Always there, even if you never consciously recognize it.
He wanted to create works that were neither painting nor sculpture.
He was against weight and mass in sculpture because these werent things you could accurately ascertain just by looking.
While he admired Brancusi and Giacometti, he thought their art implied the human body.
He refused to suggest anything outside the work itself.
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.
Felix Gonzalez-Torress stacks of paper are Judd boxes with social commentary.
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.
Both artists feel close to the land, hardscrabble, serious, dignified, Spartan.
Decades after first encountering his work, Im still of two minds about Judd.
Yet I also hate what Judd represents, how unyielding and antagonistic his abstract art can be.
None of that intensity came easy or quickly to Judd.
Then it took a few years for him to fully realize the implications of those ideas.
(Art didnt do that before Judd.)
He sent these instructions 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.
Size-wise, his indoor floor forms are often around the arm span of a person of average height.
Serra credits Judd as the first to deal with the contained interior space and the surrounding space simultaneously.
Indeed, Judds primary material is space.
Sometimes we see our reflections in his work, sometimes those of the room.
For me, Judd is more than a wintry, plain-fact Wallace Stevens thing itself artist.
He extended the sculptural field of art to its breaking point.
Fried called Judds art a mere genre of theater.
This is because you had to walk around his objects.
This implied viewers having changing views.
As if that sort of agency were a bad thing and we shouldnt view MichelangelosDavidfrom behind?
Fried is right that Judds art is theatrical.
But he is also one of the wrongest critics of the era.
(Gobers sinks conjure Judds boxes as well.)
How did Judd see his own work?
Probably the premier sculptor of his time, Judd said he didnt make sculptures.
They were to be called objects or specific objects.
He said, I never thought about sculpture.
Judd wanted to do away with all those European traditions.
It suits me fine if thats all down the drain.
About modernism, he said, Im not too sure what that means.
Judd also loathed the termminimalismand never used it.
You werent supposed to either.
Thats how stringent the mid-1960s Kool-Aid was.
So how did people talk about this work at the time?
Among the most dizzying aspects of minimalism was the incredible cacophony of contentious criticism and mandarin nonsense it produced.
Clement Greenberg decried Judds work as novelty art and mannerism and said Judd had nothing more to say.
He said Frieds formal analyses are shit.
First, this is poor [Leonard] Baskin.
Second, Baskin is mediocre anyway.
For a time, Judd was viewed dismissively, too.
But eventually, that ice age calved whole new continents.
Juddopens at the Museum of Modern Art on March 1.
