Untitled

Outspoken in his ideals and widely considered to be the de facto leader of Minimalism in the 1960s, Donald Judd’s legacy will continue to influence countless generations of artists the world over. Paving the way for an investigation of the very building blocks of art in the face of Modernist critics, Judd’s inspired writings became a solid conceptual backing for a new breed of creative minds looking to break from the historical lineage of painting. Untitled (Bernstein 93-1) is a spectacular illustration of Judd’s inquiry into space and what he termed ‘specific objects’, and is also a gleaming example of the sculptural assemblies he termed ‘stacks’. A serial wall work, the Plexiglas and bronze components create a counterpoint to both sculpture in the round and two-dimensional painting on the wall. Judd surged against historical complacency, instead choosing to go beyond the established norms for what art could be, saying, “Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors—which is riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art. A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be. Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface” (D. Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965), reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975, Halifax, 1975, p. 184). In his pivotal essay titled “Specific Objects”, Judd called for an avoidance of illusionism and flew in the face of Modernist critics like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Instead of abstraction in painting, which the aforementioned heartily endorsed, Judd suggested divorcing the artist from the ever-lengthening trajectory of paint on canvas in favor of a new inquiry into color, space, and material.

Extending vertically in uniform repetition, Untitled (Bernstein 93-1) is a testament to Judd’s interest in both color and form. Ten box-like constructions, each affixed to the wall a small space above the last, march upward with lowermost section held a short distance off the floor and the uppermost failing to reach the ceiling. The work has attributes in common with both sculpture (its three-dimensionality) and painting (its residence on the wall), yet refuses to fall easily into either category. Each unit is the same as the next, and all are industrially manufactured to exacting standards typical of the artist’s oeuvre. The negative space between each unit and the next is the same as the positive space each construction occupies, a notable factor in all of Judd’s stacks. Mirrored brass around the edges of the rectangular forms encapsulate and contain two individual planes of green Plexiglas on top and bottom. Light from the room shines through these planes like looking through the green glass of a bottle. Though each unit is the same physically, their placement on the wall creates different optical effects as the audience views them in unison. Light became increasingly important in Judd’s later stacks. His first iterations were made from opaque materials that were impermeable to light. These industrial constructions foregrounded their own presence and materials above all else. However, by introducing Plexiglas into stacks like Untitled (Bernstein 93-1), Judd allowed the light to create colored shadows as it passed through these translucent panes which helped to not only emphasize the materials but also to bring color to the negative voids between each section.

Looking to create a way for people to really grasp his objects visually, Judd noted, “Plexiglas exposes the interior, so the volume is opened up. It is fairly logical to open it up so the interior can be viewed. It makes it less mysterious, less ambiguous. I’m also interested in what might be called the blank areas, or just the plain areas, and what is seen obliquely, so the color and the plane and the face are somewhat obscure to the front. It’s the other way round when seeing the side. In most of my pieces there are no front and no sides – it depends on the viewing position of the observer” (D. Judd quoted in J. Coplans, Don Judd, exh. cat., Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, 1971, p. 36-7). The complete structures of these works, even when attached to the wall, are not completely viewable from one angle. The artist instead encourages a more inquisitive approach to gain the full experience and to more aptly understand the work’s physicality.

While Judd worked to go beyond the painterly frame, artists like Sol LeWitt were also endeavoring to escape its confines. Working off the grid (three-dimensional and two-dimensional), both made work that serves as a vigorous counterpoint to the dominant mode of Abstract Expressionism. While painters like Jackson Pollock embraced a gestural technique that flowed from the artist onto the canvas, Judd and LeWitt took a much more hands off approach. The geometric solids and mathematical grid served as their catalyst and their structure as it informed placement, composition, and form. Though their painterly predecessors found the blank rectangle of canvas empty and wanting, Judd noted, “The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. A rectangle is a shape itself; it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or inside of it” (D. Judd, op. cit., 1965, p. 207). By doing away with frames and pedestals, traditional foils used to separate the work of art from the viewer’s realm, Judd was able to liberate his work from the rarified space of art history.

Though he began as a writer, working for publications like ARTnews and Arts Magazine in the late 1950s, after his first solo exhibition in 1963 Judd became more well known as an artist. However, the theoretical and critical stance which he developed in his essays was the anchor from which he built his oeuvre. A supporter of avant-garde artists like Dan Flavin, Yayoi Kusama, and Frank Stella, among others, Judd was well-versed in the various movements and advancements being made in the mid-century art world. Expanding upon this knowledge, he set out to question the history of art, first as a painter, then as a sculptor, and finally as a key figure in the development of Minimalism. Curator Marianne Strockebrand talks about Judd’s artistic evolution, noting, “If we consider his development from a painter to an object maker/architect, and if we consider how much of the painter is perceptible in his objects and vice versa, Judd’s refusal to call his objects ‘sculptures’ makes all the more sense. His work is closer to an architectural conception of space and the color obsessions of painting than it is to the volumetric articulations of sculpture” (M. Strockebrand, Donald Judd: The Multicolored Works, 2014, p. 10). In the Spring of 1964, Judd stopped creating his own sculptures by hand and enlisted the manufacturing capabilities of Bernstein Brothers Sheet Metal Specialities, Inc. to fabricate his designs.

Having an industrial workshop only blocks from his home in New York City allowed the artist to work on a large number of projects and at a larger scale than he had previously. By removing his own hand from the process and returning to a more conceptual mode that favored plans and instructions, Judd was able to put his theoretical ideas into practice. Throughout his unmatched career, Judd created several discrete shapes that illustrated his ideas about the intersection between art and everyday objects. Rows of box forms, the curved face of the so-called ‘bull nose’, and hollow spaces formed from sheet metal, all brought physical presence to the artist’s ideals. “[H]e radicalized sculpture with nontraditional materials, brilliant color and, most of all, simple geometric forms that used more space than materials,” critic Roberta Smith noted on the occasion of an exhibition of his stack sculptures, “Space, after all, was his ultimate material.” (R. Smith, “Donald Judd: ‘Stacks’”, New York Times, October 24, 2013). Though they inevitably interacted with their surroundings, the idea that a sculptural work could be viewed on its own and divested of any artist’s hand or emotional constraints was paramount to Judd’s practice. Furthermore, by refusing to refer to his works as sculptures, Judd created an immediate conversation around their existence.

Smith wrote in the 1970s about earlier works like Untitled (Bernstein 93-1), noting, “Those characteristics of Judd’s metal pieces—lightness and structural tension, self-sufficiency, an isolation which makes us focus on them individually—seem most extreme in the pieces cantilevered to the wall. Their placement seems appropriate and undramatic; they are as indifferent to the wall as is most sculpture to the floor. Yet this indifference is in itself dramatic: we are more aware of their physical placement, more confronted by them than by many of Judd’s smaller floor pieces” (R. Smith in D. Del Balso, R. Smith, and B. Smith, Donald Judd Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Objects, and Wood-Blocks 1960-1974, Ottawa, 1975, p. 28). By foregrounding their own objecthood, Judd’s works walked the razor edge between fine art and industrial designs. Reveling in this fact, the artist continued to strive toward more and more divergent means of bucking the art historical trends established over the centuries. By continuously writing about and positioning his work in the realm of ‘specific objects’, Judd forced critics and viewers to question the taxonomic structure of the art world and to reevaluate the contributions of artists past and present.