Donald Judd

Yayoi Kusama, flamboyant, obsessive, and wildly ambitious, and Donald Judd, by nature solitary, shy (a trait he attributed to his family moving from state to state when he was young ) and vehemently against careerism and the commercialization of the art world, shared a close friendship that lasted until Judd’s death in 1994.

Rising from the Big Bend is what might be the best big idea in the whole state of Texas. Yep, it’s that big!

Bigger than the rocket launches of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Bigger than the football coliseums for the Cowboys, Longhorns, and Aggies. Bigger than any tech dream launched by the hipsters at Apple, Google, or Tesla in Austin. Bigger than the towering 10,000 Year Clock being inserted into a 300-foot deep cave in the Sierra Diablo Mountains near Van Horn. Believe it or not, there is something wondrous and profound happening in the Big Bend, far grander than anything happening in our big cities or on our electronic screens.

Imagine a huge swath of the modern world better integrated into the natural world here on Earth and the cosmos above—an area in which the bright skyglow of our cities is tempered in favor of the radiant starglow of the cosmos. In that difference between skyglow and starglow lies hope for a better tomorrow. That’s why we need to turn our gaze away from our screens, at least for a while, and experience our true place in the universe. We can find it in the Big Bend, site of this profound and beautiful project.

It’s called the Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve. You’ve probably never heard of it. But, I find this to be an incredibly hopeful project, not only for Texans, but for Americans and the rest of humanity Relax, this is not a political essay. It’s a story about hope for a deeper and richer understanding of our place on Earth and in the universe.

« Go to College! » clame le magazine Life en 1940.
Alors que l’Europe sombre dans le chaos, les États-
Unis s’évertuent à assurer la production internationale
des savoirs et à promouvoir un idéal alternatif de
démocratie éclairée. Au même titre que toute la
population, les artistes sont encouragés à converger
vers les universités pour participer à la fondation d’un
nouveau rêve américain, porté par la recherche.
Revenant sur ce projet politique méconnu, L’Artistechercheur
retrace l’émergence d’une figure de l’artiste
dont l’activité bascule soudainement dans le champ
universitaire.
Pour comprendre cette mutation, Sandra Delacourt
suit la trace de Donald Judd, artiste minimaliste, qui
dans la deuxième partie du XXe siècle fut désigné
ambassadeur d’un « art éduqué ». À travers lui,
l’auteure nous invite à suivre l’évolution, non linéaire,
d’un nouvel imaginaire pour l’art et pour la recherche,
et expose la manière dont différentes générations
d’artistes s’en sont emparées ou l’ont rejeté.
Alors que depuis quelques années la recherche
créative fait l’objet d’un nouvel engouement, cet
ouvrage propose d’explorer les désirs antagonistes qui
ont conduit l’art et le savoir à pointer un horizon
commun.

Description and analysis of Herzog & de Meuron's early work, as featured in the exhibition/catalogue "First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s" (Architectural Association, London November 2009 -February 2010; curated/edited by Francisco González de Canales and Brett Steele). Copyright © 2009 Architectural Association and the Authors

Examining the skyspace by James Turrell, 'Seldom Seen' (2004) in Houghton Hall, Norfolk through the lense of Turrell's commissions and the international distribution of the skyspaces. How is it that he can reproduce the same thing but retain the individuality required to maintain its commercial appeal as an original? He remodels each skyspace to its location to become site-specific and thereby tailored to each commission. 'Seldom Seen' is bound with the history Charles Bridgeman's unrealised plans for Houghton Hall's gardens.

This analysis of Judd’s oeuvre is predicated upon the theories of representation of Gilles Deleuze, advanced in Repetition and Difference, in that Judd’s Marfa boxes present a creative catalyst for complex, pluralistic readings where the viewer’s response is coloured by their subjectivity, aesthetic perception, knowledge base, and epistemological direction.

Improvisation in the Visual Arts, with a little editing now has  images.The paper traces the influences of Eastern  cultural practices, focusing on the improvisational methods deployed in calligraphy and brush and ink painting,  and Taoist and Zen Buddhist philosophies on  C19th Modernist art, & how it has infiltrated approaches to art making since, to the the present.

The American minimalist artist Donald Judd is closely linked to his concept of the ‘specific object,’ a new form of three-dimensional work defined by its embrace of ‘real space’ and its complete opposition to the humanistic illusionism of what Judd called the ‘European tradition.’ Yet at the crux of his canonical essay ‘Specific Objects,’ Judd compares this new type of work to ‘one of Brunelleschi's windows at the Badia di Fiesole,’ thus aligning it with the inventor of linear perspective and, so it would seem, originator of the very tradition he wished to supersede. This problematic comparison, which has never received sustained analysis, puts pressure on the dominant view of Judd’s work as an outgrowth of modernist painting, instead pointing to the abiding presence of architectural prototypes, especially Renaissance ones, in the artist's work and thought. This paper identifies Judd's Renaissance framework as a veiled form of architectural modernism inherited from his professor of Renaissance architecture, Rudolf Wittkower, and explores its operation in Judd's conceptualization of both ‘specificity’ and ‘space’ itself, as manifested in his writing and in key works from his formative period, 1960-1965. By historically situating Judd's Renaissance imaginary with respect to contemporaneous discourses on art and architecture, the paper seeks to open a new perspective onto the development of minimalism more generally.

First published in Artforum 6 (September 1967) 1, pp. 5-6.

In this letter Jo Baer responds to Bob Morris "Notes on Sculpture: Part 3," (Artforum, Summer, 1967) and Donald Judd's polemic in "Specific Objects" (Arts Yearbook 8, 1965).

This letter was also published in 'Jo Baer. Broadsides & Belles Lettres', 2010, pp. 42-44.

March 31, 2020

In this interview Mohn Family professor David Raskin at the School of Art Institute of Chicago talks about the essence of the American artist Donald Judd’s artistry.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presents the exhibition Donald Judd from March 1 through July 11, 2020, the first major US retrospective dedicated to Judd in over three decades.

David Raskin has spent more than ten years researching and writing the book Donald Judd about one of the most significant artists of the 20th century, who revolutionized the history of sculpture and who still exercises an increasing influence in the field of art, architecture and design.

Robert Morris publicó en 1966 las primeras dos partes de su apología a la escultura minimalista "Notes on Sculpture". Este ensayo se cuestiona sobre la relevancia de la ejecución de obras que evidencien su lectura de la Gestalt en la experiencia del espacio.

Presented at “Minimalism: Location, Aspect, Moment” Conference, Oct. 14-15, 2016, University of Southampton / Winchester School of Art.


Prefiguring a shift towards the intimate, recto-verso model of exposition exemplified by Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience,  Paul Thek's 'Technological Reliquary' sculptures materialize a temporally-determined experience of loss and survival that initiates a return to a materially entropic experience of spectacular procession, reasserting the idea of the flesh’s participation in (the) work.

Summary of findings from joint research with Joy Sleeman on the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The talk focuses on the question of influence, departing from Michael Baxandall's concern that 'influence' is a 'cursed term'. Nevertheless, we have tried to understand how the 2001 monolith might relate to the minimal art movement that arose in New York at exactly the time that Kubrick and Clarke began work on the screenplay for the film. The results of this investigation open up huge new areas for further investigation, and include considerations that go beyond early minimalist aesthetics into abstract expressionism, Worlds Fair design, politics and belief in extraterrestrial intelligence.

Presentación acerca de la formación lenta y progresiva de una tradición funcional en los países nórdicos como alternativa a la fórmula rupturista del Movimiento Moderno.
Se toma la obra del arquitecto danés ARNE JACOBSEN por ser una figura "puente" entre la tradición clasicista de la Academia de Bellas Artes de Copenhague (presente directa o indirectamente en su etapa de formación en los años 20: C.F.Hansen, M.Bindesboll, C.Petersen, K.Klint), la adopción esquiva del Funcionalismo centroeuropeo en Dinamarca bajo la fórmula de la "Tradición Funcional" (E.G.Asplund, Kay Fisker, A.Aalto), y la superación del Movimiento Moderno bajo el influjo de la arquitectura norteamericana (Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, S.O.M.) tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial, situándose en la vanguardia de los años 50 y 60 (hasta su muerte en 1971).

This comparative study of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Donald Judd's personal libraries questions the role of reading process and books collecting in their respective art work. This essay evaluates the library as part of the studio and aims to overstep the traditional opposition between two generations of American artists and their respective relationship to creation.

Published in Joana Barreto, Jérémie Cerman, Gilles Soubigou, Valentine Toutain-Quittelier (ed.), Le Visible et le lisible. Confrontations et articulations du texte et de l'image, Paris, éd. du Nouveau Monde, 2007, p.93-118.

As art museums seek to reach new audiences and broaden the scope of their education departments, they not only exhibit work, but also produce didactic texts, catalogs, timelines, panel discussions, and docent-led tours to contextualize the art on view. They also often venture into artist video interviews, documentary videos of the work being made and/or installed, studio visits, and artist and curator lectures. By institutionalizing and centralizing the creation, installation, contextualization, and audience conversation, a single academic narrative is created to portray simply what is often a complex and multi-layered artistic and cultural process. In this paper, the author compares the display and treatment of artists’ work in formal museums and artist-centered spaces, from the different presentation methods employed for the visceral work of William Pope.L, to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s exhibition Free (1992) at the 303 Gallery in New York City and the Museum of Modern Art, and the Arts attitudes toward art objects at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and the Pulitzer Art Foundation in St. Louis.

Em seu famoso ensaio intitulado Arte e objetidade, de 1967, o crítico Michael Fried debate acerca da arte minimalista – também chamada, entre outras designações, de arte literalista. Com tom pejorativo, mas, concomitantemente, fornecendo fundamentação teórica relevante para quaisquer reflexões sobre a temática, e cunhando conceitos como objetidade, literalismo e teatralidade, Fried contrapõe a arte minimalista, para ele, indicativa de uma sensibilidade nova e decadente, à arte moderna, calcada no ideal de pureza dos meios específicos de cada arte e na supressão da natureza objetual do quadro, em prol da ênfase nos elementos pictóricos. Ao evidenciar o conflito entre essas duas perspectivas sobre a arte, o crítico aproxima a objetidade característica das propostas minimalistas à noção de teatralidade: ressaltar o caráter de objeto de uma obra implica em afirmar sua presença no espaço real e, por conseguinte, pôr em relevo o diálogo estabelecido entre obra, espaço real e espectador. O deslocamento da arte do espaço pictórico da tela para a situação, a saber, o momento da recepção da obra, é, segundo Fried, sinal da contaminação dos trabalhos minimalistas pelo teatro e de sua condição de negação da arte, uma vez que, para ele, arte é arte pura em sua especificidade. Em contrapartida, o artista minimalista Donald Judd salienta que o minimalismo não é niilista, apesar de estar desconectado do contexto da pintura e da escultura tradicionais, demasiado ligadas à tradição artística europeia e ao racionalismo intrínseco à mesma, ambos expressivos de uma visão de mundo antropomórfica e defasada.

Partindo de teorias conhecidas e da análise de obras (essencialmente minimalistas), tentarei apresentar uma abordagem pessoal do que é o objecto-arte no seu confronto com o objecto-objecto e explicitarei alguns argumentos que suportem as minhas ideias. Explicitarei, ainda que não necessariamente por esta ordem, os seguintes conceitos: a utilidade versus não utilidade; a incompletude e a ausência (“suspension of time”) como propriedades da obra de arte; a mudança do papel do espectador, que passa de mero receptáculo a (co?)criador do objecto-arte; a arte como uma doença.

Texte publié dans la revue Histoire de l'art, n°61, "Les arts décoratifs aujourd'hui", octobre 2007, p.93-102.

Réservé pendant près de vingt ans à un usage strictement familial, le mobilier conçu par Donald Judd ne fait son apparition sur la scène artistique new-yorkaise que lorsque les galeries et éditeurs internationaux s’enthousiasment pour le « design d’artistes ». Alors que Sol LeWitt réalise en 1980 sa première Coffee Table, que Dan Flavin commercialise en 1990 son service en porcelaine For André Raynaud, Judd lance sur le marché sa première gamme de meubles industriels en 1984. Pourtant, si sa création mobilière n’a cessé de s’intensifier jusqu’à son décès en 1994, elle demeure très peu connue en dépit d’expositions régulières. À contre-courant des tendances dominantes, Judd a régulièrement souligné la distinction, fondamentale à ses yeux, entre l’art et les arts appliqués. S’il a contribué au brouillage de son engagement esthétique, c’est précisément dans ce distinguo que semblent résider les enjeux de sa production utilitaire et sa force de contre-proposition à la refonte postmoderniste des liens entre éthique et esthétique.

Donald Judd’s furniture’s pieces were initially reserved for strictly domestic purposes and they did not appear on the public art scene until the 1980s, that is nearly twenty years after they were first designed. The timing is particularly significative as it was during the 1980s that galleries and international furniture producers began to express great interest in what came to be known as “artists design”. While Sol LeWitt produced his first Coffee Table in 1980, and Dan Flavin commercialized his china set, For André Raynaud in 1990, Judd launched his first series of industrially-produced furniture in 1984. Although his production of furniture steadily increased up to his death in 1994, and despite regular exhibitions, this chapter of his work remains relatively unknown. Contrary to the then popular view, Judd regularly recalled the distinction, essential in his opinion, between art and applied art. If this distinction has contributed to misunderstandings about Judd’s position as an artist, it is also herein that lie the important questions raised by his works of applied art. Analyzing this distinction can help us to understand Judd’s furniture as a strong counter-proposition to the postmodernist redefinition of the ties between ethics and aesthetics.

It has long been acknowledged that discursive structures became an especially prominent feature of artworks during the 1960s, with conceptualism being the chief exemplar of this tendency due to its textual forms. But what are we to make of Minimalism and its own fascination with the written word? As many scholars have noted, artists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris drafted strongly programmatic essays that did not merely accompany their art practices but also sought to establish definitions for the Minimalist field as a whole as if its simplified forms required textual exposition. In that regard, Michael Fried’s decision to refer to Minimalism as ‘Literalism’ appropriately points in two directions: whilst mostly designating the literal or de-signifying utilization of materials, it also strikingly suggests a certain homology between the literal and the literary.

The aim of this paper is to explore what might be considered the crux of Minimalist criticism. By ‘crux’, my intention is partly to historicize the writing produced under the aegis of Minimalism as situated between an explanation of art and a fundamental discursivity as art—in other words, as partaking in the discursive character typical of conceptualism without being identical to it yet. In that regard, it raises the presence another of another crux: a crux interweaving artwork and criticism. This second crux complicates the traditional separation of artwork as production and criticism as evaluative commentary, thereby problematizing their categorical identities and the presumed temporal ordering that typically flows from artwork to criticism. By attending to figures such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Fried, and Stanley Cavell, this paper seeks to examine how the writings around Minimalism interpreted but also fundamentally and actively produced Minimalism, thus indicating how these artworks pinpoint a major third crux, this time situated within the history of art criticism.

Abstract: To place the fabric of the city in the gallery is to draw out a comparison between the city as a machine-whole and the breakdown of its elementary units. The 1960’s Factualists(Klüver) presented
everyday objectsfrom a Postmodern New York permitting a transference of what was not art to become art (following Dada and Duchamp) - contrasted between the clean lines of Judd’s ordered and highlypolished sense of postmodern representation and the roughness of Oldenburg, blurring the boundary between detritus and artwork. City streets became the sourcing ground for l’objet d’art and critics extracted the political messages buried deep within the embodied energy of metal, burlap, cardboard and paint. Fifty years on, amidst the fashion of deconstructivism in building design, designers are consumed by the idea of surprise and trickery, the invention of an architectural gimmick, like a magicianor illusionist. The affordance of the city to provide concept and meaning to the artist runs low, particularly in the tired, re-branded realms of relational processes drawing on the unsuspecting participation
of a public. Emerging are a new breed of artists who are resisting the cheap deconstructivist illusion, exercising a process-led methodology, a technique of simply ‘making’, challenging value and use of
material. In particular, the work of three artists; Oscar Tuazon (Tacoma/Paris), Gedi Sibony (NewYork) and Michal Budny (Warsaw), begins to hint towards a future representation of space, a curious
arrangement of experiments, building blocks made out of subordinate construction materials. It is possible to acquire an epiphenomenal reading of their work in order to understand what has come from the city – to the gallery – and can return back to the city, to learn from their forms and use of material at a time when it is increasingly difficult to read our globalized built-environments.

This is a report about my research program supported by the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation, spent in New York, 2018 September. I mainly focused on the site-specific art: where and how it is supported by institutions, and how the artists in this field connect to the market in the center of the art world - New York? I had page limit in the report.

Previously unpublished interview with Mark Godfrey, April 29, 2004. The interview was published in 'Jo Baer. Broadsided & Belles Lettres', 2010, pp. 26-35. This interview was held at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in conjunction with the exhibition 'A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968'.

cf. S. Delacourt, « Primary Structures : un tournant décisif dans le partage de l’histoire », revue Histoire de l’art, n°79 « L’artiste-historien », hiver 2016-2017, p.141-149. 
L’exposition « Primary Structures » présentée en 1966 au Jewish Museum de New York marque l’entrée sur la scène artistique d’une première génération d’artistes dont la reconnaissance est en partie assise sur leur capacité à opérer une révision épistémologique de l’histoire. Inaugurant un chapitre inédit de l’histoire de l’art américain, cette figure de l’artiste-historien impose un nouveau partage de l’histoire qui lui vaudra d’être portée aux nues lors du déclin des théories greenbergiennes et précipitée avec elles dans leur chute. Bien qu’elle ait redistribué de manière pérenne les rapports de vassalité présumés entre l’art et l’histoire, cette figure demeure encore aujourd’hui méconnue. Cet article se propose ainsi de démêler ce qui se joue, au cours des années 1960, dans la reconnaissance pour les artistes d’une autorité sur le terrain des savoirs historiques.

The core of the Conceptual artists (Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt; the Siegelaub group with Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner; English and American members of Art & Language) is situated in the art context of the late sixties and the first half of the seventies. The self-positioning of the Conceptual artists within the art world in texts dealing with art theoretical as well as institutional problems is outlined, and selected works are interpreted.

Writing through ethnographic fiction, art practice, and art
historical research, this essay presents a study of minimalist
Donald Judd’s The Chinati Foundation/La Fondacion Chinati
(1979–1986), a museum in West Texas designed by
the artist. It explores Chinati in relation to its site—the Texas-
Mexico borderlands—focusing on three objects of evidence
found in and around it: a World War II–era Germanlanguage
sign inside the former military complex that Judd
retrofitted for the museum, and that he dated and autographed;
a wall of a derelict adobe building graffitied with
a denouncement of Chinati; and a granite gravestone with
an Arabic inscription, marking the final resting place of
Lebanese peddler Ramon Karam, whose death on the Rio
Grande in 1918 was used as evidence in Senate hearings in
support of increased U.S. militarization at the border. The
essay shows how working with ethnographic fiction toward
a new evidential paradigm shifts perspectives on Chinati,
Judd’s practice, the borderlands, and the relationship
between scholarship and art practice.

Final and fairly extensively amended versions of min&quantity paper:
Quantity underpins contemporary existence. This point is convincingly argued by Badiou and a host of thinkers writing in his wake. The present piece proposes that the minimalist aesthetic offers us remarkable insight into this quantitative ontology, in particular through the technique of modular repetition as exemplar to different types of counting or calculation. The additive and subtractive patterns of such repetition recognise their own formative procedures as fundamentally quantitative, exemplifying the difficult relationship between counting, telos, and identity. The music of Philip Glass, the writing of Samuel Beckett and Robert Lax, and the sculpture of Sol LeWitt furnish us with poignant examples in this regard.

The wall between us and Robert Smithson turns to glass when seen through his writings, yet their transparency is deceiving and the distance remains the same. Smithson is commonly identified with a set of issues connected to the term "site-specific," but in his case the issues themselves put such a strain on the hyphened word that "site" and "specific" no longer stick together.The strain should not be lessened with a consistency Smithson doesn't have. His position cuts across the common division between the specific and the generic, a division he considered impossible and "abyssal". No doubt he wanted specific to be understood differently than Donald Judd's "Specific Objects", though they both intended an art independent of genre. It is likewise clear that he put specific up against the conceptual, and on the side of the material, when form is not to be an a priori given cube. Smithson speaks often of this and was given a central role in the informe material of Postminimal Art. Just the same, he keeps complicating his views, as if to find an escape route somewhere between the generic and the specific of Minimalism, Postminimalism and Conceptual Art. This is the impasse of the sixties. Were Smithson to escape and his route not be clearly impossible, then the sixties would be emptied of everything but itself. [...]

This thesis is divided into three chapters of theoretical research, each followed by an
analysis of related artwork. This structure is intended to demonstrate a dialogue
between art practice and text-based investigation. The city is a representation of
human impact and behaviour. To understand city space through art involves drawing
closer to the objects embedded in polarised spaces. To further investigate these we
require a new spatial language. While recent discourse on art and urban theory has
been important, the connection between contemporary sculpture and the city
continues to need further development. To further explore the interface between art
and architecture it is necessary to reveal the spaces between buildings, between
high and low capital, between antiquity and modernity and between the art object
and the viewer.
The relationships between Mastery and Slavery, Order and Chaos and Light and
Dark ‘drives’ are explored through philosophical models and applied to spaces.
These models include those of Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and others.
The definition of space is examined in relation to time, capital and existing spatial
terms. Two new terms, ‘Sterile’ and ‘Dissonant’ are coined and applied to five
accessible spaces, located and investigated in five cities around the world via
methods of ‘drifting’, documentation and intervention.
Finally, the space of the gallery and the object of art becomes the focus of the study,
with a particular concentration on four emerging artists who are implementing a fresh
material language in their work. ‘The Handyman Aesthetic’ concept builds on this
work and outlines modes of operation that move from the city to the gallery and back
to the city. Through the interwoven exhibitions I present there is a development of
‘The Handyman Aesthetic’. In extracting potent debris from city spaces and
representing these in a gallery context I am seeking to demonstrate
acknowledgement. This acknowledgement occurs between an art object and viewer.