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DONALD
JUDD'S
DESIGN
a turning point in the history of sculpture?
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Apparently, Nicholas Serota,
director of the Tate Modern, was not prepared to let the name of Donald Judd (1928-1994)
silently fade from our memories
- did he not do his utmost to make the man famous in the first place?
Ten years after his death - sixteen years
after the last substantial exhibition - he presents a big
retrospective of the work of the artist who has 'changed
the course of modern sculpture''. The exhibition travels to Düsseldorf (19/06 to 05/09/04)
and Basel (02/10 to
09/01/05). Heavy artillery, that makes us ask what has to be canonised
here at all cost.
Who is this master and what everlasting works did he
leave to posterity?
BOXES
'Il faut être un homme vivant et un artiste posthume'
Jean Cocteau, Le rappel à l’ordre.
From 1947 to 1953 - in
the heydays of the very 'abstract expressionism' that soon will be promoted
as
the panacea of the Free World with a little help from the CIA* - Donald Judd
studied at Art Students League in New York,
the College
of William and Mary and the Columbia University.
Meanwhile, he is already fully active as an art critic and a painter. Already in 1957, he has
his first show in the Panoramas Gallery - although from the paintings
exhibited there no trace is to be found in what is announced as the
'first full retrospective'. But things are not going well with the
Action Painting in New York. Andy Warhol comes to replace Jackson
Pollock. Accordingly, the expressionistic gestures on Judd's canvasses
are replaced with a baking tin (1961). 'Illusionism' is said to be
banned in favour of the real two-dimensional surface or the equally real
three-dimensional space.
Donald Judd's stride from 'painting' to 'sculpture' is to be understood in the
broader perspective of the more general anti-mimetic trend, here in the disguise
of anti-illusionism. Already with his ready-mades, Marcel Duchamp had
replaced painting - bluntly dismissed as mere illusionism - with real
three-dimensional objects. Such dadaistic gesture has been renewed
in 1960 by the Nouveaux Réalistes of Pierre Restany and in 1967 by the Arte Povera
of
Germano Celant (see also Kounellis**). With Donald Judd, however,
we are dealing neither with real cars like those of Arman, nor with real
horses like those of Kounellis**. The reason is that Donald Judd rather
joins another anti-mimetic trend: the new geometric abstraction ('hard
edge') of painters like Barnet Newmann, Ad Reinhardt en Frank Stella,
who
wanted to break with the 'abstract expressionism' from the school around Pollock
and De Kooning. While Andy Warhol followed the example of Duchamp, they walk in the footsteps of the
old geometric abstraction. And here we find an equally strong radicalism: even
the last traces of 'illusionism', such as the overlap in Mondrian's
pictures, are
eliminated: on the flat plane of the canvas equally flat
surfaces are bluntly juxtaposed. After such reduction of the 'illusionistic'
canvas to a two-dimensional plane, only the reduction of the sculpture to a mere non-illusionistic
object in real space is left - providing the
geometrically painted surface with a real third dimension in the vein
of Rietveld who made three-dimensional architectural versions of
Mondrian
or of Lissitzky who made three-dimensional versions of his
own paintings.
Donald Judd takes the
stride outside the canvas with his 'stack sculptures'. While Carl André
laid bricks on a row in 1964, Donald Judd aligned boxes on a wall from
1966 onward (an 'abstract' echo of Warhol's Brillo
boxes of 1964?). He repeats this theme in ever changing colours, sizes
and materials.
What is presented as a
revolutionary stride in the development of sculpture, makes the artist,
who nearly started painting, famous at once. Already
in 1968 a retrospective (!) is dedicated to his work in the Whitney Museum of American Art.
and via a big show of minimalists in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1971
Donald is featured in the Venice Biennale in 1980 and the Dokumenta in Kassel in 1982. However
much he is celebrated in the galleries and the museums,
Donald Judd wants to have his works exhibited properly in an appropriate
museum of his own already during his life-time. In 1972
he
moves to Marfa in
Texas where in 1986 a renovated complex is opened to exhibit his works
and that of other artists such as Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg en Dan Flavin.
Let us have a closer look at his work.
COMPOSITION
Donald
Judd uses the simplest compository principles.
That applies in the first place to the elements he uses: a
cube is constructed according to one single principle: all the sides are placed at right angles. More simple still would have been a
sphere, but that
threatened perhaps to remind Donald Judd of Brancusi's still organic
heads reduced to the shape of an egg.
And it applies also for
the combination of the elements. Donald Judd's most cherished principle
is the addition in one dimension into a row or in two dimensions into a
chequered pattern. A more mechanistic composition is not conceivable. Everything
that could remind of the already more organic progression, let alone of
the golden section, is banned.
Meanwhile, the confrontation of Donald Judd's box with Brancusi's egg makes it clear how little Brancusi's
'sculpture'
partakes of an egg and, conversely, how much it
partakes of a head! When,
as with Donald Judd, geometrising ends up in pure geometry, the
dialectic between organic and geometric, typical of every more subtle
kind of mimesis, is suspended altogether and collapses into a monolithic
reality. And in the installation of such rigid geometric reality, a nearly
concealed anti-mimetic impulse is at work. With Donald Judd, the geometric is not only the
real - the very opposite of art - but also the an-organic, the soulless - the very opposite
of the human. In that sense Donald Judd's cube is the pure negation
of the primeval sculpture: the human body - in sharp contrast to Brancusi's egg that is precisely its quintessence!
MATERIALS
A similar anti-mimetic impulse is at work in the choice of the materials.
The same rejection of 'abstract expressionism' and action painting that
made Andy Warhol resort to the silk-screen, makes Donald Judd resort to
plywood, galvanised iron,
stainless steel, plexiglass and enamelled or anodized aluminium. In doing so, he joins the
preference of Constructivism, de Stijl and Bauhaus for machine-made
materials devoid of every trace of the human hand. After the example of
the conceptualists, Donald Judd even lets his work execute
through specialized craftsmen (see: Weiner***) .
COLOUR
What you see is what you see
Frank Stella
Just like Mondrian, Donald Judd holds that in traditional art 'the necessities of representation
inhibited the use of colour': Colour cannot be pure when shadows have to
suggest rounding. And just like Mondrian, Donald Judd concludes that
the painter should concentrate on pure colour. He also refers to Frank Stella: 'What you see is what you
see'.
No doubt,
Donald Judd has brought colour back to where it has always been at home:
in the domain of the ready-made colours of nature - from the
green of the grass to the blue of the sky, not to mention the coloured
patterns on flowers and animals - or the domain of the man-made
colours with which man has of old embellished his furniture, his carpets, and the inner and outer walls of his houses.
And no doubt, colour 'works' in that domain of nature and man-made objects -
the world of design. But it is not because someone makes colour 'speak'
- produce whatever effect -
that he is making art. Colour only comes to belong to the domain of
art when it goes the opposite direction as the one that
Mondrian or Donald
Judd had it walk: when the red that we see is no longer the red of
paint on a carrier, but the blush on the cheek of a girl that is
conjured up on a canvas. Despite Frank Stella: when 'you do not see what
you see...'
And that cannot but draw our attention to the rather
poor quality of Donald Judd's theorising. The red of a blush does not
differ in principle from the red of a painted blush. What distinguishes
a
real blush from a painted one is not some characteristic of colour,
but of the surface that reflects the colour: is it the skin of a cheek,
then we are dealing with reality; is it paint on a canvas, then we are
dealing with art (mimesis). It is a question of the transition from
blood in skin to paint on canvas, hence, and not of
the purification
of colour by removing shadow.
And that catches the eye all the more,
when we realise that the colour of real painted
objects is not at all pure, unless the object is lighted with a constant
artificial light from all sides, or when it is lighting itself, like Dan Flavin's neon tubes. That Donald Judd's rejection of shadows
thus turns out
to be a merely inappropriate way of rejecting mimesis as such, becomes fully
apparent when we realise that the effect of many of his works depends
precisely on the very presence of shadows and reflections of the colour of
one surface on the other that he was so fiercely rejecting in 'illusionistic
painting'!.
SPACE
And Donald Judd's anti-mimetic fervour comes to its apogee in his
treatment of space. Donald Judd prides himself on the fact
that
in his 'stack sculptures' the empty space between the boxes is an
integral part of the sculpture as a whole. That is not new at all, at
least not in architecture, where columns, obeliscs, towers and the like are not so much there as an end in themselves,
but rather as a means of structuring and articulating the surrounding space.
Also sculptures - above all sculptures from the time when people knew
how to dispose them in space - are primarily meant
as beacons in architectural space. Think of the Karlsbrücke in Prague,
where the sculptures are in first instance a kind of columns articulating the whole, just like the arches. And that
holds equally true of Bernini's colonnade on Saint Peter's square in
Rome.
As soon as we concentrate on a single sculpture, however, the real space
wherein it is erected disappears, and imaginary space unfolds, where the
sculpture is no longer the equivalent of a column, but begins to conjure
up
imaginary beings. The comparison with the instruments of the
orchestra imposes itself: as long as they are tuning, they are part of a
real soundscape, but as soon as they begin to play, musical space unfolds
in the dimension of the imaginary.****
New, hence, is not Donald Judd's structuring of space - therein,
fare more apt architects have preceded him already for centuries, if not
millennia. New is that, under the guise of a revolution in sculpture, he
reduces sculpture to a
mere pedestal and proceeds to sell us such real thing for a
sculpture - although the same Donald Judd conversely
asserts that he has made a 'revolutionary stride' by liberating
sculpture from the
pedestal. 'It is impossible for people to understand
that placement on the floor and the absence of a pedestal were
inventions. I invented them' (cat. p. 148).
Unlike sculptors,
hence, Donald Judd does not transform his material into
an imaginary being. He merely
transforms the real world, just like architects. Or to be more precise:
like an interior designer. For, because Donald Judd continues to
understand himself as an artist, he does not so much transform the open
space as rather the interior of a museum. We do not deny that Donald
Judd's 'free (fine)
interior design' has
its merits. It suffices to refer to highlights as the
Marfa.
But Judd's work cannot but fade in comparison with the feats of
the anonymous
architects who built the gothic cathedrals, who rather than disguise their creations as sculpture, knew
all too well their due place - and that of
sculpture - or stained glass -
as well.
That is why, even when we do not challenge Donald Judd's qualities as a
free (fine)
designer, we deny him a position in the history of sculpture - or
in the history of art in general. Donald Judd has nothing in common with Rodin or Brancusi,
but everything with figures like Mies van de Rohe. He does not belong in
the history of art, but in the history of architecture or interior
design - or the history of 'free' or
'fine' design in general, hand in hand with
his true colleagues: designers like Panamarenko
and Goldsworthy.
THEORY
Aesthetics is to the artist as
ornithology is to the birds
Barnett Newman
Although Donald Judd is a Columbia graduate, it suffices to read a text
like 'Some Aspects of Color
in General and Red and Black in particular' to become aware of the
lamentable quality of his
philosophising, even when it features in the prestigious catalogue of
Tate Modern. We already discussed how insufficient his theory of colour
is. But Judd's texts brim over with inaccuracies. Thus, he refuses to
call his creations 'sculptures', because sculpture
'means carving to me' (cat. p. 61) As if the
way in which something is made determines whether it is a sculpture or
not. Hand-made objects like the heads of
Brancusi, as well 'industrial' creations like Naum Gabo's
marvellous 'Constructive Head No. 2'
are
genuine sculptures, not by virtue of the way in which they are made, but
by virtue of the fact that they represent something, unlike Judd's boxes
(see:
Mimesis and Abstraction).
Instead of speaking such plain language, Donald Judd, in his famous 'Specific Objects'
(1965) prefers to introduce a new kind or art that is neither painting
nor sculpture. The 'label' 'specific object' that Donald Judd wants to
introduce instead of 'painting' or 'sculpture' is merely a rather clumsy
attempt to mask that he is no longer making paintings or sculptures
indeed - no longer art as such - but mere
real objects. In other words: that he is no longer an artist but has
become a 'free' or 'fine'
designer.
That does not prevent Donald Judd from continuing to pose as an artist -
and many others to feature him as such. Worse still: figures like Rudy
Fuchs emphatically put him in line with masters like Van Eyck and
Raphael
as if to convince themselves that their
protégé is really an artist, and
not a mere designer. How else to explain that there is no mention of Sluter, Michelangelo or Bernini - would that perhaps have hindered the
raising of Donald Judd on an artistic pedestal in a museum of fine arts?
The Britannica is wrong, hence, when it describes Donald
Judd as an 'American minimalist sculptor' - 'minimalist
free (of 'fine') designer' would have been far more accurate. And completely wrong goes Serota
when he asserts in his foreword to the catalogue of the Tate exhibition
that 'Donald Judd has changed the
course of modern sculpture'...
©
Stefan
Beyst,
July
2004
Your reaction
(English, German, French or Spanish):
beyst.stefan@gmail.com
See also
stefan beyst: theory on art and music
* See Frances Stonor Saunders,' Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the
Cultural Cold War',
Granta Books, London .http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/cummings3.html
or
http://www.meaus.com/cia-and-modern-art.htm
** See 'Kounellis: the
metamorphoses of Apollo'
*** See 'Lawrence Weiner: and flesh became word'
**** See:'Musical space
and its inhabitants'.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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AGEE, Willam C.: 'Donald Judd: Sculpture/Catalogue',
Pace Wildenstein 1994. |
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BATTCOCK, Gregory (Editor): 'Minimal Art : A Critical Anthology', University of California Press, 1995.
BLOEMINK, Barbara & CUNNINGHAM, Joseph: 'Design Art: Functional Objects from Donald Judd to Rachel Whiteread', Merrell Holberton, 2004 |
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BOIS,
Yves-Alain: 'Donald Judd: New Sculpture'. Trans. Gregory
Sim, New York, Pace Gallery, 1991.
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ELGER, Dietmar ed. :'Donald Judd: Colorist', Texts by William C. Agee,
Dietmar Elger, Martin Engler, Donald Judd. Hatje Cantz, 1999 |
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HASKELL, Barbara: 'Donald Judd', New York: Whitney Museum of American Art
in association with W. W. Norton & Company, 1988. Texts by Barbara
Haskell and D.onald Judd. |
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JUDD Donald: 'Fifteen Works'. New York:
Heiner Friedrich Gallery, 1977. |
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JUDD DONALD TATE
CATALOGUE with texts by Nicholas Serota, Rudi Fuchs, Richard Shiff,
David Batchelor, David Raskin, Donald Judd, Marianne Stockebrand,
Jeffrey Kopie,D.A.P./Tate, London 2004 |
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JUDD
Donald: Prints 1951 - 1993 foreword Rudy Fuchs,
Director of the Haags Gemeentemuseum. |
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JUDD, Donald:"Art
and Architecture", Vortrag am 20. September 1983 an der Yale University,
Department of Art and Architecture; veröffentlicht in: Donald Judd.
Complete Writings 1975–1986, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 1987, S. 25-36;
dt. Auszug in: Donald Judd. Architektur, Münster 1990, S. 143-145.
http://www.txt.de/vdk/judd.htm |
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JUDD, Donald: 'Complete Writings 1959-1975', The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design,
2005. |
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JUDD, Donald; NOEVER, Peter; FUCHS, Rudi;
HUCK, Brigitte: 'Donald Judd: Architecture', Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2004. |
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KOENIG, Kasper Ed.: 'Donald Judd: Complete
Writings, 1959–1975. Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of
Art and Design, in association with New York University Press, New York,
1975.
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KRAUS, Rosalind E. and SMITHSON, Robert: 'Donald
Judd: Early Fabricated Work. New York: Pace
Wildenstein, 1998. |
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KUSPIT, Donald: 'The Dialectic and Decadence' Allworth Press, New
York: 2000).
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LYNNE COOKE: Essay
http://www.diacenter.org/exhibs_b/judd/essay.html |
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McKENZIE, Janet:'Donald
Judd Tate Modern, London 5 February-25 April 2004', Studio International 6/4/2004
http://www.studio-international.co.uk/ sculpture/ donald_judd.htm |
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MEYER,
James: 'Minimalism, Themes and Movements', Phaidon Press, 2005. |
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MORGAN, Robert: 'Rethinking Judd'
Sculpture magazine April 2001 - Vol.20 No.3 |
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SMITH,
Brydon: 'Donald Judd: Ottawa: National Programme of the National Gallery
of Canada, 1975. Catalogue raisonné by Brydon Smith. Texts by Dan Flavin
and Roberta Smith. |
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STAUNDERS,
Frances Stonor:
' Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the
Cultural Cold War',
Granta Books, London
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STOCKEBRANDT, Marianne (Ed.): 'Donald Judd: Architektur.
Trans. Brigitte Kalthoff. Münster: Westfälischer Kunstverein,
1989. |
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ZAUG, Remy:
'Die List der Unschuld. Das Wahrnehmen einer Skulptur', Eindhoven 1982. |
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