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Donald Judd’s art is outside the box
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LONDON–Human beings are preposterously sensitive to difference.
Give one person skin that’s a shade darker than someone
else’s, and all of a sudden it’s as though
they’re different through and through. Art has always taken
advantage of this sensitivity: The difference between a great
painting and a minor daub is so small it can barely be described,
and yet we’re quite happy to bet fortunes on it.
One recent artist made subtle difference almost the sum total of
his art.
American abstractionist Donald Judd spent a hugely influential
career looking at how small changes, worked on a limited range of
shapes, materials and colors, could register more loudly than
anyone would ever guess.
Beginning in the early 1960s, Judd discovered that if you pay close
enough attention to a stack of sheet metal boxes, or to a row of
unpainted plywood cubes, or to a copper crate with its inside
painted red, you soon begin to notice and care about their special
qualities.
This noticing of difference is how we come to grips with the world
and, for good or ill, with one another. Judd’s art simply
lets the raw fact of difference speak for itself.
Ten years after the artist’s death from cancer at 65, the
Tate Modern museum here is giving Judd his first full-scale
retrospective, which strangely is not coming to the United States.
The exhibition is about as good as any art show gets. It’s a
powerful machine for thinking: It sets mental gears whirring as we
try to figure out what this art is doing and why it works so well.
Much more importantly, it is also a machine for feeling and
perceiving: It provides a stunning sequence of simple forms whose
effects on us are compelling and complex.
Consider a pared-down piece from 1973, a good decade into
Judd’s New York career. The work consists of seven
unvarnished plywood cubes, each 77 inches high and wide and deep
but with their fronts and backs left off. Each one is like the
outline of a square drawn on the wall but then extended forward
into the viewer’s space. The cubes sit in a row, flat on the
gallery floor and backed against the room’s white wall, with
a hand’s width of space between each cube and the next, and
also between the last cubes and the walls at each end. But
experience the work in person, and things get much more
complex.
There is the fact that the work seems very different when
it’s seen from far away, where it reads as a single unit made
up of several parts, and from up close, where it feels like one
cube, which then gets repeated several times to either side of the
one you’re looking at. Or stay close but walk from side to
side, and feel the difference between the piece seen from the
middle of the middle cube, where parallelism is the order of the
day, and the piece seen from one end, where recession is the most
notable effect.
A standard exercise in Perspective 101 asks art students to draw a
row of cubes from various viewpoints; Judd’s piece is that
exercise brought to life, demonstrating how the theories that
describe vision and optics pan out in practice. What started out as
a building block or side effect of realistic picture-making is
turned into the essence of a work.
In the 1960s Judd’s art, along with that of several of his
closest colleagues, was labeled “minimalist,’’ and
once that turned into an “ism,’’ the label stuck for
good. But Judd never liked the name, and for good reason:
“Minimalism’’ implies an intellectual, theoretical
commitment to reduction for its own sake, and that’s how Judd
has often been read.
Judd’s mature work, if it is minimal at all, is really about
minimizing only a few obvious, even superficial variables, so as to
go on and get maximal impact from the subtle sensory effects that
they can trigger in us.
lake Gopnik
The Washington Post
