(Edited from Wikipedia)
Donald Clarence Judd was an artist
associated with minimalism (a term he nonetheless stridently disavowed).
Judd sought autonomy and clarity
for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a
rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. It created
an outpouring of seemingly effervescent works that defied the term
"minimalism".
In his essay “Specific Objects” (1964) Judd found a starting point for a new
territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited
European artistic values, these values being illusion and represented space, as
opposed to real space. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works
of an array of artists active in New York at the time, including H.C.
Westermann, Lucas Samaras, John Chamberlain, Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin, George
Earl Ortman and Lee Bontecou. The works that Judd had fabricated inhabited a
space not then comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture and in
fact he refused to call them sculpture, pointing out that they were not
sculpted but made by small fabricators using industrial processes.
That the categorical identity of
such objects was itself in question, and that they avoided easy association
with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for
Judd.
Specific
Objects
Donald
Judd
Half or more of the best new work
in the last few years has been neither painting nor
sculpture. Usually it has been
related, closely or distantly, to one or the other. The work is diverse, and
much in it that is not in painting and sculpture is also diverse. But there are
some things that occur nearly in common.
The new three-dimensional work
doesn't constitute a movement, school or style. The
common aspects are too general
and too little common to define a movement. The
differences are greater than the
similarities. The similarities are selected from the work;
they aren't a movement's first
principles or delimiting rules. Three-dimensionality is not as near being
simply a container as painting and sculpture have seemed to be, but it tends to
that. But now painting and sculpture are less neutral, less containers, more
defined, not undeniable and unavoidable. They are particular forms
circumscribed after all, producing fairly definite qualities. Much of the
motivation in the new work is to get clear of these forms. The use of three
dimensions is an obvious alternative. It opens to anything.
Many of the reasons for this use
are negative, points against painting and sculpture, and
since both are common sources,
the negative reasons are those nearest commonage.
"The motive to change is
always some uneasiness: nothing setting us upon the change
of state, or upon any new action,
but some uneasiness." The positive reasons are more
particular. Another reason for
listing the insufficiencies of painting and sculpture first is
that both are familiar and their
elements and qualities more easily located.
The objections to painting and
sculpture are going to sound more intolerant than they are.
There are qualifications. The
disinterest in painting and sculpture is a disinterest in doing it again, not
in it as it is being done by those who developed the last advanced versions.
New work always involves
objections to the old, but these objections are really relevant only to the
new. They are part of it. If the earlier work is first-rate it is complete. New
inconsistencies and limitations aren't retroactive; they concern only work that
is being developed. Obviously, three-dimensional work will not cleanly succeed
painting and sculpture. It's not like a movement; anyway, movements no longer
work; also, linear history has unraveled somewhat. The new work exceeds
painting in plain power, but
power isn't the only
consideration, though the difference between it and expression can't be too
great either. There are other ways than power and form in which one kind of art
can be more or less than another. Finally, a flat and rectangular surface is too
handy to give up. Some things can be done only on a flat surface.
Lichtenstein's representation of a representation is a good instance. But this
work which is neither painting nor sculpture challenges both. It will have to
be taken into account by new artists. It will probably change painting and
sculpture.
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. In work before 1946
the edges of the rectangle are a boundary, the end of the picture. The
composition must react to the edges and the rectangle must be unified, but the
shape of the rectangle is not stressed; the parts are more important, and the
relationships of color and form occur among them.
In the paintings of Pollock,
Rothko, Still and Newman, and more recently of Reinhardt and Noland, the
rectangle is emphasized. The elements inside the rectangle are broad and simple
and correspond closely to the rectangle. The shapes and surface are only those
which can occur plausibly within and on a rectangular plane. The parts are few
and so subordinate to the unity as not to be parts in an ordinary sense. A
painting is nearly an entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group
of entities and references. The one thing overpowers the earlier painting. It
also establishes the rectangle as a definite form; it is no longer a fairly neutral
limit. A form can be used only in so many ways. The rectangular plane is given
a life span. The simplicity required to emphasize the rectangle limits the
arrangements possible within it. The sense of singleness also has a duration, but
it is only beginning and has a better future outside of painting. Its
occurrence in painting now looks like a beginning, in which new forms are often
made from earlier schemes and materials.
The plane is also emphasized and
nearly single. It is clearly a plane one or two inches in front of another
plane, the wall, and parallel to it. The relationship of the two planes is specific;
it is a form. Everything on or slightly in the plane of the painting must be arranged
laterally.
Almost all paintings are spatial
in one way or another. Yves Klein's blue paintings are the only ones that are
unspatial, and there is little that is nearly unspatial, mainly Stella's work.
It's possible that not much can be done with both an upright rectangular plane
and an absence of space. Anything on a surface has space behind it. Two colors
on the same surface almost always lie on different depths. An even color,
especially in oil paint, covering all or much of a painting is almost always
both flat and infinitely spatial. The space is shallow in all of the work in
which the rectangular plane is stressed. Rothko's space is shallow and the soft
rectangles are parallel to the plane, but the space is almost traditionally
illusionistic. In Reinhardt's paintings, just back from the plane of the
canvas, there is a flat plane and this seems in turn indefinitely deep.
Pollock's paint is obviously on the canvas, and the space is mainly that made
by any marks on a surface, so that it is not very descriptive and
illusionistic. Noland's concentric bands are not as specifically paint-on-a-surface
as Pollock's paint, but the bands flatten the literal space more. As flat and
unillusionistic as Noland's paintings are, the bands do advance and recede.
Even a single circle will warp the surface to it, will have a little space
behind it.
Except for a complete and
unvaried field of color or marks, anything spaced in a rectangle and on a plane
suggests something in and on something else, something in its surround, which
suggests an object or figure in its space, in which these are clearer instances
of a similar world - that's the main purpose of painting. The recent paintings aren't
completely single. There are a few dominant areas, Rothko's rectangles or Noland's
circles, and there is the area around them. There is a gap between the main
forms, the most expressive parts,
and the rest of the canvas, the plane and the rectangle.
The central forms still occur in
a wider and indefinite context, although the singleness of the paintings
abridges the general and solipsistic quality of earlier work. Fields are also usually
not limited, and they give the appearance of sections cut from something indefinitely
larger.
Oil paint and canvas aren't as
strong as commercial paints and as the colors and
surfaces of materials, especially
if the materials are used in three dimensions. Oil and
canvas are familiar and, like the
rectangular plane, have a certain quality and have limits.
The quality is especially
identified with art.
The new work obviously resembles
sculpture more than it does painting, but it is nearer
to painting. Most sculpture is
like the painting which preceded Pollock, Rothko, Still and
Newman. The newest thing about it
is its broad scale. Its materials are somewhat more
emphasized than before. The
imagery involves a couple of salient resemblances to other
visible things and a number of
more oblique references, everything generalized to
compatibility. The parts and the
space are allusive, descriptive and somewhat
naturalistic. Higgins' sculpture
is an example, and, dissimilary, Di Suvero's. Higgins'
sculpture mainly suggests
machines and truncated bodies. Its combination of plaster and metal is more
specific. Di Suvero uses beams as if they were brush strokes, imitating
movement, as Kline did. The
material never has its own movement. A beam thrusts, a
piece of iron follows a gesture;
together they form a naturalistic and anthropomorphic
image. The space corresponds.
Most sculpture is made part by
part, by addition, composed. The main parts remain fairly discrete. They and
the small parts are a collection of variations, slight through great.
There are hierarchies of clarity
and strength and of proximity to one or two main ideas.
Wood and metal are the usual materials,
either alone or together, and if together it is
without much of a contrast. There
is seldom any color. The middling contrast and the
natural monochrome are general
and help to unify the parts.
There is little of any of this in
the new three-dimensional work. So far the most obvious
difference within this diverse
work is between that which is something of an object, a
single thing, and that which is
open and extended, more or less environmental. There
isn't as great a difference in
their nature as in their appearance, though. Oldenburg and
others have done both. There are
precedents for some of the characteristics of the new
work. The parts are usually
subordinate and not separate as in Arp's sculpture and often
in Brancusi's. Duchamp's
ready-mades and other Dada objects are also seen at once
and not part by part. Cornell's
boxes have too many parts to seem at first to be
structured.
Part-by-part structure can't be
too simple or too complicated. It has to seem orderly. The degree of Arp's
abstraction, the moderate extent of his reference to the human body,
neither imitative nor very
oblique, is unlike the imagery of most of the new three dimensional work.
Duchamp's bottle-drying rack is close to some of it. The work of Johns and
Rauschenberg and assemblage and low-relief generally, Ortman's reliefs for
example, are preliminaries.
Johns's few cast objects and a few of Rauschenberg's works,
such as the goat with the tire,
are beginnings.
Some European paintings are
related to objects, Klein's for instance, and Castellani's,
which have unvaried fields of
low-relief elements. Arman and a few others work in three
dimensions. Dick Smith did some
large pieces in London with canvas stretched over
cockeyed parallelepiped frames
and with the surfaces painted as if the pieces were
paintings. Philip King, also in
London, seems to be making objects. Some of the work on
the West Coast seems to be along this
line, that of Larry Bell, Kenneth Price, Tony Delap,
Sven Lukin, Bruce Conner,
Kienholz of course, and others. Some of the work in New
York having some or most of the
characteristics is that by George Brecht, Ronald Bladen,
John Willenbecher, Ralph Ortiz,
Anne Truitt, Paul Harris, Barry McDowell, John
Chamberlain, Robert Tanner, Aaron
Kuriloff, Robert Morris, Nathan Raisen, Tony Smith,
Richard Navin, Claes Oldenburg,
Robert Watts, Yoshimura, John Anderson, Harry
Soviak, Yayoi Kusama, Frank
Stella, Salvatore Scarpitta, Neil Williams, George Segal,
Michael Snow, Richard
Artschwager, Arakawa, Lucas Samaras, Lee Bontecou, Dan
Flavin and Robert Whitman. H. C.
Westermann works in Connecticut. Some of these
artists do both three-dimensional
work and paintings. A small amount of the work of
others, Warhol and Rosenquist for
instance, is three-dimensional.
The composition and imagery of
Chamberlain's work is primarily the same as that of
earlier painting, but these are
secondary to an appearance of disorder and are at first
concealed by the material. The
crumpled tin tends to stay that way. It is neutral at first,
not artistic, and later seems
objective. When the structure and imagery become apparent,
there seems to be too much tin
and space, more chance and casualness than order. The
aspects of neutrality, redundancy
and form and imagery could not be coextensive without
three dimensions and without the
particular material. The color is also both natural and
sensitive and, unlike oil colors,
has a wide range. Most color that is integral, other than in
painting, has been used in
three-dimensional work. Color is never unimportant, as it
usually is in sculpture.
Stella's shaped paintings involve
several important characteristics of three-dimensional
work. The periphery of a piece
and the lines inside correspond. The stripes are nowhere
near being discrete parts. The
surface is farther from the wall than usual, though it
remains parallel to it. Since the
surface is exceptionally unified and involves little or no
space, the parallel plane is
unusually distinct. The order is not rationalistic and underlying
but is simply order, like that of
continuity, one thing after another. A painting isn't an
image. The shapes, the unity,
projection, order and color are specific, aggressive and
powerful.
Painting and sculpture have
become set forms. A fair amount of their meaning isn't
credible. The use of three
dimensions isn't the use of a given form. There hasn't been
enough time and work to see
limits. So far, considered most widely, three dimensions are
mostly a space to move into. The
characteristics of three dimensions are those of only a
small amount of work, little
compared to painting and sculpture. A few of the more
general aspects may persist, such
as the work's being like an object or being specific, but
other characteristics are bound
to develop. Since its range is so wide, three-dimensional
work will probably divide into a
number of forms. At any rate, it will be larger than painting
and much larger than sculpture,
which, compared to painting, is fairly particular, much
nearer to what is usually called
a form, having a certain kind of form. Because the nature
of three dimensions isn't set,
given beforehand, something credible can be made, almost
anything. Of course something can
be done within a given form, such as painting, but
with some narrowness and less
strength and variation. Since sculpture isn't so general a
form, it can probably be only
what it is now-which means that if it changes a great deal it
will be something else; so it is
finished.
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. The several limits of painting are no longer
present. 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. Obviously, anything in three
dimensions can be any shape,
regular or irregular, and can have any relation to the wall,
floor, ceiling, room, rooms or
exterior or none at all. Any material can be used, as is or
painted.
A work needs only to be
interesting. Most works finally have one quality. In earlier art the
complexity was displayed and
built the quality. In recent painting the complexity was in
the format and the few main
shapes, which had been made according to various interests
and problems. A painting by
Newman is finally no simpler than one by Cezanne. In the
three-dimensional work the whole
thing is made according to complex purposes, and
these are not scattered but
asserted by one form. It isn't necessary for a work to have a
lot of things to look at, to
compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a
whole, its quality as a whole, is
what is interesting. The main things are alone and are
more intense, clear and powerful.
They are not diluted by an inherited format, variations
of a form, mild contrasts and
connecting parts and areas. European art had to represent
a space and its contents as well
as have sufficient unity and aesthetic interest. Abstract
painting before 1946 and most
subsequent painting kept the representational
subordination of the whole to its
parts. Sculpture still does. In the new work the shape,
image, color and surface are
single and not partial and scattered. There aren't any
neutral or moderate areas or
parts, any connections or transitional areas. The difference
between the new work and earlier
painting and present sculpture is like that between one
of Brunelleschi's windows in the
Badia di Fiesole and the fa9ade of the Palazzo Rucellai,
which is only an undeveloped
rectangle as a whole and is mainly a collection of highly
ordered parts.
The use of three dimensions makes
it possible to use all sorts of materials and colors.
Most of the work involves new
materials, either recent inventions or things not used
before in art. Little was done
until lately with the wide range of industrial products. Almost
nothing has been done with
industrial techniques and, because of the cost, probably
won't be for some time. Art could
be mass-produced, and possibilities otherwise
unavailable, such as stamping,
could be used. Dan Flavin, who uses fluorescent lights,
has appropriated the results of
industrial production. Materials vary greatly and are simply
materials—formica, aluminum,
cold-rolled steel, plexiglas, red and common brass, and so forth. They are
specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific. Also, they are
usually aggressive. There is an
objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material. Also, of
course, the qualities of
materials—hard mass, soft mass, thickness of 1/32,1/16,1/8 inch,
pliability, slickness,
translucency, dullness—have unobjective uses. The vinyl of
Oldenburg's soft objects looks
the same as ever, slick, flaccid and a little disagreeable,
and is objective, but it is
pliable and can be sewn and stuffed with air and kapok and
hung or set down, sagging or
collapsing. Most of the new materials are not as accessible
as oil on canvas and are hard to
relate to one another. They aren't obviously art. The
form of a work and its materials
are closely related. In earlier work the structure and the
imagery were executed in some
neutral and homogeneous material. Since not many
things are lumps, there are
problems in combining the different surfaces and colors and
in relating the parts so as not
to weaken the
Three-dimensional work usually
doesn't involve ordinary anthropomorphic imagery. If
there is a reference it is single
and explicit. In any case the chief interests are obvious.
Each of Bontecou's reliefs is an
image. The image, all of the parts and the whole shape
are coextensive. The parts are
either part of the hole or part of the mound which forms
the hole. The hole and the mound
are only two things, which, after all, are the same
thing. The parts and divisions
are either radial or concentric in regard to the hole, leading
in and out and enclosing. The
radial and concentric parts meet more or less at right
angles and in detail are
structure in the old sense, but collectively are subordinate to the
single form.
Most of the new work has no
structure in the usual sense, especially the work of
Oldenburg and Stella.
Chamberlain's work does involve composition. The nature of
Bontecou's single image is not so
different from that of images which occurred in a small
way in semiabstract painting. The
image is primarily a single emotive one, which alone
wouldn't resemble the old imagery
so much, but to which internal and external
references, such as violence and
war, have been added. The additions are somewhat
pictorial, but the image is
essentially new and surprising; an image has never before
been the whole work, been so
large, been so explicit and aggressive. The abatised orifice
is like a strange and dangerous
object. The quality is intense and narrow and obsessive.
The boat and the furniture that
Kusama covered with white protuberances have a related
intensity and obsessiveness and
are also strange objects. Kusama is interested in
obsessive repetition, which is a
single interest. Yves Klein's blue paintings are also
narrow and intense.
The trees, figures, food or
furniture in a painting have a shape or contain shapes that are
emotive. Oldenburg has taken this
anthropomorphism to an extreme and made the
emotive form, with him basic and
biopsychological, the same as the shape of an object,
and by blatancy subverted the
idea of the natural presence of human qualities in all
things. And further, Oldenburg
avoids trees and people. All of Oldenburg's grossly
anthropomorphized objects are
manmade - which right away is an empirical matter.
Someone or many made these things
and incorporated their preferences. As practical as
an ice-cream cone is, a lot of
people made a choice, and more agreed, as to its
appearance and existence. This
interest shows more in the recent appliances and
fixtures from the home and
especially in the bedroom suite, where the choice is flagrant.
Oldenburg exaggerates the
accepted or chosen form and turns it into one of his own.
Nothing made is completely
objective, purely practical or merely present. Oldenburg gets
along very well without anything
that would ordinarily be called structure. The ball and
cone of the large ice-cream cone
are enough. The whole thing is a profound form, such
as sometimes occurs in primitive
art. Three fat layers with a small one on top are enough.
So is a flaccid, flamingo switch
draped from two points. Simple form and one or two
colors are considered less by old
standards. If changes in art
are compared backwards, there
always seems to be a reduction, since only old attributes
are counted and these are always
fewer. But obviously new things are more, such as
Oldenburg's techniques and
materials. Oldenburg needs three dimensions in order to
simulate and enlarge a real
object and to equate it and an emotive form. If a hamburger
were painted it would retain
something of the traditional anthropomorphism. George
Brecht and Robert Morris use real
objects and depend on the viewer's knowledge of
these objects.
Source: Thomas Kellein, Donald Judd: Early Work,
1955-1968, New York: D.A.P., 2002. Originally published in Arts Yearbook 8,
1965.