Art: Exquisite Minimalist

No movement, no gesture, no direction. No mass (only gleaming metal surfaces and transparencies of color per-spex). No pedestal: the box on the floor is the sculpture. No metaphor, no image, and especially no relation or reference to the human figure.

Described in terms of what it is not, Don Judd’s sculpture must inevitably sound cold and vacuous—a Pandora’s box of absences. But Judd, at 42, is possibly the most influential sculptor of his generation. His austere and intensely deliberate art has proved a disinfectant, sluicing away the organic waste that tended in the early ’60s to encumber current ideas about sculpture in the U.S. and abroad. His work is now being celebrated at the Pasadena Art Museum by an exhibition of his boxes, stacks and progression pieces organized by Art-forum’s new editor, John Coplans. Since this museum is a regrettable hybrid of cruise-ship lounge and California bathroom, the event is not altogether harmonious, and the relationship that Judd’s pieces seek with the walls and floor around them is blocked. Nevertheless it is a good opportunity to experience the work of a man who, in the eight years since his first show at the Greene Gallery in New York City, has in Coplans’ words, contrived to “rejuvenate the medium radically.”

Failed Assumption. The simpler art looks, the more esoteric it seems to get. Probably this happens because we expect a work of art to be a rich crock of ideas and visual transactions, and if the box on the floor seems nothing of the sort we assume that its complexities have merely veiled themselves, rather than gone. A great many works of second-rate minimal art—complacently irreducible objects set up with a phony air of discovery, didactic in look but teaching nothing—have benefited from this assumption. But Judd is one of those reductive talents who operate on a stringent level of quality and intelligence. His output constitutes a kind of critical meditation on what is and what is not intrinsic to sculpture. The lucidity of his argument is what makes his work so influential.

Thus his wooden pieces eight years ago, like Untitled, 1963 (see color page), were abstract, which was nothing new—but their kind of abstraction was. It was peculiarly inert and casual looking. This, it became clear, was because Judd has no interest in “composition”—the play between major and minor elements in a work of art, tuned into equilibrium. This elimination of hierarchies had never been tried in sculpture before, though it was very much a feature of advanced New York painting in the early ’60s—the striped patterns of early Stella, the symmetrical chevrons of Noland. So it seemed that Judd had contrived to declare in sculpture one of the basic attitudes of that mode of painting: its flatly declarative, unmodified, take-it-or-leave-it quality.

The most dramatic instance of Judd’s rejection of hierarchy—and it is hard to remember how radical it was, since every art student does it now—was his decision to get rid of the pedestal or base on which sculpture traditionally stood, and put the things straight on the floor or the wall. This amounted to a declaration that sculpture was not imagery, but simply another thing in a world of things.

Judd’s work looks remote, but it is intended to be the very opposite—concretely present. A box is a box is a box, and Judd makes the point explicit by placing a series of identical boxes in a row, without variation, on the gallery floor. “The thing about my work,” says Judd, “is that it is given.” Each sculpture is determined in advance—there is no sense that it has grown under the artist’s hand; in fact all his work for the past few years has been fabricated to his designs in a factory.

Ruthless and pointless as this may seem, Judd’s work is a consistent answer to a difficult question: What kind of order belongs to sculpture and to nothing else? More organic sculpture alludes to orders that are not its own, thus the bumps and hollows and textures of a Henry Moore suggest the processes by which wood grows or rocks are formed. Judd’s work treads the thin, difficult edge of embodying and demonstrating an order without alluding to it. Hence its abstractness, its relative unpopularity and the challenging effect it has had on younger artists.

The curious thing is that, as the show in Pasadena makes clear, Judd’s work is a good deal less cold and unenjoyable than its philosophy suggests. His use of materials is instinctively exquisite. A piece like Untitled, 1970 (see color page) seems bald at first—a run of identical flat sheets of galvanized iron, each 5 ft. by 4 ft., along the gallery wall. Then you notice the silvery flakes and washes caused by the galvanizing bath, rising through the darker metal and catching the light like mica, and that sense of program and frigidity goes. Says Judd: “There is a lot more variety in my work than is casually apparent.” As indeed there is; for Judd’s interrogation of sculpture has trimmed, but not excluded, its sensual beauty. ∙Robert Hughes