Donald Judd: Sculpture Prints Furniture

Judd Donald - Sculpture Prints Furniture

Donald Judd Sculpture, Prints, Furniture. Centro Cultural de Belém, 1997.
60's Abstract Expressionism in the United States
Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl André, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt --> Minimal art

Greenberg v.s. Judd
Judd's "specific objects": simple geometric forms purged of any traces of illusionism, metaphor, gesture of anthropomorphic references. His object's engagement with both the wall, floor and ceiling broke the traditional association of the wall with painting and theatre, and his rigorous engagement with scale, symmetry, volume and architectural space linked his art strongly with architecture. (5)
Judd's work subverted traditional notions of artistic creativity, which involved hierarchical relations between different elements. Instead, he used concepts such as gestalt, unity and indivisibility to realise his specific objects, each of which was conceived as a whole, with its own clearly-defined scale. With these primary structures, developed in repetitions of unitary, identical and symmetrical elements, Judd created a new lexicon. (5)

purity & forms
open & closed volumes
plain or coloured plywood, Plexiglas or metal.
space, scale & material.
painting & architecture

Judd, Donald. "Selected Writings". Donald Judd Sculpture, Prints, Furniture. Centro Cultural de Belém, 1997. 11-21

"Jean Arp". Arts, September 1963
part & whole relationship
example of Arp's sculpture: One of the most interesting aspects of Arp's sculpture [...] is that a good piece is a whole which has no parts. The protuberances can never clearly be considered other, smaller units; are not secondary units. This lack of distinct parts forces you to see the piece as a whole. The perception of wholeness dominates the impressions of its parts... (11) "Kenneth Noland", Arts. September 1963
& Norland's painting: Painting has to be as powerful as any kind of art; it can't claim a special identity, an existence for its own sake as a medium. If it does it will end up like lithography and etching. Painting now is not quite sufficient, although only in terms of plain power. It lacks the specificity and power of actual materials, actual colour, and actual space. (12)
"Specific Objects", Arts yearbook, 1965 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... (13)
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 shapes and surface are only those which can occur plausibly within and on a rectangular plane [...] A painting is nearly and entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group of entities and references. (13)
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... Obviously, anything in three dimensions can be any shape, regular or irregular, and can any have relation to the wall, floor, ceiling, room, rooms or exterior or none at all... (14)
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. (15) A painting isn't an image. The shapes, the unity, projection, order and color are specific, aggressive and powerful. (16)"

Don Judd: an interview with John Coplans
Originally published in Don Judd, Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, California, 1971
yea, kinda boring the interview. not much point made.

Review: Hal Foster
Originally published in ARTFORUM magazine, 1978
Rosalind Krauss wrote of a Robert Morris piece, 'the specific configuration of the work is not allowed to become a figure seen against the "ground" of the object's "real" structure'. (Artforum, November 1973) When a box is aligned with the wall, it may have more to do with the illusionism of painting: each box, like a canvas, is seen as a natural extension of our own visual field. (44) Sculpture that is Minimalist in origin must face the brand of "theatre" applied to Minimalism proper by Michael Fried (Artforum, Summer 1967). To Fried the Minimalist object is theatrical insofar as it imposes as a presence, a presence that provokes a situation between viewer and itself. This he spurned as not self-critical. (45) Not only does Minimalist sculpture have a physical presence, i.e. command a situation or theatre, it also speaks to a metaphysical presence, i.e. to a plenitude, not an "exhaustion", of gestalt, forms, ideas, etc. (46) Rosalind Krauss noted, Judd used forms that seemed given, forms that were somehow a priori. This was done in order to delimit (or disguise) intentionality, what she called "the intention-laden grammar of process", and the presence implicit therein. To Krauss the idea was to make meaning "a function of external space" as opposed to a function of internal space, that metaphorical realm where the operations of the constitutive mind occur. She saw the break with the 'Cartesianism' that was the ground of "Western illusionism". (47)

Donald Judd's Equivocal Objects Prudence Carlson
Originally published in ART IN AMERICA, Brant Publications Inc., January 1984.
As always, Judd's new boxes, whether single or arranged in series, are emphatically self-referential objects that wed form, material and content and that, as a consequence, "exist between mind and matter, detached from both and representing neither" (Noted in Lucy R. Lippard, "Cult of the Direct and the Difficult", Changing, New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1971, 116). hmm, pretty repetitive about Judd's practice. no need to note more i guess.