Writing

“Specific Objects,” first published in 1965, remains Judd’s most widely-read and often-cited essay. Regularly confused for a manifesto or statement on his own work, Judd instead contended in a 1968 interview with Lucy Lippard that the:

“Specific Objects” article, despite what people think, was not meant to be a doctrinaire, dogmatic, or definitive, or anything article…it was just really meant to report all of that stuff, and all of it was very diverse and not capable of coming under any heading but an extremely general one. And “Specific Objects,” which is my title, and I liked, isn’t meant to be about my work; it’s just meant to be about any of that kind of thing that isn’t painting or sculpture. I liked the article a lot.

Included in this selection, is an essay from a previously unpublished body of material – Judd’s essays written for class assignments while a student at Columbia University. Judd received his BS in philosophy from Columbia University, cum laude, in 1953. He began graduate work in art history at Columbia in fall 1957 and completed his coursework in fall 1961. “An Ica Leeboard,” written for a course on Ancient Mexican and Peruvian Art, addresses the “abstract” styles found in Chavín period reliefs.

In addition to Judd’s polemical writings from the 1970s, this selection also includes a long form essay on Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) written in 1973 at the time of artist’s first major exhibition in the United States at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Although Judd eschewed Malevich’s influence on his own work, he did acknowledge an admiration for the breadth of Malevich’s ambitions and achievements.

In “Judd Foundation,” written in 1977, Judd described the purpose of the Judd Foundation, which came into being after his death in 1994. As the essay clearly states, the primary concern of the Foundation, permanent placement for his work and the work of others, responded, at least partially, to seeing what had happened to the work of artists of previous generations. He was particularly upset to see their works dispersed by the whims of the market and museum system after their deaths. He argued in 1978 that, “Almost nowhere in the United States has there been an effort to keep together and permanently and properly install the work of the artists of the last fifty years.” Judd would formulate this idea for himself in the clear opening sentence of the essay: “The purpose of the foundation is to preserve my work and that of others and to preserve this work in spaces I consider appropriate for it.”

Three of Judd’s essays from this decade use the same title, “Art and Architecture” and while Judd maintained that art and architecture were distinct practices with specific concerns that were not interchangeable, he understood how the two impacted each other and were in turn impacted by the society and politics in which they were practiced. Judd reacted against the ways in which post-modern art and architecture falsified history. Instead, he strove for what was new and unknown, as he noted in the essay “Marfa, Texas”: “In contrast to the prevailing regurgitated art and architecture, I think I’m working directly towards something new in both.”

Judd continued to write in a genre which he described as a “complaint,” although not titled as such, as were two of his essays from the late 1960s and 1970s, “Complaints: Part I” and “Complaints: Part II.” Judd’s complaints of the 1980s focused on what he perceived as a decline in the quality of contemporary art, while also firmly defending artists rights and condemning the rise of large, sprawling international art exhibitions. These complaints took aim at a variety of issues, including: a general lack of education, the commodification of art, the misuse and exploitation of history, the failures of art criticism, and the escalation of bureaucracy in the arts and government. In his 1989 essay, “Ausstellungsleitungsstreit,” Judd denounced the large exhibition and art fair as symptoms of the corporatization of art. The essay, which focused on the exhibition Bilderstreit, at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (April 8– June 28, 1989), was written for the exhibition catalogue but was not included by the organizers.

The onset of the first Gulf War in August 1990, addressed here in “Nie Wieder Krieg” (translated from the German as “No More War”), was the foundation for much of Judd’s thinking about art during the 1990s. The galvanizing impact that the war had on his writing can be seen with great clarity in this essay, which he submitted in place of an essay on his own work for the exhibition catalogue Donald Judd-Architektur (Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst, Wien). In “Art and Internationalism” Judd considered the implications of the global art world and its relationship to imperialism and colonialism.

In “It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp,” written for the catalog of his 1993 furniture retrospective at Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Judd described his approach to the manufacturing and distribution of his furniture. Because the furniture is hand-made, one by one, “the best method is small distribution,” he contended, noting that, “The distribution of furniture, and of books, probably of most things, are monopolies against diversity which eliminate exceptions and complication, which have an invariable scheme for production and for costs, and of course for appearance, and, for books, subject matter.”

The importance and “insufficiently developed” status of color was a primary concern of Judd’s essays of the 1990s. His description of Josef Albers’s use of color in the eponymous essay from 1991 was developed from reflection on Albers’s work over thirty years (Judd’s first review of Albers’s work is from 1959) and years of looking at paintings by Albers in his own collection. In his last published essay “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,” Judd shared a view of his own achievements in visual art, with a specific focus on innovations in space and color. “Color will always be interpreted in a new way, so that I hardly think my use is final,” he wrote, “in fact I think it is a beginning.”