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Donald Judd and the lateral amplification of sculpture

Wouter Davidts

Wouter Davidts is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the VU University in

Amsterdam. He is the author of Bouwen voor de kunst? Museumarchitectuur van Centre

Pompidou tot Tate Modern (2006) and recently edited The Fall of the Studio: Artists

at Work(2009, with Kim Paice) and CRACK: Koen van den Broek(2010). He curated

the show Abstract USA 19581968. In the Galleries at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in

Enschede, which runs until 11 February 2011.

FROM MR. BIG OF

SOHO TO THE MANWHO BOUGHT MARFA

94 Kunstlicht jrg. 31 2010 nr. 3/4 Beeldende kunst + architectuur

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Disgruntled by the illusory spatiality that lingered in even his most abstract paintings,

Donald Judd went on to work in real space. But instead of becoming a sculptor,

he focused on the qualities of space itself, using a three-dimensional form that

[is] neither painting nor sculpture. By carefully calibrating scale, size, objects, and

environments, he created works that actually inhibit pictorial space as well as in

sculptural space.

the whole world + the work = the whole world.

Martin Creed, work no. 232, 2000

When the artist Donald Judd issued a statement

at the launch of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa,Texas in 1986, he stressed that the institution grew

out of his personal concern to provide artworks

with the best possible temporal and spatial con-

ditions.1 In a by now well-known passage Judd

remarked that [i]t takes a great deal of time and

thought to install work carefully. This should not

always be thrown away. Most art is fragile and

some should be placed and never moved again.

Some work is too large, complex, and expensive

to move.2 The Chinati Foundation was to provide

a gauge for installing present-day artworks: Some-where a portion of contemporary art has to exist

as an example of what the art and its context were

meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinum-

iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict

measure must exist for the art of this time and

place.3 Apart from the exemplary spatial precision

and the temporal stability, Judd also pointed out

the exceptional size of the endeavor: The Chinati

Foundation [] is now one of the largest visible

installations of contemporary art in the world,visible, not in storage. When it nears completion,

or even now, if my own complex [of La Mansana de

Chinati] is added, it is the largest, as befits Texas.4

On the invitation card for the opening that was

sent to all international guests, however, a text was

printed that surprisingly put the acclaimed large-

ness of the project in perspective. What is unique

about the installations, so future guests were

told, is not so much to be found in the scale and

the magnitude of the whole. The distinguishing

feature was the fact that here art is encountered in

the context of its surrounding architectonic spaces

and in a natural situation and not isolated in a

museological anthology.5

The Chinati Foundation on the grounds

of the former Fort Russell in Marfa was the mostextensive in a series of building and installation

projects that the artist Donald Judd initiated

during his life, in order to permanently install his

own work and that of a selected group of artists

that he liked and admired. It all started with the

acquisition and refurbishment of the 1870 cast-

iron building on 101 Spring Street in SoHo in

1968, and after having moved to the little town

of Marfa in the South of Texas in 1971, continued

with the purchase and renovation of several small

to large buildings in and around town.6 Due tothis incremental accumulation of real-estate in

New York and later in Marfa, the artist received

such nicknames as Mr. Big of SoHo and The Man

who Bought Marfa.7 Yet at many occasions in his

writings and during interviews, Judd expressed his

distrust of sheer size. Even though the artist was

creating some of the biggest art installations of the

twentieth century, he did not blink to state that

[s]mall is beautiful and that one never ought to

make anything [] bigger than necessary.8

In themany essays that he wrote on the subject of art and

architecture, the artist never felt obliged to defend

the actual dimensions of his building and installa-

tion efforts. They were, so he noted in 1977, urgent

and necessary.9

In 1985, one year before the official opening

of the Chinati Foundation, Judd penned down that

proportion and scale were qualities that were very

important to him. In contrast to the prevailing re-

gurgitated art and architecture, he argued, he was

working directly toward something new in both.10

95 Wouter Davidts From Mr. Big of SoHo to The Man Who Bought Marfa

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1. Donald Judd,100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum(interior view), 1982-1986, The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.


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ing in particular. Bontecou belonged to a small

number of Americans artists that had developed a

new scale.17 In order to abandon the type of unifi-

cation necessary for the representation of objects

in space, Judd wrote, the new work had a larger

internal scale and [] fewer parts.18The new

scale, especially in case of Bontecous simple re-

liefs, was pragmatic, immediate and exclusive andallowed the work to manifest itself as an object

in its own right, as a work with a power that was

remarkably single.19 An object gave evidence of

internal scale when the three primary aspects, the

scale, structure and image, were in balance, albeit

The subsequent installations in the 101 Spring

Street Building in New York, La Mansana and the

Chinati Foundation in Marfa then are, if we are to

believe the artist, not so much the product of the

artists megalomania and privileged financial posi-

tion and institutional power, but the launch of a

new paradigm in terms of size and scale for the en-

counter between artworks, buildings and nature.11

Judds use of the notion of scale was

based on one of his so-called counterintuitive

intuitions.12 Instead of defining scale aspublic,

that is, as being constituted between the art object,

the body of the viewer and the (architectural)

context, Judd thought of scale first and foremost

as a built-in quality of the art object itself.13 Don,

sculptor and friend David Rabinowitch recalled,

thought of scale as fundamentally inherent in an

object.14

A noteworthy example of Judds use ofthe idiosynchratic notion of internal scale is to be

found in his well-known 1965 review of the work

of Lee Bontecou, an artist that would later that

year also prominently figure in his landmark essay

Specific Objects.15 Lee Bontecou, Judd started

the review, was one of the first to use a three-

dimensional form that was neither painting nor

sculpture.16Bontecous reliefs signaled to Judd a

vital departure from the compositional hierarchies,

representational illusionism and thematic allusion

that marked previous art, and European paint-

2. Donald Judd, untitled (Brass Box), 1968.

3. Donald Judd, untitled (Bras s Box), 1968.


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the particularity and the generality of a work.

The elements and aspects of Pollocks paint-

ing, Judd concluded, are polarized rather than

amalgated.23 Although Judd also held Pollock

responsible for the introduction of a new size

of painting, he did not consider a works degree

of polarity to increase along with its size.24

Polarization rather was correlated with the inter-nal scale, that is, with the inherent proportional

relation between the parts and the whole. In his

1983 essay Abstract Expressionism, Judd stressed

that the large size and the great scale of Abstract

Expressionism were not the same thing. While he

admitted that the large size and fairly simple parts

of paintings like Number 32, 1950 by Pollock, or

Annas Light by Barnett Newman produced a great

scale, he stated, almost paraphrasing the latters

famous exclamation, that scale is not dependent

on size.25

not a placid balance but a powerful polarization of

the latter elements and qualities within the work

as a whole.20

Polarization on its turn was a value of long

standing for Judd, most clearly elaborated in his

critical appraisals of the work of Jackson Pollock.21

In his 1967 article on Pollock, Judd praised the

painters works for the paradoxical combinationof the lack of compositional hierarchy between

the particular material marks of paint on the one

hand, and the resulting experience of the general

composition of the canvas as a whole on the other:

Everything is fairly independent and specific.22

Judd realized that not a single part, let alone a

fragment of a Pollock painting, matched the pow-

erful experience of the painting as a whole. Yet

every single drip of paint nevertheless manifested

itself as an sovereign and specific element. Polarity

then was constituted by the divergence between

4. Donald Judd,100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum (interior view), 1982-1986, The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.


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Yet for Judd painting was not the most ap-

propriate medium to achieve his artistic ambitions.

While he started out as a painter of abstract works,

he gradually grew disgruntled with the medium, in

particular with the residual spatial illusionism that

continued to haunt all paintings, even the most

abstract works.26 Anything on a surface, he notedin his essay Specific Objects, has a space behind

it.27 Judd decided to work in the three dimen-

sions of real space.28 Yet this did not imply that

the artist immediately converted to the medium of

sculpture. His true artistic objective, so one could

read in the opening sentence, was to work in the

area in between both media: Half or more of the

best new work in the last few years has been nei-

ther painting nor sculpture.29 The very newness

of his work, so the artist claimed in his last essaySome Aspects of Color in General and Red and

Black in Particular, consisted in developing space

as a main aspect of art.30 Judd regarded space as

one of the distinct qualities of his art, to be sensed

along with shape, color, light and proportion. His

space, Richard Shiff has rightly pointed out, was

a primary among equals. It became an active ele-

ment rather than a passive container, no longer

the homogenising background of a picture.31

Judd granted objects a particular shape, material-

ity (that is, color and surface), and proportion (thatis, an abrupt cantilever from the wall or rise from

the floor) so they could resolutely occupy space

as three-dimensional entities. Yet while space

turned into a vital constituent of the experience of

works by Judd, these works were not intended to

activate the space they dwelled in.32 Even though

space no longer acts as a homogenizing pictorial

background, the spatial formation of Judds works

remains fundamentallypictorial. Or put differently,

while Judds works indeed identify actual space asa constitutive aspect of an artwork an element

that they project into, as well as enclose, shape,

and contain, like asculpture they nevertheless

continue to relate to that actual space in frontal

fashion like apainting. The works use the floor

on which they are placed, or the wall on which

they are hung, as a backdrop, that is, as a surface

from which they abruptly emerge, or, put differ-

ently, from which they arise, either vertically or

horizontally. This applies not only to the vertical

wall stacks or the horizontal wall progressions,

but as well to the many shiny boxes in either brass

or aluminum, the surfaces of which both reflect

and merge with the floor on which they rest.

In this essay I would like to argue that it is

precisely the acknowledgement of the dual nature

of Judds work the existence, as Robert Pincus

Witten remarked in 1970 about one of Judds brass

boxes, in two spheres of being, in pictorial space

as well as in sculptural space that provides uswith a critical framework to assess the scale of

his work in general, and the scale of his installa-

tion and building activities in particular.33 Judds

scale, I contend, consists of the transposition of

the polarity that he detected in an artwork, respec-

tively a Pollock painting or a Bontecou relief, into

the actual space of an art installation. The inherent

scale that he discovered within the works of the

aforementioned artists is transferred into space: it

is spatialized. Judd managed to arrive at the qual-

ity of polarization that he avidly wanted to achieve

5. Donald Judd, 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum(exterior v iew),

1982-1986, The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.


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in his three-dimensional work via the medium and

practice of installation, that is, via the calibrated

relationship between the scale of his works and the

scale of the setting.34 The artists consecutive in-

stallations, I will argue here, can be read as spatial

renditions of the pictorial quality of polarization.

From SoHo to Marfa, Judd provided his abstract

works with different yet utterly specific spatial

backdrops, in terms of both size and materiality.That activity, which spanned a period of more than

25 years, is marked by a major difference between

the change of the size of the works on the one

hand and the change of the size of the settings on

the other. Throughout his career, Judd continued

to produce work that retained the body as a basic

measure.35The enlargement or extension in the

work of Judd was, as Barbara Rose presciently

remarked in 1968 in her article Blow Up The

Problem of Scale in Sculpture, laterally rather than

vertically.36 The artist did not so much blow up his

work vertically to tower over the viewer, but did

rather extend it sideways. If the work grew bigger,

it was due to the multiplication of the units. While

the one hundred untitled aluminum boxes in the

Artillery Sheds at Fort Russell make up an undeni-

ably vast installation, the respective one hundred

boxes remain comparatively small objects (img. 1-5).

Judd moreover always stressed that all boxes wereto be considered as individual works.37

The architectural contexts in which and the

spatial backdrops against which Judd successively

placed his work, however, did gradually grow big-

ger: there is a major leap in size from the interior

of the Spring Street loft building in the urban

fabric of New York, over the assorted spaces within

the walled garden of La Mansana, to finally the

industrial sheds of the Chinati Foundation in the

vast natural landscape of Marfa, Texas. It is signifi-cant that Judd in all of these cases did not create

environments from scratch. If the architecture of

the artists projects might give the impression of

being tailor-made, it remains important to remem-

ber that he always started with existing buildings

that he subsequently refurbished. Judd notoriously

took pleasure in criticizing new architecture and

applauding existing, vernacular architecture.38

Every context he chose to install his work in was

marked by a certain degree of materiality and his-

toricity. He was uninterested in a neutral settingand wanted to provide his works with a real back-

drop. All idealizing spatial and architectural strate-

gies would end up putting the works on a pedestal

again.39 Yet this urge was first and foremost driven

by the gradual development of the artists works.

The less reference to reality his works came to

possess Smithson once famously referred to

Judds pink plexiglass box as a giant crystal from

another planet the more the backdrop had to be

a marker of that very reality.40

My work, he oncecomplained, has the appearance it has, wrongly

called objective and impersonal []. Yet my

first and largest interest, so he continued, is in my

relation to the natural world, all of it, all the way

out. This interest includes my existence, a keen

interest, the existence of everything and the space

and time that is created by the existing things. Art

emulates this creation or definition by also creat-

ing, on a small scale, space and time.41

Judds installation practice, I would like to

argue, examined the relational difference between


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art and all other things material, either natural or

man-made, that we encounter in our daily exist-

ence in time and space. The more wordly the

backdrop and the more abstract the work, the more

polarized the installation as a whole could become.

Judd consciously installed his works against

different backdrops, each being marked by adifferent spatial regime, ranging from the urban

bustle of New York, the domestic tranquility

combined with the idyllic nature of the hortus

conclusus of La Mansana de Chinati or The Block,

and finally the vast stretch of landscape in the

Artillery Sheds of the Chinati Foundation.42 Judd

already started this practice in 101 Spring Street

in SoHo. The view at the city through the windows

of his bedroom was framed by a work by Dan

Flavin, itself being a succession of frames oftubular light fixtures (img. 6). In his studio on the

ground floor he frontally juxtaposed his own

works with the life on the streets. In two portraits

of the artist in the ground floor workplace in the

early 1970s, one can discern two of the artists

early paintings mounted on the solid wall panes

that alternate with the windows (img.7).43 Later

he exchanged these paintings by a wall sculpture

consisting of two small aluminum boxes. The

domestic spaces of the house and the enclosed

space of the garden of The Block, however, pre-

6. Donald Judd,

interior view of the

bedroom of 101

Spring Street, SoHo,

New York.

7. Donald Judd, interior view of the ground floor studio space of 101

Spring Street, SoHo, New York.


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sented the artist with a radically different back-

drop than the loft building and the surrounding

urban environment of New York (img. 8). La Mansa-

na de Chinati somehow seems to have served as

an intermediary stage between the domestic and

exhibitionary conditions of respectively 101 Spring

Street and The Chinati Foundation. While Juddused both the large warehouse spaces in the

south-west and the south-east buildings as

galleries to present his works, the boundaries

between these exhibition spaces and his living and

working quarters were far from absolute, yet

nevertheless distinct. Judd tried out the different

levels of coexistence and juxtaposition between his

works and the props of his private life, and in

doing so he tested and put at stake the difference

between the respective regimes of these very

material objects and surroundings. The result is a

remarkable unity in which the different elements

nevertheless stand out and retain their discrete

character.

This succession of radically different settings from

101 Spring Street, over The Block to The Chinati

Foundation represents an ever further move away

from the workday world of industrial modernityand consumer culture with which Judds work,

as Joshua Shannon has convincingly argued, had

inescapably entered into a mimetic relation.44

In each of these distinct contexts Judd never aimed

at a synthesis, but forced the works in an utterly

balanced yet fundamentally contrasting relation

with their setting, whether architectural or natural,

that is, whether building or landscape. While the

artist to a certain degree went as far as to blend

his artworks with their everyday environment, henevertheless frontally juxtaposed both with each

other, as in a picture. Judds subsequent installa-

tions in New York and Marfa may serve as prime

examples of a fertile meeting between art and

architecture, even between art and life, yet the

actual artworks never fully merge with their

surroundings. They remain to claim their differ-

ence. This sensation is the product of what David

Raskin has termed Judds aesthetics of disparity,

an artistic enterprise that generates complexity

in the face of unity.45 Just as much the works attimes even literally frame their context, that very

context frames the works too. The most famous

picture of the installation of the one hundred

aluminum boxes in the artillery sheds in Marfa

consists of the view along the axis of the artillery

sheds (img. 4). Judd himself however indicated that it

was not the longitudinal view within but the

perpendicular view through the building that was

the most important: The long parallel planes of the

glass faade enclose a long flat space containingthe long rows of pieces. The given axis of a

building is through its length, but the main axis is

through the wide glass faade, through the wide

shallow space inside and through the other glass

faade. Instead of being long buildings, they

become wide and shallow buildings, facing at right

angles to their length. (img. 5).46 By prioritizing the

frontal view through the building instead of the

internal view amidst the boxes, Judd highlighted

the necessity to see both the interior space of the

installation and the landscape together, that is,

8. Donald Judd, interior view of the living quarters of the East Building

with view into South East Gallery, The Block (La Mansana de Chinati),

The Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas.


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as both are framed through and by the building.

In doing so, he indirectly confirmed the pictorial

constitution of the installation as a whole. The

building not so much juxtaposes as it pictures

two worlds that could not be more distinct from

each other: artificial on the one hand and natural

on the other. While the artillery sheds deliver the

material framework for the individual works, theyfirst and foremost deliver the pictorial outline for

the installation as a whole. It is via and through

these buildings that we understand that the real

backdrop for the one hundred aluminum boxes is

not the architecture but the vast Texan landscape,

that is, the landscape as it is framed by the

architecture. Judds key statement that [t]he

greater the polarity of the elements in a work, the

greater the works comprehension of space, time

and existence, applies to the installations as awhole.47 By taking control of the spatial installa-

tion of his own works the artist made sure that the

latter were going to be viewed against that very

material world that they want to differ from, yet

fully partake in, albeit in such a fashion that both

the difference and the partaking come into the

picture.

The scale of either Judds works or the insti-

tutional enterprise of the Marfa fiefdom, I would

like to argue, can only be critically assessed by

measuring the intense process of installation thatwent with it, in both temporal and spatial terms.48

In every installation being an at once spatial

and temporal translation of Judds conception of

a polarized entity that is marked by a balanced

internal scale neither the size of the works nor

the size of the surroundings matter at first. What

matters to assess the scale of Judds work in general

is the extent of polarization that results from

the juxtaposition of the different elements. The

uniqueness of the different permanent installa-tions by Judd is indeed not so much to be found in

the scale and the magnitude of the whole, but in

the experience of a contrasting encounter between

artworks and different types and magnitudes of

nature urban or rural, domestic or exhibition-

ary, private or public, man-made or natural in the

respective installations. Contrasting indeed, since

Judd was not involved in providing his art with an

ideal setting. He was rather testing out the viable

spatial and temporal conditions to grant (his)

artworks a meaningful place. The spatial precision

that is, the well-proportioned balance between

the artworks and the buildings and the temporal

consistency that is, the aim to have that equilib-

rium tested by the course of time created

a model and a gauge. Yet the model-quality of

Judds installations, I would like to argue, is not

so much to be found in the perfected conditions

of presentation as they are to be situated in therealistic assessment of the relative dimensions of

arts place and status in the world, that is, a place

mediated by the practice of installation. In compar-

ison to all things produced and existing, Judd once

indicated, art is no more than creating on a small

scale, space and time.49 But that didnt prevent

him, as befits an artist, to claim a proper spatial

and temporal enclave to accommodate art and to

test out its probable dimensions. In a present-day

world and society where things are ever moredirected towards total instrumentalization and

rapid exchangeability, Judds installations, both in

New York and Marfa, serve as a solemn reminder

of how small yet considerable arts place in the

world is. But more importantly, they involuntar-

ily also reveal how difficult it is to safeguard and

maintain that place. It was a belief that the artist

already voiced in 1985 when he most presciently

remarked that [it]'s a lot easier to make art than

to finance and make the space that houses it.50


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1 A first version of this essay was delivered

as a paper during the session The Age of

Enlargementat the College Art Association

(CAA) 98th Annual Conference in Chicago

on February 13, 2010. The research is part

of a book-length project on size and scale

of postwar art, architecture and art instituti-

ons.

2 D. Judd, Statement for the Chinati

Foundation / La Fundacin Chinati, in:

D. Judd, Complete Writings 1975-1986,

Eindhoven, 1986, pp. 110-114 (111). The

writings of Donald have been published in

two separate editions: the aforementioned

Complete Writings 1975-1986and D.

Judd, Complete Writings 1959 -1975.

Gallery Reviews, Book Reviews, Articles,

Letters to the Editor, Reports, Statements,Complaints, Halifax 1975/2005.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 As cited in: R. Fuchs, The Ideal Museum:

An Art Settlement in the Texas Desert,

in: P. Noever (ed.), Donald Judd.

Architecture / Architektur, Ostfildern-Ruit/

Portchester 2003, pp. 85-89. The rest of

the card reads as follows: Chinati moreover

stands for the idea that the installation and

exhibition of art must be supervised by the

maker of it, the practicing art ist, who other-

wise only loses control over his work all too

often. Aside from the works of Chamber-

lain, Flavin and Judd, Chinati is planning to

install works of other artists, to es tablish a

graphics workshop and a library for art and

architecture, and to create an atmosphere

which will lead to the making and exhibiting

of art as an inherent part of life.

6 Judd acquired the building in New Yorkand the grounds and buildings of what was

later to become La Mansana de Chinati

as a private person. In 1978 he enters into

a dialogue with the founders of Dia Art

Foundation, Heiner Friedrich and Philippa

de Menil, to realize a large-scale project

in Marfa. While the Dia Art Foundation

initially supports the realization of the one

hundred aluminum boxes, it purchases the

bulk of Fort Russell, as well as the Wool

and Mohair building, a large warehouse in

the centre of Marfa, the latter structure for

the installation of Chamberlains work. After

financial decline in 1985, Dia Art Founda-

tion is forced to abandon Judds project

in Marfa. In 1987 Dia Art Foundation

transfers the ownership of the property and

artworks in Mar fa to the newly founded,

public organisation of The Chinati Founda-

tion/La Fundacin Chinati. For a survey of

the different architecture and installation

projects I refer to: M. Stockebrand (ed.),

Donald Judd. Architektur, Mnster 1989;

P. Noever (ed.) , Donald Judd.

Architecture / Architektur, Ostfildern-Ruit/

Portchester 2003; U.P. Flckiger, Donald

Judd: Architecture in Marfa, Texas, Basel

2007. Most recently a lavishly illustrated

book on the history of the Chinati Founda-tion was published by the foundation itself:

M. Stockebrand (ed.), Chinati: The Vision

of Donald Judd, Marfa/New Haven, 2010.

7 P. Gardner, SoHo: Brave New Bohemia ,

ARTnews 73 (1974) 4, pp. 56-57; P. Wright,

The Man Who Bought Marfa , Radio

Program, BBC 3 , Wednesday 1 September

2004 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3).

8 D. Judd, Art and Architecture (1987), in:

Stockebrand 1989, op.cit. (note 6), pp. 194-

199 (197).

9 Idem, In defense of my work, in: Judd

1975/2005, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 9-10 (10).

10 Idem, Marfa, Texas, in: Judd 1986, op.cit.

(note 2), pp. 96-102 (102).

11 For a criti que of Judds alleged megaloma-

nia, see a.o. Y.A. Bois , Specific Objections,

Artforum 42 (2004) 10, pp. 196-203, 289.

12 R. Shiff, Donald Judd, Safe from Birds,

in: N. Serota (ed.), Donald Judd, London

2004, exh.cat. Tate Modern, London, pp.29-61 (46).

13 In this regard Judd fundamentally differs

from his contemporary and colleague

Robert Morris, who in his landmark essay

Notes on Sculpture II of 1966 states that

minimalist work resorted to larger size in or-

der to avoid the private relationship towards

small objects and to obtain a public condi-

tion: Much of the new sculpture makes a

positive value of large size. It is one of the

necessary conditions of avoiding intimacy.

[] If larger than body size is necessary to

the establishment of the more public mode,

nevertheless it does not follow that the

larger the object, the better it does. Beyond

a certain size the object can overwhelm

and the gigantic scale becomes the loaded

term. This is a delicate situation. For the

space of the room itself is a structuring

factor both in its cubic shape and in terms

of the kinds of compression different sized

and proportioned rooms can effect upon

the object-subject terms. See R. Morris,

Notes on Sculpture II (1966), in : R. Morris

(ed.), Continuous Project Altered Daily.

The Writings of Robert Morris , Cambridge,

Massachusetts/London/New York 1993,

pp. 11-22 (15-16).

14 Rabinowitch, as cited in Shiff 2004, op.cit(note 12), pp. 29-61 (46). Rabinowitch

himself, so he adds, saw it as a function of

[the] conditions of observation.

15 Judd uses the term internal scale for the

first time in the review of an exhibition of

Kenneth Noland in Gallery Emmerich in

1962 (April 10-May 5) that starts with the

famous sentence that Noland is one of the

best but not the best, nor is he the leader of

the best group. Noland exemplifies the new

tendencies in Abstract art towards material

singularization of the art object that Judd

himself avidly wanted to achieve in his work,

such as greater immediacy, continuous

single surfaces, making him work a single

object without conspicuous parts, greater

internal scale and further simplicity and so

on. See D. Judd, In the Galleries (1962),

in: Judd 1975/2005, op.cit. (note 2), pp.

54-60 (57).

16 D. Judd, Lee Bontecou (1965) , in: Judd1975/2005, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 178-180

(178).

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid. Judd, as he would not much later write

in Specific Objects, was interested in [t]

he thing as a whole, its qualit y as a whole.

D. Judd, Specific Objects (1965), in: Judd

1975/2005, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 181-189

(187).

20 Ibid.


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34 This might also explain why the Judd often

got so upset by the presentations of his

work by others in museums worldwide. A

bad installation was simply detrimental to

the work itself. No wonder the artist admit-

ted in 1977 that the practice of install ation

had become equally important as the work

itself. See D. Judd, In defense of my work,

in: Judd 1986, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 9-10 (9):

The space surrounding my work is crucial

to it: as much thought has gone into the

installations as into a piece itself. While he

admits that initially the effort to preserve

the work in appropriate spaces was a

concern second only to the invention of

[his] work, he then indicates that gradually

the two concerns have joined and both tend

toward architecture. In a late essay, Juddreaffirms this concern: Any work of art, old

or new, is harmed or helped by where it is

placed. This can a lmost be considered ob-

jectively, that is, spatially. Further, any work

of art is harmed or helped, almost always

harmed, by the meaning of the situation

in which it is placed. There is no neutral

space, since space is made, indifferently or

intentionally, and since meaning is made,

ignorantly or knowledgeably. This is the

beginning of my concern for the surround-

ings of my work. These are the simplest

circumstances which all art must confront.

Even the smallest single works of mine are

affected. See: D. Judd, 21 February 93,

in: R. Fuchs, D. Judd (eds.), Donald Judd.

Large-Scale Works, New York 1993, pp.

9-13 (9).

35 In contrast to many of his contemporaries,

such as Richard Serra or Claes Oldenburg,

Judd did not systematically proceed tomake ever-larger work. Whereas some

work might have taken up increasingly more

space in galleries and museums and others

were made for urban or natural sites, most

of it was always based on a relatively small

singular element, that is, on a base unit of

somatic scale.

36 B. Rose, Blow Up - the Problem of Scale in

Sculpture, Art in America 56 (1968) 4, pp.

80-91 (91).

37 Donald Judd during interview in the film

Donald Judds Marfa, Texas (dir. Christop-

her Felver, 1998): It is individual work and

could be somewhere else, but was made

to go into those buildings and to always be

there. In the essay on the installation of the

one hundred aluminum boxes, Judd uses a

plural term: The buildings, purchased in 79,

and the works of art that they contain were

planned together as much as possible. The

size and nature of the building were given.

This determined the size and the scale of

the works. From: D. Judd, Artillery Sheds,

in: Stockebrand 1989, op.cit. (note 6), pp.

72-74. See also B. Haskell, Donald Judd,

New York 1988, p. 123.

38 Judd promoted respect for existing archi-

tecture and tried to preserve the acquiredbuildings as much as possible, even though,

as the artist stated himself in an interview

(Donald Judds Marfa, Texa, dir. Christop-

her Felver, 1998), many of the buildings

that he acquired didnt have any interesting

qualities at all.

39 While Judd notoriously disliked museums

and often indicated that he did not want to

imitate the institution, his building and in-

stallation endeavors are nevertheless often

described in such terms. See for example:

Fuchs 2003, op.cit. (note 5), pp. 85-89.

40 R. Smithson, The Crystal Land (1966), in:

J.D. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Col-

lected Writings, Berkeley 1996, pp. 7-9 (7).

41 D. Judd, Art and Architecture (1983), in:

Noever 2003, op.cit. (note 6), pp. 24-28

(27).

42 Descriptions of these respective building

projects can be found in 101 Spring Street,

Horti conclusi, Mansana de Chinati andArtillery Sheds, in: Stockebrand 1989,

op.cit. (note 6), pp. 18-19, 40-41, 48-50,

72-74. See also P. Viladas, A sense of Pro-

portion. A walled compound in West Texas

embodies sculptor Donald Judd's ideas

about design, Progressive Architecture 66

(1985) 4, pp. 102-109.

43 See T. Kellein, Donald Judd. Early Work

1955-1968 , Kln 2002, pp. 98-99, 99-100,

101.

21 Shiff 2004, op.cit. (note 12), pp. 29-61

(50).

22 D. Judd, Jackson Pollock (1967), in: Judd

1975/2005, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 193-195

(195).

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid. In this article Judd praised Pollock

a.o. for having created the large scale,

wholeness and simplicity that have become

common to almost all good work.

25 D. Judd, Abstract Expressionism, in: Judd

1986, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 37-48 (46).

26 For an in-depth discussion of the early work

of Judd, see T. Kellein, Donald Judd. Early

Work 1955-1968, Kln 2002.

27 Judd 1965/1975, op.cit. (note 19), pp.

181-189 (182). He found it objectionable

that anything spaced in a rectangle andon 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.

28 Idem, p. 182.

29 Idem, p. 181.

30 D. Judd, Some Aspects of Color in General

and Red and Black in Particular, in: N .

Serota (ed.), Donald Judd, London 2004,

exh.cat. Tate Modern, London, pp. 145-159

(147). For a discussion of Judds concep-

tion of space in three-dimensional work

and the alleged newness of his invention,

see R. Shiff, A Space of One to One, in:

R. Shiff, D. Judd (eds.), Donald Judd: 50 x

100 x 50, 100 x 100 x 50 , New York 2002,

exh.cat. Pace Wildenstein, New York, pp.

5-23.

31 Shiff 2004, op.cit. (note 12), pp. 29-61

(50).32 They deliberately remained, as Nicholas

Serota remarked at the time of the major

2004 retrospective in Tate Modern, dis-

crete objects within it. N. Serota, Donald

Judd: A Sense of Place, in: N. Serota (ed.),

Donald Judd, London 2004, exh.cat. Tate

Modern, London, pp. 99-110 (105).

33 R. Pincus-Witten, Fining it Down: Don Judd

at Castelli, Artforum 8 (1970) 10, pp. 47-49

(48).


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44 J. Shannon, The Disappearance of

Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the

Postmodern City, New Haven 2009, pp.

150-186. See also J. Flatley, Allegories of

Boredom, in: A. Goldstein (ed.), A Minimal

Future? Art as Object 1958-1968 , Cam-

bridge, Massachusetts 2004, pp. 51-75

(63).

45 D. Raskin, Judd's Scale, in: M. Stocke-

brand, R. Shiff (eds.), The Writings of

Donald Judd, Marfa 2009, pp. 26-41 (35).

46 Judd 1989, op.cit. (note 37), pp. 72-74

(73).

47 D. Judd, Abstract Expressionism, in: Judd

1986, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 37-48 (45).

48 Y.A. Bois, Specific Objections, Artforum 42

(2004) 10, pp. 196-203, 298 (198).

49 Judd 1983, op.cit. (note 41), pp. 24-28(27).

50 D. Judd, Marfa, Texas (1985), in : Judd

1986, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 96-102 (100).


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