Word: judd
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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...
...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...
...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...