Donald Judd wanted his work totally empty. Which allowed the world to make anything out of it.
You know Donald Judd’s work even if you don’t know you know it. Judd is to minimalism as Picasso is to Cubism. But unlike Cubism, which lives much more vibrantly inside museum walls than anywhere else in the world, minimalism quickly achieved exit velocity from the art world and took over … everything. Since the 1990s, endless streams of derivative decorators, designers, architects, less-is-more self-help gurus, Calvin Klein stores, landscape artists, furniture-makers, and corporate-office planners have owed many of their ideas to misunderstanding Judd’s notions of objects, space, material, and interior design, the built and lived-in environment. His wall sculptures became wall shelves, floating on the white space of generic HGTV-approved interiors and carefully layered with books and small sculptures. He is in everything from the buildings we live in and the furniture we sit on to our work spaces and iPhone design. Judd’s minimalism is the ubiquitous dark design energy of everyday modern life. Always there, even if you never consciously recognize it.
Today, this might make it hard to see Judd’s work — showcased starting March 1 in a MoMA retrospective, his first in 30 years — as art at all. In fact, his iconic boxes were meant to be an end point of a sort: not a form of expression but “the thing in itself,” an art-historical object emptied of all referential art-historical meaning. He wanted his art to have definite qualities, plain power, a sense of singleness — to make things that “aren’t obviously art.” He wanted to create works that were “neither painting nor sculpture.” The experience of his art, he said, should be democratic, available all at once, never mystical, hidden, expressionistic, or illusionistic. He was against weight and mass in sculpture because these weren’t things you could accurately ascertain just by looking. He was against all forms of figuration and certain forms of authorship — his vision was so much his own it was revolutionary, yet the works themselves were produced by machines or made to look that way, tributes of a kind to American industrial production. While he admired Brancusi and Giacometti, he thought their art implied the human body. He refused to suggest anything outside the work itself.
The problem was as soon as Judd emptied his objects of art history, the world changed on a dime, demanding the vacuum of form he established be filled again with content. In the era of Vietnam and civil rights, women’s liberation and the sexual revolution, the idea of pure formalism lost its currency. A hundred other types of art sprung up: Land and Earth art, process art, performance art, video art, Conceptual art. Many of these made use of Judd’s form, appropriating or stuffing those boxes with life, politics, history, biography, science, or biology. First came Eva Hesse putting squiggly plastic things into boxes. Then Robert Smithson filled them with rocks. Michael Heizer gouged two rectangles out of the sides of a mesa in Nevada. Félix González-Torres’s stacks of paper are Judd boxes with social commentary. Jeff Koons put appliances in boxes and invited us to worship them. Rachel Whiteread made boxy concrete casts of negative spaces. Damien Hirst put dissected animals in boxes. In the end, Judd was less an end point than a reset, an end of modernism and a beginning of everything that followed, who, in trying to invent a form of pure object, actually ended up producing a platform — or a theater — onto which everyone else’s ideas about everything else could be projected.
I first saw Judd’s work in the mid-1970s, when I was in my early 20s. Even though it was barely ten years after Judd caused a sea change, his art already felt like it came from another world. It scared me, like I wasn’t up to coming to grips with whether these manufactured objects could be art. Judd’s work isn’t even spiced with the puckish, riddling frisson of Duchamp’s readymades, which his boxes might otherwise call to mind in their pure objectness. It also doesn’t have the messianic fervor of early monochrome artists like Malevich and Rodchenko, who made art out of rules, metaphysics, and philosophy on canvas. Judd, for all his seriousness, is less grand and more quotidian — nearer to the stripped-down wholeness, visual lucidity, and existential absorption conjured by photographer Walker Evans. Both artists feel close to the land, hardscrabble, serious, dignified, Spartan.
Decades after first encountering his work, I’m still of two minds about Judd. I love the totality of this Renaissance man who made paintings, sculptures, prints, and furniture; designed buildings; created outdoor works in his own landscapes; transformed museum-exhibition ideas; and was perhaps the best art critic between 1959 and 1965 — when much art criticism was seen by artists as almost universally bad. (Peak Judd is his awesome West Texas Gesamtkunstwerk in Marfa, itself now a strange, genuine art-world pilgrimage site turned generic Instagram backdrop.) Yet I also hate what Judd represents, how unyielding and antagonistic his abstract art can be.