The following is my writing sample. It is a revised and condensed version of my undergraduate thesis, which was submitted to Columbia’s Department of American Studies in April 2015.

Donald Judd, Artist in the American Tradition by Joe Bucciero

I. A Viable Continuity

In the November 1959 issue of Art News, Donald Judd—then in his early days as an art critic—reviews an exhibition of nineteenth-century American painting at New York’s

Bayer Gallery entitled American Survey. The exhibition, writes Judd, “posits a viable continuity in American art, a view relatively unexplored, and debatable.”1 What qualities describe this continuity, if it does indeed exist? What purposes could it serve?

Ralph Blakelock, a late-century painter included in American Survey, is

“conspicuously American,” Judd writes, “yet derived many elements from earlier

European styles. His color is in the ambiance of dark European Romanticism; but it is astringent and dissonant.” Blakelock’s paintings are dark and hazy; he flattens and decenters the scene, situating all the content on one perspectival plane (fig. 1). Why is this approach conspicuously American? In the review Judd also analyzes Apple Orchard in Blossom by tonalist painter George Inness (fig. 2). Inness’s piece “portrays something intrinsically American; an everyday orchard is lyric, largely due to the practical device

(found only obliquely in European art) of painting the scene at eye level of someone standing in the orchard.” The contents of the painting are plain, unadorned; we look upon them as though we were there, in the orchard. Why is this intrinsically American?

Judd reviewed roughly a dozen New York exhibitions nearly every month from

September 1959 until spring 1965, in Art News, Art International, and Arts Magazine. He

1 Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2005), 6. wrote on all types of art, from nineteenth-century American painting to non-Western folk art to New York’s burgeoning avant-garde. Many of the ideas that Judd would espouse in subsequent decades (in catalogue essays, talks, and personal notes) are foreshadowed by the content of these reviews—not just their subject matter, but also their style and lexicon, which, like the forms of his objects, remained fairly consistent throughout his career. As Roberta Smith wrote in a 1994 obituary, Judd’s prose is “blunt, judgmental and drily humorous.”2 He presents a fairly limited vocabulary, marked by a stable of specific words—such as particular, practical, direct, and American—that do not necessarily describe an artwork’s formal aspects so much as its outward stance, a rhetorical approach that can make his critiques difficult to parse. Yet Judd’s idiosyncratic definitions begin to take shape in his early reviews and cohere in his subsequent essays, which would help define the work he and his peers innovated in the mid-1960s.

In his most famous essay, published in Arts Yearbook 8 in 1965, Judd termed this work “Specific Objects,” an umbrella covering a disparate array of art, from Dan Flavin’s to Claes Oldenburg’s. In “Specific Objects” Judd focuses less on formal characteristics

(“the work is diverse”) and more on the objects’ philosophies and their position against artistic tradition. Specific objects are “neither painting nor sculpture,” he states, rejecting a modernist trajectory imposed by contemporary critics such as Clement Greenberg.

Throughout, Judd employs the vocabulary he had established in the years prior, characterizing specific objects with words such as direct, aggressive, explicit, clear, strong, and whole. Specific objects utilize “real space,” not pictorial space, he writes.

Their materials—new substances like Formica and car metal—when “used directly… are

2 Roberta Smith, “Donald Judd, Leading Minimalist Sculptor, Dies at 65,” New York Times, February 13, 1994.

2 more specific.” Critics were quick to codify this art with formalist terms like

Minimalism, Literalism, and ABC Art, among many others. But the formal flexibility

Judd gives to specific objects illustrates how, in his view, “the new three-dimensional work doesn’t constitute a movement, school or style.”3 Fellow “Minimalist” Robert

Morris agreed: “A particular term for the new work is not as important as knowing what its values and standards are,” writes Morris in 1966’s “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2.”4

The use of real space is perhaps the most salient feature of specific objects, in that it opens them up to a new mode of direct reception, both discursively and for the viewer.

Real space “gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space…” writes Judd,

“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.”5 Real space allows a work to assert its power and, to use another of

Judd’s favorite words, independence—independence from the pictorial realm, from traditional concepts of medium, and, importantly, from an outmoded European tradition.

Critics such as Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss, and fellow artists such as Morris and Robert Smithson, often view Judd’s work (directly or indirectly) in the context of Eurocentric traditions of modernist art, from impressionism to abstract expressionism, and philosophy, from the Enlightenment to phenomenology. Judd rebuffs such considerations; while always taking him at his word is not advisable, given his biases, his rejection of these critical approaches nevertheless complements a particular engagement with an American tradition of art, philosophy, and politics. He positions

3 Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, 181. 4 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 11. 5 Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, 184.

3 himself in this tradition through his articulation of “American” art, especially in contrast to “European” art, and enters the tradition further through habits that align with a dominant sense of American-ness, defined in part by his studies in pragmatism, his interest in the frontier landscape, his political engagement, and his work in Marfa, Texas.

Judd saw American Survey as “posit[ing] a viable continuity in American art.” I argue that his objects and writing ultimately cohere through the lens of this continuity.

John Dewey, at the outset of Art and Experience, proclaims that art should “restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.”6 Judd also appreciates continuities between separate approaches to art, and between art and experience—something that must have felt necessary beginning at a time (the 1960s) marked by rupture in both American art and American society at large. In a 1975 essay Judd writes, “good art cannot contradict what’s known at the time it’s made.”7 Engaging what is known at the time it is made helps to define a tradition of American art that, further, aims to make a contribution to what is known.8

II. Live Ideas

Judd was born on June 3, 1928, in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, a small town on the western edge of the state, and moved throughout the United States during his childhood.9

In the late 1940s he served in the Army in Korea; upon his return home, he began studies at William and Mary before transferring to Columbia University, where he earned an

6 John Dewey, Art and Experience (New York: Penguin, 1934/2005), 2. 7 Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, 222. 8 I must specify that the tradition or sense of American-ness sketched here, via Judd, is indicative of a white, male, post-colonial experience and is not the only American artistic tradition. 9 Roberta Smith, “Donald Judd,” New York Times.

4 undergraduate degree in philosophy. After graduating, like many New York artists, Judd took painting classes at the Art Students League. In the late 1950s he went back to

Columbia for graduate study in art history and worked with Meyer Schapiro.

Judd’s upbringing situates him among a dominant group of twentieth-century

Americans—white, middle-class, male, veteran—which helps to explain the definition of

“American” that he would later articulate. His language recalls that of foundational

American thinkers, namely pragmatists like Dewey and William James, both of whom

Judd studied at Columbia.10 Following Dewey and James, Judd, when it came to art, privileged personal experience of real objects in real space, not absolute claims or allusions within the work. “I believe in what I feel, know, and experience and I follow the interests inherent in myself,” he said in a 1983 lecture.11 Interest had been tied to Judd since “Specific Objects,” wherein he states, “[a] work needs only to be interesting.” His simple objects and pragmatic concept of art’s production and reception echoes a framework Dewey establishes in Art and Experience: “[i]n order to understand the esthetic [sic] in its ultimate and approved forms,” writes Dewey, “one must begin with it in the raw; in the events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man, arousing his interest and affording him enjoyment as he looks and listens.”12 Specific objects are raw, embracing Judd’s idea that “[m]ost works finally have one quality.”13

Judd’s graduate school writing, from 1958 and 1959, further demonstrates his pragmatist lineage. An essay on the abstract expressionist James Brooks—written for a class with Schapiro (himself a student of Dewey’s)—uses words like actual, immediacy,

10 James uses terms Judd later would, such as “particular scale.” (William James, “Conclusions on Varieties of Religious Experiences,” in Essays in Pragmatism (New York: Hafner, 1949), 115.) 11 Donald Judd, Donald Judd Writings (New York: David Zwirner, 2017), 350. 12 Dewey, Art and Experience, 3. 13 Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, 184.

5 and independence, key terms drawn from a pragmatist vocabulary that likewise show up in Judd’s later exhibition reviews. Writing on Brooks, Judd follows pragmatist methods to arrive at a view of how art can speak to the world around it through simple objecthood.

“Knowledge of an object, a substance, or the universe, or a psychological process, or an attitude,” he writes, “is a collection, a bundle of existing things which possess unity only in existence.”14 Judd’s stance summons William James’s “principle of pragmatism”: “[t]o attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare.”15 Judd’s notion that in real space,

“[a] work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be,” abides by a similar principle.

In his 1965 essay “New York Letter,” Judd praises several contemporary artists, including Larry Poons, who has “discarded the old intellectual basis of art, particularly the old compositional order, and developed ways to deal with live ideas and sense of order, relative order and chance.”16 Good artists of the 1960s are concerned with live ideas, argues Judd, with what is going on in their minds here and now. Live ideas are not rational—they do not come from preordained systems, but from a sense of relative order

(as in, with respect to the object itself) and chance. The small ovals in Poons’s Via Regia

(fig. 3) do not relate to one another in any allusive or illusive way—they simply cover the canvas. The painting’s “affinities, incidentally, are with the best American art and not with optical art,” writes Judd. Poons emphasizes the whole canvas, as did artists such as

Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhardt. In other writings Judd refers to

14 Judd, Donald Judd Writings, 47. 15 William James, “What Pragmatism Means,” in Essays in Pragmatism (New York: Hafner, 1949), 140. 16 Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, 174.

6 each of these painters as specifically American as well. They all present objects that are uniform, complete, able to be addressed in real time and space.

III. The Whole European Tradition

Judd’s review of American Survey sets American art against the European tradition. He specifically positions Blakelock and Inness in relation, but superior, to European art, and maintains this position three years later in a review of a “particularly good” 1962 exhibition by Blakelock at Lewison Gallery. Blakelock and his contemporaries “have qualities and elements which seem American,” writes Judd, “which at any rate are not

European, and which seem, although very changed, to have been continued to the present.”17 Judd often sets his own work in this continuation. In a 1964 interview with

Bruce Glaser, Judd and Frank Stella dismiss the idea that their work comes out of

European art. Judd states that he wants to do away with “all the structures, values, feelings of the whole European tradition.”18

When Glaser suggests that Stella’s work recalls European artists like Piet

Mondrian, Stella disagrees. “European geometric painters really strive for what I call relational painting,” he says, whereas “…we use symmetry in a different way. It’s nonrelational.” Judd adds, “My things are symmetrical because, as [Glaser] said, I wanted to get rid of any compositional effects, and the obvious way to do it is to be symmetrical.” To Judd, the visual logic and relationships that define a painting by

Mondrian suggest that it is “linked up with a philosophy—rationalism, rationalistic

17 Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, 58. 18 Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California, 1995), 149. Judd is close-minded; Robert Morris points out that a “Constructivist ideal of a non- imagistic sculpture that was independent of architecture” also comes from European artists such as Gabo, Pevsner, and Vantongerloo. (Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 1,” 3.)

7 philosophy,” like that of René Descartes. The Cartesian lineage also perturbs William

James, who writes, “Rationalism is only comfortable in the presence of abstractions.”19

Mondrian is abstract, whereas Judd’s Untitled (fig. 4) utilizes real space, with parts that are “unrelational,” as Judd insists. “If there’s nothing to relate,” asks Glaser, “then you can’t be rational about it because it’s just there?” “Yes,” Judd replies.

Being “just there” prompts live ideas. If “good art cannot contradict what’s known at the time it’s made,” in Judd’s view, European art makes that contradiction.

“[M]uch recent European art looks old,” he writes in a 1964 review of an exhibition by

German artist Horst-Egon Kalinowski, at Cordier-Ekstrom. Further, “[t]here seems to be a notion that art should look old and heavy… Profundity became identified with these sensations. They became a way of thinking about important and complex matters; these were weighty.”20 Kalinowski’s work, composed of dark wood and rusted metal, looks serious; for Judd, this is not an effective means of addressing weighty issues. Objects become powerful through direct experience, which is disrupted by rational composition.

The work of John Chamberlain, despite its heavy materials, looks light, new, and non- composed, implicitly offering an active route to engaging issues. The work is imbued with “openness and capacity for expansion and change,” writes Judd in a 1962 review.21

Judd concludes the Kalinowski passage, “American art, even in the nineteenth century, has made everything appear lighter than it is.” One of Judd’s most recognizable object motifs, his untitled “stack” pieces (fabricated numerous times from 1967 onwards), also belies material heaviness (fig. 5). Although made of metal they appear weightless, as if floating on a beam of light passing through panels of stainless steel and

19 James, “What Pragmatism Means,” 144. 20 Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, 144. 21 Ibid., 46.

8 Plexiglas. Although there is a vertical hierarchy of levels, all of the individual levels are identical—no part is highlighted. The composition is open, not rational; the stacks can be rearranged, augmented, reduced. Robert Morris connects the lack of rational formal relationships in Minimal work to its existence in the public sphere:

The better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision… One is more aware than before that he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object… Every internal relationship… reduces the public, external quality of the object and tends to eliminate the viewer to the degree that these details pull him into an intimate relation with the work and out of the space in which the objects exist.22 The heaviness that Judd sees in Kalinowski, as well as the relationships he and Stella see in Mondrian, prohibits an open, live, and public encounter with the object.

“Order in Judd’s work is more specific, contextual to placement,” writes Dan

Graham. “The work’s placement in terms of a ‘structure’ is only ‘local order,’ just an arrangement.’”23 Graham’s description of Judd’s non-rational organization as “local order” connects to Judd’s public attitude. Around the time he began making stacks, Judd began writing about and engaging in politics more. He disdained institutions and believed in local order. “The United States is still a hierarchical country, sort of a large oligarchy,” he writes in a 1968 statement, “though apparently not as hierarchical as Europe, which may be the difference between European and American art; my work and that of most artists is opposed to that hierarchy.”24 For Judd, European and American describe, more than geography, an object’s locality and its opposition to institutional hierarchies. How is his art American, as such?

22 Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” 15. 23 Dan Graham, Rock My Religion, ed. Brian Wallis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 38. 24 Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, 196.

9 IV. An Empirical and Pragmatic Outlook

Nineteenth-century art historian H.T. Tuckerman writes that the sculptor Horatio

Greenough, “[t]rue to his American principles… recognized no aristocracy but that of nature.”25 Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, American artists increasingly pictured the country’s natural landscape. By engaging with the ideas and objects that nature presents, artists abandoned the compositional and cultural hierarchies that drove European painting and set their work in the American ground instead.

In American Painting of the Nineteenth Century Barbara Novak outlines her version of American art’s continuity. “The roots of an enduring American vision were first put down with the mature paintings of John Singleton Copley (1738–1815), from about 1765 to 1774,” writes Novak. Copley’s work possesses an “equal emphasis of parts,” “over-all uniformity of painted surface,” and “marked individualism”— descriptions that mirror Judd’s writing on peers like Lee Bontecou.26 In a 1963 review

Judd writes, “The four obvious aspects of [Bontecou’s] reliefs—the broad scale, the total shape, the structure and the image—combine exponentially into an explicit quality and are the aspects of a single form.”27 In 1965, reviewing a subsequent Bontecou show, Judd states simply, “The black hole does not allude to a black hole; it is one” (fig. 6).28

Novak herself outlines continuities between Copley and Judd’s generation. “The quality of artistic anonymity,” she writes in a chapter on luminism, “the concern with the fact of the physical object, with its thingness and thereness, are continuous right up to the

25 Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (New York: James F. Carr, 1967), 275. 26 Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1, 3, 23. 27 Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, 65. Bontecou’s is among “the best American art.” 28 Ibid., 178.

10 bland surfaces of much art in the 1960s.”29 Her description summons Frank Stella’s famous phrase, from his and Judd’s interview with Glaser: “What you see is what you see.” In the interview Stella refers to “the image” in “newer American painting” as “the thing.” The thing, he adds, is “there.” 30 The thing being there defines the art. Novak has a similar understanding and, in her book’s epilogue, mentions Judd by name as an inheritor of the American tradition she has sketched.31

In Novak’s conception, American painting prides itself on the engagement of real space. Winslow Homer’s “figures respond to a gravitational pull similar to that of our own three-dimensional world,” writes Novak. She contrasts Homer with one of his

European contemporaries: “Monet’s figures are no longer grounded in our world,” she writes.32 Art that separates itself from the ground, figuratively but also literally, is more difficult for a viewer to access. American art prefers what is verifiable. Robert Morris writes, “That which has ambiguity built into it is not acceptable to an empirical and pragmatic outlook.”33 Indeed, in Copley’s Mrs. Joseph Mann, “the more specific and solid quality of the head also indicates a strong empiricism,” writes Novak, “which was to temper and qualify these abstract properties as he developed.”34 The focus on the thing grounds the composition, eliminating (or tempering) rationalism and abstraction and allowing objects to confront viewers as they are.

The natural landscape provided American artists with new things. Landscape painting rose to prominence in the early-nineteenth-century—history painting had been

29 Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, 76. 30 Battcock, Minimal Art, 158, 149. 31 Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, 237-238. 32 Ibid., 142. 33 Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 3,” 26. 34 Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, 3.

11 considered a nobler genre by European, and as a result early American, standards. Novak identifies Thomas Cole as the first American painter to “[transfer] the heroic aims of the history painters to the landscape category, where at last they could take firm root in

American soil.” Americans, Novak continues, were proud of their landscape—a landscape that recalled Rousseau’s “primeval paradise” better than Europe’s did. She quotes Cole, who writes, “All nature here is new to art, no Tivolis, Ternis, Mont Blancs,

Plinlimmons, hackneyed and worn by the daily pencils of hundreds; but primeval forests, virgin lakes and waterfalls.”35 The landscape was for Cole and his contemporaries an untapped subject. Judd likewise expresses in his writing how important it is for art to be, not primeval, but primitive and original. Good art does not look to the old, but to what is known at the time it is made—to what is “new to art.” In a December 1962 review of a

Niki de Saint-Phalle exhibition at Iolas, Judd outlines this dichotomy: “Whether or not

[de Saint-Phalle] is European, her work has a prevalent European failing… There is no structure, as there certainly is in [Robert] Rauschenberg’s work… The Europeans commonly mix some of their most novel devices with very naïve ideas of their past culture.”36 Altar by de Saint-Phalle attempts to replicate a church’s altar. It presents illusion and an unoriginal structure, whereas “Rauschenberg’s work is the model,” writes

Judd; “there are even mounted birds.” It is an original object, not a recreation thereof.

While Cole’s perception of the “primeval” landscape negates America’s pre- colonial culture, his type of art—and art in its American continuity—situates itself as the model. In a picture of a western New York landscape, Genessee Scenery (fig. 7), nature’s things are untouched and are presented on the same plane. There is no vanishing point, no

35 Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, 41. 36 Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, 61.

12 central figure. Instead, the contents depicted are viewed all at once. Tonalist painter

Albert Pinkham Ryder further emphasizes nature’s democracy. He is notable for his

“reduction of the picture to a few large unbroken shapes,” writes Novak.37 Lloyd

Goodrich, in a Ryder monograph, writes, “The American mind is generally thought of as practical, matter-of-fact and extroverted. Certainly these are conspicuous traits in our national character.”38 Ryder’s Gay Head (fig. 8) is matter-of-fact and resists hierarchy in its composition. There are several horizon lines, arranged almost like the stripes in an early Stella painting, Plum Island (Luncheon in the Grass) (fig. 9). In Ryder’s piece, the first row of hills, the houses, the shore, and the mountain each form such a line; the natural and manmade, foreground and background, are coextensive—just things.

This American approach extends to the modernist Charles Sheeler, whose work emphasizes technological aspects of the twentieth-century American landscape. His

American Landscape (fig. 10) juxtaposes organic and industrial subjects. There is a river, clear and reflective, and a factory, flat and geometric. There is no adornment or traditional painterly expression; everything is simple, austere, horizontal. In Charles

Sheeler, Artist in the American Tradition, Constance Rourke writes that despite foreign influence, “on the whole American art had shown a fair amount of continuity in handling the American subject.”39 Still, it is not just the subject that makes Sheeler’s art American, but also the work’s construction. “Certainly the American subject has not sufficed to create a strongly defined American art,” Rourke adds; “if this were true we would have had the substantial fiber of a tradition almost from the beginning… The determinant is

37 Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, 175. 38 Lloyd Goodrich, Albert P. Ryder (New York: G. Braziller, 1959), 11. 39 Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler, Artist in the American Tradition (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), 58.

13 form.”40 The American subject is diffuse—it spreads across the land. Sheeler paints new forms, with new (precise) form, and accommodates new subjects as they arise.41

V. Extraordinary Beauty

Judd’s objects are not landscape paintings. But does their new, minimal form allow them to engage nature and technology in a way that accommodates the contemporary landscape, which was likewise, in the 1960s, defined by accelerations in technology

(mass media, military technology) and commerce? Could they operate like landscape paintings? Richard Shiff implies they could when he refers to Judd’s pieces as

“panoramic.” Shiff’s description is practical: nearly all of Judd’s objects are wider than they are tall, like a landscape painting. The reliefs usually hang so that their top edge is about five feet off the ground, around eye level, recalling Inness’s practical perspective.

As a result, according to Shiff, discussing Judd’s Untitled (fig. 11), “[v]iewing the work entails moments of surprise (a pragmatic, empirical experience) but no mystery (a metaphysical element, outside real time and space).”42

But Untitled is just two feet wide—there may be no mystery simply because the piece can be viewed in full with one lateral step and some craning of the neck. Could the twenty-foot-wide Untitled (fig. 12) contain mystery? It is a horizontal white aluminum bar undergirded by separated, shorter purple bars, hanging on the wall. There are parts, like Inness’s houses and trees, but their uniform depths with respect to the wall and their structural connection to the whole ensure that no part stands out. In “Allusion and

40 Rourke, Charles Sheeler, 69. 41 Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, 226. Novak writes that American art “accommodate[s] itself to the new landscape.” 42 Richard Shiff, Donald Judd: Late Work (New York: PaceWildenstein, 2002), 11.

14 Illusion in Donald Judd,” published in Artforum in 1966, Rosalind Krauss ascribes qualities to Untitled that could apply to American landscape painting: she says Judd’s piece has “extraordinary beauty” and “[appears] luminous and relatively weightless.”43

Krauss’s description underlines her suspicion of Judd, who considers his work to be direct, without allusion or illusion. Because Untitled is so long, it is difficult to take in all at once. The shorter bars appear to hang from the long bar, but actually connect to the wall and support it. “A view raking alongside the façade of the sculpture, then, reveals one’s initial reading as being in some way an illusion,” Krauss writes.44 She identifies a slippage between Judd’s writing and objects that recalls Greenberg. In 1967’s

“Recentness of Sculpture,” Greenberg condemns Minimalism because “[t]here is hardly any aesthetic surprise in Minimal art, only a phenomenal one.”45 Greenberg and Krauss are not off base when noting the work’s phenomenal aspects. Phenomenology, cultivated in Europe but resonant with American pragmatism, was en vogue in the New York avant- garde. Krauss quotes phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose writings had recently been translated into English. Judd’s work, she writes, “can be sensed only in terms of its present coming into being as an object given ‘in the imperious unity, the presence, the insurpassable [sic] plenitude which is for us the definition of the real.’”46

Robert Morris understands real space through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as well; yet Judd does not refer to phenomenology as such. Judd is less concerned with surprise or coming into being as means of defining reality. For him, the object itself is real. Accordingly, he is less picky than Morris about what his objects might convey on a

43 Rosalind Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” Artforum, May 9, 1966, 24, 25. 44 Ibid., 25-26. 45 Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 254. 46 Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion,” 25.

15 formal level. A specific object, he writes, “can be any shape, regular or irregular, and can have any relation to the wall, floor, ceiling, room, rooms or exterior or none at all. Any material can be used, as is or painted.”47 Morris, on the other hand, requires that the object be simpler to allow for a purer phenomenological encounter, one defined by the object’s gestalt. He disavows color because “it is additive”; he is also against, for example, the relief, which limits “the number of possible views the wall imposes.”

Morris’s objects are gray and placed on the floor, or hung from the ceiling. “The qualities of scale, proportion, shape, mass are physical,” he writes; in his view, his objects possess only those qualities. Extra elements such as color “[emphasize] the optical,” like in painting, and “[subvert] the physical.”48 Many of Judd’s pieces feature warm colors like pink and cadmium red, a quality that opens his work to critical dissention.

Robert Smithson experiences illusion when viewing a Judd, but does not lose the feeling of physicality. Smithson is drawn to the visual effects of Judd’s Untitled (fig. 13), a rectangular prism composed of four pink Plexiglas panels (on top, bottom, and two sides) and two plates of aluminum (on either end). Wires connect the steel plates, improbably holding the piece in place. “It is impossible to tell what is hanging from what or what is supporting what,” writes Smithson. Because of the plays of light and tension across the radiant surfaces, “an uncanny materiality inherent in the surface engulfs the basic structure.”49 While Smithson, contra Judd, sees a type of illusion as engulfing the structure, he also writes, “[t]he more one tries to grasp the surface structure, the more baffling it becomes. The work seems to have no natural equivalent to anything physical,

47 Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, 184. 48 Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 1,” 5. 49 Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 7.

16 yet all it brings to mind is physicality.”50 Smithson accepts Judd’s proposal of thingness while allowing for Krauss’s illusion, extant in the materials—new, industrial materials often assembled with new, industrial processes indicative of their time.51

Judd’s objects from the 1960s onwards are not American landscape paintings.

Still, we can view a Judd much like we would an Inness or a Sheeler—absorbing the whole, relating the work’s perspective to our own. They all present an “American subject,” as it were, not through expressive composition but through practical engagement with familiar, contemporary material. Smithson refers to Judd’s pieces as

“artifices of fact, without any illusionistic representations,” a descriptor that could apply to Inness.52 Inness’s scenes are artificial, insofar as they are man-made, but they are artifices of fact, showing what is there—an orchard, a barn—what is known, at eye level.

VI. A Commitment to Democracy

I have referred to Judd’s interest in politics, and highlighted the importance of things, anti-hierarchical composition, and viewer engagement in American (specifically, landscape) art. When art engages what is known, and fosters a type of pragmatic experience that attunes viewers to what is in front of them, can it promote public habits?

“A commitment to democracy in politics is included in the synthesis that is very good art,” writes Judd in a 1984 essay.53 Many viewers have trouble seeing a commitment to democracy in Judd’s work. His stack pieces might comprise identical objects, arranged democratically, but they do not convey visible political motives. James

50 Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 6. 51 “John Chamberlain… suggested [Judd] go to the Harley Davidson Motorcycle Company and get some ‘Hi-Fi’ lacquer. Judd did this and ‘self’ sprayed some of his works with it.” (Ibid., 20.) 52 Ibid., 5. 53 Judd, Donald Judd Writings, 357.

17 Meyer writes, “Literalist experience is the experience of a ‘real’ object in a ‘real’ gallery, yet it offers no conclusions as to what this encounter means.” For Meyer, as for Judd, the

“failure to signify is a refusal of higher truths.”54 While Meyer understands the failure as a political stance—“a dialectical posture of negation and affirmation”—other critics see it as mere idealism. Greenberg describes Minimal work as an empty test to the limits of art.

“Minimal Art remains too much a feat of ideation,” he writes, “and not enough of anything else.”55 Michael Fried calls it “largely ideological.”56 Anna Chave, in a 1990 essay, goes further: “The blank face of Minimalism may come into focus as the face of capital, the face of authority, the face of the father,” she writes. The new materials that, for Judd, facilitate direct encounters, for Chave, “reproduc[e] some of the values most indelibly associated with the modern technocracy.”57 Because Judd’s work uses industrial materials, and because its production relied on an emergent class of galleries and collectors, it could be said to “emulate a capitalist industrial logic,” as Meyer notes.58

Judd saw his art as being “against much in the society”; yet while his writing in the 1970s and 1980s was increasingly critical of American politics and society, his art objects kept similar forms, indicating a potential dissonance.59 Chave argues that Judd’s writing is manipulative—“a largely successful effort at dictating the terms in which

[Minimalists’] work would be received.”60 Is his art idealistic? Or could it align with his politics? This is something Judd himself considered: “The artists of my age… have not

54 James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 187. 55 Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” 254. 56 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood (1967),” in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148 57 Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine, January 1990, 51, 49. 58 Meyer, Minimalism, 184. Meyer quotes a letter Carl Andre wrote to Sol LeWitt in 1970: “My art is that of the culture of my origins… 20th century North American capitalist culture.” 59 Judd, Donald Judd Writings, 217. 60 Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” 54.

18 written and talked enough, myself included,” he writes in a 1984 essay.61 Beginning around 1970 Judd may have questioned his own work’s power. In “The Artist and

Politics: A Symposium,” published in Artforum that year, he examines himself:

I’ve always thought that my work had political implications, had attitudes that would permit, limit, or prohibit some kinds of political behavior and some institutions. Also, I’ve thought that the situation was pretty bad and that my work was all I could do. My attitude of opposition and isolation… has slowly changed in regard to isolation in the last five years or so. In 1970, it appears that Judd needed to exercise his beliefs and that he was less sure than before of how to do it through art. Around this time, he turned to activism.

Judd’s life in New York at the turn of the 1970s was marked by civic engagement.

He wrote for the Newspaper (of Lower Manhattan Township), penning screeds against gentrification and development as well as informational texts about revenue sharing and protesting. As a community leader in SoHo, he fought against the Lower Manhattan

Expressway, a planned thoroughfare that was ultimately defeated. He became involved with the War Resisters League, Citizens for Local Democracy, and H.R. Shapiro’s political journal The Public Life. “The easiest way to change the United States, and that’s still very difficult, is for citizens to act as citizens and use representative government,” he states in “The Artist and Politics.” “If you don’t have local control, you don’t have anything.”62 Judd’s emphasis on representative government reflects his interest in figures like Thomas Jefferson and in the founding principles of the United States. His career spanned a time when the power of the American government and economy inflated, and when the dominant sense of “American” was often called into question. While the shiny

61 Judd, Donald Judd Writings, 386. 62 Ibid., 217-218.

19 surfaces of his objects summon, for some, “the face of authority,” Judd’s negative stance and civic responsibility align with an artistic continuity that privileges humans and objects over systems and institutions, helping to order societal disorder on local levels.

VII. Permanence

Judd sought local control in New York in the 1970s, but got fed up and exercised his manifest destiny, moving his practice to Marfa, where local control might be more attainable. “I chose the town Marfa (pop. 2,466) because it was the best looking and most practical,” he writes in a 1985 essay.63 West Texas appealed to Judd because of its low population (easier to organize) and its raw landscape. Rudi Fuchs writes that while in

New York in the 1960s, Judd “studied maps and remembered that the southwest of Texas was still open and unoccupied,” like the “primeval forests” that inspired Thomas Cole.64

Judd’s Marfa project, like much American land art of the 1970s, can be viewed as a prototypical colonial narrative as well as a method of institutional critique. Indeed,

Judd’s unchecked frontier spirit in many ways aligns with his anti-institutional attitudes on art and politics. “It’s hard to have a careful and intelligent discussion about the land when states are asinine and when states have a ‘style,’” he writes in a 1989 note, “when the government has a ‘style.’”65 His words echo the aversion to artistic “style” he had advanced in 1965—that specific objects do not “constitute a movement, school or style.”

63 Donald Judd, “Marfa, Texas,” in Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd, ed. Marianne Stockebrand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 278. 64 Rudi Fuchs, “The Ideal Museum: An Art Settlement in the Texas Desert,” in Donald Judd: Architektur, ed. Peter Noever (Münster: Westfälischer Kunstverein, 1989), 86. Judd had first passed through West Texas—namely the town of Van Horn—in 1946 while in the army. 65 Judd, Donald Judd Writings, 532.

20 Almost thirty years later, in a 1992 essay about the work of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, he concludes, “A category is an institution.”66

Throughout his life, no matter the urgency of his political musings, art and its institutions served as the fulcrum of Judd’s thought—the guiding force in his rhetoric and beliefs. Making, writing about, and installing art made him consider what is known. In a catalogue essay for a 1989 exhibition in Germany, Judd writes about the international economy through the lens of an artist. After pontificating on the exhibition’s expenses, he asks, “[c]an artists get this sort of money to do their work?” Then: “[t]his discussion leads directly to the main economic and political issues of this time, which is that largeness is thought to be better, thought to be the goal: enlightened, fair, efficient, cheaper, democratic. Large institutions are none of these.”67 Judd’s objections to American museums reflect his appreciation of local order and originality. “The vague purpose of the museum,” he writes in a 1991 essay, “is to immobilize art, to have culture without having any effect, to make art fake. The purpose of fake is to avoid disturbing the social hierarchy.”68 Judd’s essay addresses the institutional problems inherent to both museums and the government, the latter of which wages wars—and often funds museums. Like the

American government, the art that hangs on museum walls stratifies rather than engages.

It is separated from other art, its viewers, and its own original context.

Judd’s attitude toward institutions was consistent. In a 1963 article about Kansas

City’s art scene, he notes that the museums display centuries-old Chinese and European art, distracting from the contemporary art made locally. “Kansas City and all American

66 Judd, Donald Judd Writings, 795. Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s piece in Marfa is marked by Americana: it is a large horseshoe entitled Monument to the Last Horse. 67 Ibid., 560-561. 68 Donald Judd, “Nie wieder Krieg (Never Again War),” in Donald Judd: Architektur, ed. Peter Noever (Münster: Westfälischer Kunstverein, 1989), 18.

21 cities need some conspicuous art, buildings and sculpture, reliefs and paintings,” Judd writes.69 In a 1987 essay, he notes, “[t]he installation of my work and of others, is contemporary with its creation. The work is not disembodied spatially, socially, temporally, as in most museums. The space surrounding my work is crucial to it.” How should art be installed? In Judd’s view: “well done and permanent.”70

According to head of the Chinati Foundation Marianne Stockebrand,

“‘[p]ermanence’ is a key term for Judd.”71 Judd’s interest in permanence typifies his

American characteristics, aligning him with, for example, Walt Whitman. Describing how we “see our land, America, her literature, esthetics, &c.,” Whitman writes that “she” will “become a full-form’d world… the main thing being the average, the bodily, the concrete, the democratic, the popular, on which all the superstructures of the future are to permanently rest.”72 Judd’s work is just that—a substructure that collects elements of the

United States’ social, physical, and artistic landscapes, but is materially secure, concrete.

Michael Fried charges Minimalist objects with “endlessness,” a quality summoned, in part, by their “repetition of identical units.” He prefers art that is present and instantaneous, traits that he connects to a quote by Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards: “it is certain with me that the world exists anew every moment.”73 Yet the endlessness Fried decries—that an encounter with a Minimalist object continues endlessly—is, for Judd, precisely a bridge to Whitman’s future.

69 Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, 105. 70 Donald Judd, “In Defense of My Work,” in Complete Writings 1975-1986 (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 1987), 9. 71 Marianne Stockebrand, Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 13. 72 Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” in The Portable Walt Whitman, ed. Michael Warner (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), 62. 73 Fried, Art and Objecthood, 166. 148. Edwards, a pre-Revolutionary American, signals the discord between Fried and Judd, whose American tradition is imbued with a Revolutionary spirit.

22 The Marfa project is such a bridge as well. It comprises several buildings and objects scattered in and around the town, centered on a former army base, Fort D.A.

Russell. The base covers a flat section of the desert, with the Chinati Mountains visible in the distance. Settled into the landscape on a “straight line of definite longitude if possible,” echoing the mountains, are Judd’s 15 Untitled Works in Concrete (fig. 14).

Each work stands sixty meters from the next and comprises multiple large concrete prisms, arranged in different configurations. The individual prisms are identical within each work but, from one to the next, vary slightly in terms of proportion and in which faces of the prisms are open. They bear resemblance to Judd’s earlier objects because of their rectilinear forms, although their size—each taller than a human, altogether extending for roughly a kilometer—and use of concrete set them apart.

Above all, though, 15 Untitled Works’s specific interaction with the natural landscape distinguishes it. The objects are set in the ground, coextensive with nature, with the “primeval” landscape, its mountains and soil. Dewey writes, “Piety to the past is not for its own sake nor for the sake of the past, but for the sake of a present so secure and enriched that it will create a yet better future.”74 Judd sought to make his present secure—formally, materially, ideologically—as it created possibilities for the future.

“Perhaps the point at which a piece of mine becomes good,” he wrote in 1990, “is when it opens toward many possibilities.”7515 Untitled Works is solid, present, lining the frontier; when we cross the line we step further from the museums, central government, and clustered landscape of the east coast, open to new possibilities. We consider everything

74 John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Holt, 1922), 23. Elsewhere: “Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reënforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is.” (Dewey, Art and Experience, 17.) 75 Judd, Donald Judd Writings, 617.

23 around us: “the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government,” to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson.76 At Fort D.A. Russell, we attain clearness in our thoughts of Judd’s objects, and sense the far-reaching freedom that he articulated, and that exists—promised, if often not delivered—in an American grain.

76 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 150.

24

fig. 1: Ralph Blakelock, Moonlight, ca.

1885-1889. Oil on canvas. 27 1/16 x 32 in.. fig. 4: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1970. Copper. 40 x 49¾ in. Note: This object was fabricated in 1970 but shares the form of the 1965 piece included in the Glaser interview.

fig. 2: George Inness, Apple Orchard, 1892. Oil on canvas. Dimensions unknown.

fig. 3: Larry Poons, Via Regia, 1964. Acrylic and graphite on canvas. 72 x 144 in. fig. 5: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968. Stainless steel and plexiglas. 10 levels, each 6 x 27 x 24 in.

fig. 8: Albert Pinkham Ryder, Gay Head, undated (1880s). Oil on canvas. 7½ x 12½ in.

fig. 6: Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1961. Welded steel, canvas, black fabric, rawhide, copper wire, and soot. 80¼ x 89 x 34¾ in.

fig. 9: Frank Stella, Plum Island (Luncheon in the Park), 1958. Oil on canvas. 73¼ x 85 in.

fig. 7: Thomas Cole, Genessee Scenery, 1847. Oil on canvas. 51½ x 39¼ in.

fig. 10: Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930. Oil on canvas. 24 x 31 in.

fig. 11: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1964. Red lacquer on wood. 5 x 25½ x 8½ in.

fig. 13: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1963. Stainless steel and plexiglas. 20 x 48 x 34 in.

fig. 12: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965. Painted aluminum and anodized aluminum. 8¼ x 253 x 8⅛ in.

fig. 14: Donald Judd, 15 Untitled Works in Concrete, 1980-1984. Concrete.