150 FIG.4.1 Installation view, Don Judd, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 27 FebruarY-24 March 1968 Curator, William C. Agee

THE OPENING OF OONALD JUDD'S solo exhibition at catalogue raisonn. designation Untitled rOSS 79] [fig. 4.3]), the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1968 sealed his "As an object, the box was very much there ... Its. whole reputation as a central figure in contemporary art. William purpose seemed to be the declaration of some blunt quid­ C. Agee, the curator, had packed Judd's sheet-metal sculp­ dityand nothing more."'ln the years since, Judd's works tures fairly tightly into what at least one critic described as have likewise appeared "blunt, unambiguous," "completely

a warehouselike installation,and the tidy right angles and present," "just existing," and "simply 'there.' "5 Each sculp­ repetitive modularity of the works made a neat match to ture has asserted itself as· "simply another thing in the world the stone tiles and concrete ceUing coffers of the museum's of things."'ln the 1967 essay "Art andObjecthood," which two-year-old Marcel Breuer building (fig. 4.1).' Sitting remains the single most influential account of Minimalism, brightly in the middle of the space, Untitled (OSS 128) (fig. Michael Fried characterized Judd's work (together with that 4.2) exemplified the overall appearance of the exhibition: of Robert Morris and others) as a "literalist art" that insisted a shiny rectangle of amber Plexiglas with a thin and hollow on its own occupation of ordinary space and time? By the stainless.-steel core. Critics conSidering the works were time of the Whitney exhibition, literafist characterizations undecided about their meanings, and their importance. of Judd's work predominated, with one clause becoming Some dismissed the show as empty novelty ("He is about as paradigmatic. Glueck's review appeared under the title "A minimal as can be .... Do you suppose that next year, with Box Is a Box Is a Box," while the anonymous critic at Time the skirts, art will go midi?"), while others lauded it as newly wrote, "For Judd, a box is a box is a box, and nothing more." canonical ("The most important event of the month ... A year later, Rose concluded, "[Thelprincipal statement [of a tremendous success").2 Judd's early Minimalist works] appeared to be the tautology Although the responses plainly lacked any certainty that a box is a box is a box."B over the critical terms in play CArtnews titled their review If we find echoes here of Stuart Preston's declaration, "Judd the Obscure")' a cluster of related phrases appeared in a review of Jasper Joh ns, that "a flashlight is a flashlight again and again. James R. Mellow, writing for the New York is a flashlight," then we should hear an assonance, too, be­ Times; saw Judd's.sculptures as "a matter of brilliant factual­ tween Mellow's understanding of Judd's floor box and John ity," while Jane Harrison Cone emphasized the sculptures' Ashbery's view of White Flag: "It has tremendous-though "inescapable factuality," and Grace Glueck called the works silent-impact. It is there, though for what purpose it would "actual, specific facts- in themselves."3Indeed, critics had be hard to say.'" Despite these critical parallels, the most already been tripping over the factual quality of Judd's work cursory glance at Judd's work makes it clear that his brand for a couple of years. In 1965, Barbara Rose had claimed of literalism, especially after the Minimalist turn of 1964-65, "concreteness and substantial presence" as the "prime is quite different from those of the other artists treated in quality" of Judd's sculpture. In 1966, Lucy Lippard had added this book. Judd's Minimalist sculpture has none of Johns's that "[Judd's] metal and plastic boxes are among the most heft or palpability, none of Rauschenberg's discordance, factual and radically assertive works today," while Mel- none of Oldenburg'S mad mark-making. Instead, it is thin, low had written of an untitled floor box (now known by its serial, often shiny; the artist directly declared that he "didn't 1 I I I I I I I I I

I!

I I FIG. 4.2 i Donald Judd Untitled (DSS 728), 1968 Stainless steel and Plexiglas, overall 33 x 68 x 48 in. (83·8 x 172.7 x 121.9 em), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchase, with fu'nds from the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation, Inc. FIG.4.3 Donald Judd Untitled (DSS 79), 1966 Aluminum, 40 x 72 X 51 in. (101.6 x 182.9 x 129.5 cm) Collection of Judd foundation

FIG. 4.4 Donald Judd Untitled (D5555), 1964 Brass and galvanized iron with blue lacquer,

40 '12 X 84 x 6 3/4 in . .(102.9 x 2134 x '7.2 cm) National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Purchased 1974 A LOFT WITHOUT LABOR: JUDD 153

want to make just lumps."10 If we wish to unpack what the explanation." It also seems to me a quality that allows the critics might have meant in diagnosing a factuality in Judd's sculptures to speak with a unique fullness to the changes sculpture, we will have to consider the specifics of the case. facing New York at the time, and especially (far more than For one thing, the literalist reception of Judd's work the other artists we have considered) to the rapid transfor­

was complicated from the beginning by ~mother, 'Competing mation'of the city's economy-its shift away from manufac­ strain in the criticism. Take for example Harold Rosenberg's turing and toward the provision of financial S€rvices. 1967 claim that many Minimalist sculptures, even while "affirm(ing] the independent existence of the art object as To be sure, Judd's own statements underscor:ed his antipa­ meaningful in itself' also aimed to "disguise themselves as thy toward representation. Art historians have leaned es­ I ordinary objectsLJ ... to pass as machine or building parts, pecially heavily on Judd's essay "Specific Objects" {"Three as those of two or three years earlier passed as billboards or dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of comic strips."l1 In Rosenberg's view, Minimalism eschewed illusionismLl ... one of the salient and most objectionable reference and quoted the built environment at the same -relics of European art") and on his radio interview with time. Other critics betrayed a similar ambivalence. Despite Bruce Glaser and Lucy Lippard {"I'm using actual space")." its claim that "for Judd a box is a box is a box," Time pro­ As early as 1963, Judd had emphasized the importance of posed that viewers might ask, "What is a box ... if not "actual materials, actual color, and actual space," and he a coffin, a house, a treasure chest?"12 told a New York symposium audience in 1966, "I'd like work Rosalind Krauss pursued architettural references in a that didn't allude to other things and was a specific thing 1966 essay titled "Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd," see­ in itself."17 ing similarities between Untitled (DSS 55) (fig. 4.4) and "the For Judd, the primary problem with pictorial represen­ colonnades of classical architecture or , , , the supporting tation was that it inevitably imposed a fallacious human members of any modular structure," The next year, Clement order on things, rather than simply delivering fact. "Earlier Greenberg, attacking Minimalism, suggested that the move­ painting," Judd said to Glaser and Lippard, "was saying that ment had been infiltrated by the "good design" of recent there's more order in the scheme of things than we admit home and office furniture." Although the art-historical now, like Poussin saying order underlies nature." That is, pic­ mainstream now largely treats Judd's sculpture as intrac­ torial representation (especially "illusionism") was "linked tably literalist about its own space and materials, several up with" ways of thinking that Judd characterized variously recent essays, too, have found references to the everyday. as "rationalism," "humanism," "anthropomorphism," or "the built environment, "echoes of Plexiglas jukebox windows, philosophy of,a man-centered universe." These views of the car parts, cutlery, and shiny metal turnstiles',"14 world,·repiete with implicit organization, were "pretty much It seems to me that this Janus-faced quality of Judd's discredited now" or "wrong and not-credible."18 sculptures-their being at once literalist and bound up, 11 seems that Judd, trained as a painter, had finally as one writer has put it, in lithe spaces and surfaces of concluded that none of the modernist efforts to perfect rep­ the modern city"-is a strange quality, one needing resentation couM save it from its fundamental fraudufence, 154 FIG. 4.5 Donald Judd Untitled (DSS 32), 1962 light cadmium red oil on wood and Masonite black enamel on Masonite and wood with asphalt pipe, 1 44 /4 x 40 3/8 X13 3/4 in. (112.4 x 10204 x 34.9 em) Collection of Judd Foundation

its inevitable organization, systematization, or abstraction you live here and you are involved in your sense of what's of the world. On the occasion of the Whitney exhibition, around yoU."21 Judd spoke to Lippard about his early frustration with Seeing Judd's work fully requires that we manage to drawing from life. His femarks make dear that his eventual -keep always in view both its literalism and its engagement rejection of optical representation was c;tlso a denial of with the built environment. What might it have meant for idealist notions of the material world: Judd to refuse representation even as he worked with the architectural vocabulary of his city? These two claims made You know, you can't sit and draw something out there as if for Judd's sculpture, both by his critics and by the artist somehow you're putting it down on paper. Which was a very himself, may not be mutually r.econcilable. Listening to their live, hard problem one time. And J used to go down and try to awkward jostling, side by side, however, might allow us to draw things off the dock at 27th Street; drawing, say, the limb see what was at issue in Judd's resolutely spartan project as of a tree on a piece of paper as if there's something in the tree that you're putting down on the piece of paper. And it became an artist. Specifically, such a view may allow us to recognize pretty obvious after a while that the thing was only a tree and that Judd's work identified an ascendant idealism in itsdty, that the gap between the tree and what I had on the paper and that it responded with an oddly qualified, materialist was just a lotof·baloney.... 1t was really pretty horrible. I mean alternative. To learn what we can from Judd's art, let us I was very bothered by it. But, see, once you quit believing now turn to the two pivotal moments of his.early career: that you can see something in a tree and get it down, that it's , the years 1962-63, in which the artist picked up wood and really in the tree, then that's it.19 hardware to make his first sculptural constructions, and the years 1964-66, in which he turned to sheet metal, tven after rejecting the "baloney" of representation {and helping to develop the style that would come to be known of its faith in capturing essences), Judd, like his critics, .as Minimalism. clearly recognized that his sculpture did make reference to its world. In 1962 he wrote, "All good art has a certain Useless Objects: 1962-63 amount of social content."20 Judd claimed for his own work Donald Judd had been painting in New York since 1949. a particular relationship to the .contemporary built environ­ When he did make his first sculptural construction, in 1962, ment. Talking with Bruce Hooten in 1965, he compared his it was a decidedly strange thing." Untitfed (DSS 32) (fig. 4.5) own work to Edward Hopper's, which he said had been stands not quite four feet tall, an open assemblage made influenced by the look of the United States in the 1930s: ',," from the scraps -of a .discarded warehouse pallet, a section think some of the things I deal with, Hopper probably has of asphalt pipe, and a bowed sheet of Masonite pressboard. dealt with also, since it's somewhat the same environment Properly speaking, the construction has neither front nor and I have pretty strong reactions to what this country 1001

··1 I .,l

I! ; I I THE DISAPPEARANCE OF OBJECTS '1 ! I I .; ! ! the boards to their frame, so they contribute, together with that Judd's works "resemble storage units of an unidentifi­ I the texture of the asphalt pipe, to a feeling of casual rough­ able kind."" ness. Although suggestive of cheap industrial infrastruc­ The planks Judd used in DSS 32 (see fig. 4.5) were, I tur.e, this useless object persistently refuses any famlHar as the artist well knew, of a rather specific origin. Roberta I identity or purpose. It speaks vaguely and pointlessly in the Smith noted in 1975 that these were "materials found on HIe I language of small-scale manufacturing, where forklifts and street," and we can see indentations in the wood suggest­ ~ large packages meet the labor of hand tools and bent backs. ing they were once baled with metal straps.25 (In assem­ 2 Many of Judd's early constructions similarly dr.ew ma­ bling the boards for the work, Judd turned the boltom one terials from an ad hoc realm of industry and construction. around, so that the notches, lined up in the top two boards, The artist included a lath for wall plastering in Untitled (DSS appear off-register there.) While discussing the rough look 36) (fig. 4.6), a metal pipe and wooden planks in Untitled of the piece in a 1971 interview, Judd explained that it was (DSS 33) (fig. 4.7), and a wire-reinforced window in Untitled "made out of printing material skids, salvaged wood."26 (DSS 14) (fig. 4.8)." The paintinglike construction now It would have been easy, in 1962, for Judd to pick up the called Untitied{DSS 34) (fig. 4.9) works only slightly more leftover industrial pallet on his own block. He was living at - obliquely. Above and below this work's central surface-a 53 East Nineteenth Street, in a modest nineteenth-c<>ntury plywood board, mechanically striated and painted red­ brick loft building with a corner doorway and a single cast­ Judd attached an odd concave frame of galvanized sheet iron column (fig-4.12). Judd seems to have had the top floor, iron. If we have any doubts about this frame's relationship to for $100 a month; the lease stipulated that it was to be used the sheet-metal cornices of New York's nineteenth-century only as a studio. 27 Across Nineteenth Street stood a grander manufacturing buildings, a period drawing dispels them (fig. structure, the American lithographic Building, which in 4.10). The artist could even have copied the frames sketched 1962 listed no fewer than fifty-seven commercial occupants,

at lower right from the roof of his own future home, the 1870 mostly in printing, typography, lithography, dir~ct mail, label industrial loft building at 101 Spring Street (fig. 4.11). finishing, and binding." Judd's own building had been the When Judd showed some of his early constructions at home of small apparel firms; in '955, Hughes and Thomas the Green Gallery in the winter of 1963-64, several critics, as Clothing, Mrs. E. Falta (a manufacturer or merchant of if unconsciously struck by an industrial quality, dwelled on - trousers), and Vincent Remini (a tailor) all had quarters their conspicuous lack of utility. Brian O'Doherty, writing for there. Other buildings nearby had recently housed the Loyal the New York Times, described the works as "red wooden­ Shirt Company, Hudson Clothes, and A. S. Greenberg & Son shelved constructions with occasional grills, washboards Woolens and Worsteds.29 with curved aluminum-covered ends, pipes running hither By 1962, however, manufacturing of all kinds in Man­ and thither." Barbara Rose, reviewing the show for Art Inter­ hattan was in rapid decline. In '947, it seems, 90 percent national, mmmented, "At first, Donald Judd's simple wood of the area's manufacturing had taken place in Manhattan; constructions look more like useless objects than 1ike sculp­ fifteen years later, this proportion had dropped to no more ture," and Sidney Tillim, in his review .for Arts, concluded than 70 or 75 percen!.'o In just the six years after 1958, FIG. 4.6 (below) 157 Dona[d Judd Untitled (DSS 36), 1963, reconstructed 1975 light cadmium red oil on wood with metal lath, 72 x 104 X49 in. (182.9 X264.2 X124.5 cm) National Gallery of-Canada, Ottawa

FIG. 4.7 (above right) Donald Judd Untitled (055 33), 1962 light cadmium red oil on wood with black enameled metal pipe,

48 x 33YS x 213/4 in. (121.9 x 84.1 X 55.2 cm) Kunstmuseum Basel

FIG. 4.8 Donald Judd Untitled (055 14), 1961 Maroon enamel on recto and light cadrryium red oil on verso of wire-.reinfor.ced glass, 18 x 31 in. (45.7 x 78.7.em) Collection of Judd foundation FIG. 4.9 (above) FIG. 4.10 (left) Donald Judd Donald Judd Untitled (D5534), 1962 sketch, book 1, no. 38, 1963 Ughkadmium red oil on Pencil and ink on paper, striated plywood, black oil 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm) on wood with galvaniz€d Collection of Judd Foundation iron and aluminum, 76x96'/4x12in. (193 x 244.5 x 30cm) Kunstmuseum Basel I I I

!I j, . ·z i i I ,I I i i I r ; ~ i I I

FIG. 4.11 FIG. 4.12

Judd's·home after 1969: 101 Sprjng~Street Judd's home from 1959 or 1960 to 1969: Nicholas Whyte, architect, 1870 53 "East Nineteenth Street Photograph-c. 1940. NYC Municipal Archives Photograph c. 1940. NYC Municipal Archives

Manhattan lost 66,000 manufacturing jobs, 12.25 percent Simpson characterized the change along the following of its total. (The years around 1960 dramatically represent­ terms, which one could extrapo1ate to.charaderize the ed a longer trend. The 1,'22,000 manufacturing jobs in all of 'Situation in Manhattan as a whole: New York City in 1947 had by 1976 dwindled to 543,000.)

Fully six hundred Manhattan loft buildings were demolished Large, low plants that could take full advantage of mechani~ in the years 1959-62, representing nine million square cal material~hand!ing required tracts of land available only-on the outer rings of metropolitan regions. The most competitive feet of manufacturing space, or 5 percent of the borough's plants were very iarge, one~story buildings that could incorpo~ total.31 The need for larger .continuous floor spaces to rate the new continuous material flow systems. Mechanization, ac-commodate higher scales of automation, together with the key to the competitive advantage, had raised the average the incentive of easy aCG€SS to new highways and ports, floor area per employee from 1,140 square feet in 1922 to 4,550 was driving manufacturers to the suburbs. In an account square feet in 1945. Thebui[dings in the South Houston District ofSoHo-where Judd would move in 1969-<:harles R. had become too small. Their materia! flow lines were strangled 160 THE DISAPPEARANCE OF OBJECTS

at elevator points and by the complete absence of off-street it had housed seventy-one firms just seven years earlier. truck docks. While suburban plants were accommodating Of the three clothing firms in Judd's own building in '955, block-long continuous-bake ovens and huge rotary presses, only Hughes & Thomas, by then listed as a supplier of firms in the South Houston District were finding that even uniforms, survived to thetimeof DSS 32" (The number of forklift trucks were too large for use in thirty-foot-wide struc­ tures and eight-by-eight elevators. The district came to depend apparel jobs in metropolitan New York, having-climbed to upon low-profit firms, which could survive with labor-intensive 228,900 in 1950, dropped by one-fifth over the next decade, procedures. 32 to 180,400.35 ) It was this deindustrialization that had made Judd's loft available to an artist on the cheap. Even as this decline of urban industry was ravaging the city, Upstairs, in that loft, the artist's proto-Minimalist

Manhattan was alr-eady transforming itself to serve the 50- works appeared to sit just on the edge of this dying world called FIRE industries-finance, insurance, and r.eal.estate. of industry. In July 1964, Judd was stacking parts of several In each year between 1956 and 1965, developers completed of his works-including those since given the DSS numbers over three million square feet of new office space in -the 36,38,42,43, and 50-alongside opericardboardcartons, city's central borough.33 discarded paper, and scrap wood (fig. 4.13). He h"d just On East Nineteenth Street, these changes were taking taken delivery of a new sculpture from a neighborhood their .effect. Although the printing building across from metalworking shop: Untitled (DSS SO), an eight-foot loop of Judd's still claimed fifty-seven tenants when he lived there, sheet iron. Presaging a major shift in Judd's oeuvr.e to which

FIG. 4.13 Judd's studio at 53 'East Nineteenth Str.eet, July 1964 I ! A LOFT WITHOUT LABOR: JUDD ! I I I I ! ~ % I we shall return, the work looked radically out of place: all .probably built up its slightly soiled speckles of wax and sand ~ I thin, bright regularity in a world of piled-up planks. Judd had by irregularly pinching his thumb to his for"finger in {he wet I, deared a little space so he could paint the new piece, but he surface. In sections, as at lower left, he worked with near­ ! nad not had room to relocate an outmoded machine-per­ total disr"gard to patt"rn, while in other plac"s, as at the ~ ,I haps a foot-operated printing press-that he left encircled top, he arranged the marks 'Carefully into lines and rows. t B by the loop. In our photograph of the scene, taken by the Earlier in his oeuvre, too, Judd had animated these critic f.lten H. Johnson, we can just make out its heavy iron ·tensions between gummy surface and organizing pattern. workings and stained wooden top. In another work that he kept all'his life, Untitled (DSS 21) I i {fig. 4.15), the artist marked out a neat setof stripes that Untitled (DSS 29) (fig. 4.14) had been Judd's first workto he never finished painting; it seems he wished to-stop short take the shape of a box. It was central enough:to the art­ of cleanly syst"matizing it. Untitled (DSS 27) (fig. 4.16), ist's thinking about his own practice that he kept it all his while finished, likewise proffers an inexact-skein of gobs, life, installing it over his bed at 101 Spring Street, where it against which a pattern of shallow stripes reads as counter­ still hangs. Despite the robust claim to object status made point. At first, it is difficult to tell, even when examining this by its centrally placed asphalt pipe and its Double-wide work in person, how jts stripes were made: their ·edges are frame of two-by-fours, the work is fundamentally a paint­ just deep enough to make them appear neither superficially ing. The main vertical surface is a canvas, crudely stapled applied to the work nor f

i he painted black, contrasting them sharply with the bright facades lined with delicate grids-sprang up meanwhile, ! red canvas.36 seeming almost to float above the city's streets. As both The resulting object pushes and pulls between its own aspects of this architectural transition proceeded, printing awkward particularity and something of a systematic order. pallets, iron pipes, and sheet-metal cornices cropped up The thick planks appear graceless while functioning as an as loose things, the rejects of an ever-more-.ethereal urban organizing edge; the pipe-registers as a soiled street object environment. It was in this uncertain terrain that Judd's even while providing a tidy focus for the composition. Judd's sculpture operated, picking up these objects and half­ -two-minded ness about the work appears especially evident integrating them into incomplete patterns. in his unusual appropriation of the modern~st grid. The artist FIG. 4.14 Donald Judd Untitled (055 29), 1962 Light cadmium red oil. wax, and sand on canvas and wood, black enamel on wooJ 'Nilh d~phall pipe,

50'/2 X 45 x 9 5/8 in. (128.3 x 114-3 X)4 4 em) Collection of Judd Foundation FIG. 4.15 (top) Donald Judd Untitled (DSS 21), 1961 Oil and sand on canvas, 46 '/8 x 50 in. {117.1 x 127-cm) Collection of Judd Foundation

FIG. 4.16 (bottom) Donald Judd Untitled (DSS 27), 1962 Oil and wax on canvas,

69 x 101 3/4 (175.3 x 2S8A cm) Collection of Judd Foundation

I I 164 FIG.4.17 FIG. 4.18 Illustration from "Designs Photograph from "Mall on for New Skyscraper Show Park Ave. South Advances," Zoning Impact," New York Times, New York Times, 16 March 1962 17 September 1961. General Research Division, The New York Public library, Astor, lenox and Tilden Foundations

The'Citywide rezoning of 1961 further hastened New York's transformation, explicitly organizing and aggregating the uses of the.city. Adopted 15 December 1960, to go into effect a year later, the new law replaced the famous zoning law of 1916-the nation's first-which had since become subject to thousands of picayune amendments. The sweep­ ing new regulation had three chief goals: to bring more light into architectural planning, to spur the development of more parking (at least outside the densest parts of the city), and to increase separation of uses-clearly designating differ­ ent areas for residential, commercial, and manufacturing purposes. Architecturally, the law's chief impact was to allow tall buildings with no setbacks, a provision that amounted {a a semiofficial endorsement of the International Style tower. Just before the ordinance went into effect, the New York Times ran a pair of artides comparing the architectural styles (both residential and commercial) encouraged by the old and new codes (fig. 4.17). In one, a journalist offered this assessment, now comical for its understatement: the new planning designation reshaped this whole stretch of "The design of the new building indicates the shape that the avenue, from an area primarily of light manufacturing to may well become predominant among new Manhattan one exclusively for 'Commercial use.39 In the following year, office buildings."37 as the artist assembled DSS 27, 29, and 32, the upgrading The new code identified some areas of the city for -continued: it was in 1962 that Park Avenue South was torn intensive redevelopment, and Judd's building at Nineteenth up beneath Judd's windows,to make room for its planted Street and Fourth Avenue lay squarely in a zone earmarked median (fig. 4.1S).40 for dramatic upgrading. Back in the spring of 1959, the As the city was systematizing unruly parts of lower city had renamed the section of fourth Avenue between Manhattan, Judd himself was deploying a language of Seventeenth and Thirty-second Streets, officially dubbing stripes and grids, gingerly half-organizing the rough it Park Avenue South. The change was intended to express surfaces of his works. In his paintings 011961 and 1962, the a cost·lier charact.er for the neighborhood as its industry artist constantly -rearticutat.ed, this tense dialectic between declined. Office rentals in fact picked up there even before random surface particularities and abstract linear order. As the 1961 rezoning, while plans were laid to prohibit certain he began to work in sculptural reliefs, Judd brought these kinds of storefronts and overhangingsigns. 38 When it came, tensions to bear"Ofl the forms of the city, focusing for a time Mall on Park Ave. South , I i

-I ture, the subterranean work of improvised fix-it jobs. All of I this untidiness in the work hangs just beneath the imagined ,~ supremacy of a system of pipes and the governance of a i i universal and infinitely.expandable grid. Speaking the terms of organized expedience, DSS 29 is jusU.mgainly enough to I, distinguish itself-to favor, in the.end, the haphazardness i of human bodily encounter. The work wishfully reimagines the independence, declared from within a network, of the unique and palpable thing." I In this respect, DSS 29 begs comparison to a slightly earlier Jasper Johns sculpture with which it has a kind I of formal assonance: Untitled of 1960-61 (see fig. 2-36). .Both works juxtapose fragments of hardware with grids­ grids that, in both cases, are slightly clotted and irregular. Each bit of hardware appears discrete and thinglike: Judd's I pipe is removed from the city sewer, Johns's lightbulb has been cut free from its network of wires. The two works, it seems to me, present cases of what Judd would 'Come to call "specific objects": each has taken a piece of a syst€m, Workmen at Eighteenth Street dig foundations isolated it, and delivered it back to us in a state of anti­ : ter mall that will run the length of Park AVenue instrumentalobjecthood. As the old city disappeared around him, how.ever, Judd's mat-erializations became increasinglYi'"iven with con­ on the fading materiality of the urban environment, the tradiction, displaying an ascendant abstract organization. ungainliness of iron, asphalt, and discarded two-by-fours. In Untitled (DSS 31) (fig. 4.19), for example, Judd redeployed In that first box, DSS 29, Judd se€ms to have wanted his thick surface of sand -and paint on Masonite, but this to make an object that would hang free, if just bardy, from time he centered the splotches around a tidy copper disk integration into a productive system. ·Extrapolating from his and had them snap obediently to the columns and rows earlier interests as a painter, the assemblage is awkwardly of their grid.42 Slightly later, he abandoned painterliness cobbled together, built coarsely around blotches of sticky altogether, drilling holes at the vertices of a grid he had sand, wood grain, and the granules -of an asphalt -pipe. The marked out on Untitled (DSS 43) {fig. 4.20); the <"suiting crudeness of its materials suggests both a fading period in sculptur-e looks almost like a platen for a syst.em-of telecom­

urban history {one of wood and asphalt, rather than glass munications wires. The labor imagined by this work is 110t and steel) and also the hidden materiality of city infrastruc- the manual tinkering actually undertaxen to make it, but FIG. 4.19 FIG. 4.20 Donald Judd Donald Judd Untitled (OSS 31),1962 Untitled (OS5 43), 1962 Oil on Uquitex and sand on Masonite with copper, Black enamel on aluminum, raw sienna 48 x 48 in. (122 x 122 cm) enamel and galvanized iron on wood,

'Collection of Judd Foundation 52 x 42 '/8 X 5 7/8 in. (132 x 107 x 15 cm) Private collection

rather that of disembodied mass production. Judd told an interviewer that, whilehe had to drill "thousands of holes all over" the sheet of galvanized iron althe center of DSS 43,he would have prefeued to have it stamped out systematically, "[alll at once."43 moded forms, and by 1965 he had developed a new kind of Judd's earliest sculptur"s, perched on the edg" be­ sculpture-one that would articulate a rather different and .tween his neighborhood's obsolescent manufacturing and more complicated understanding of his.changing world . the city's new systematicity, embodied a tension between materiaiity and abstraction, between manual fabor and Flash Gordon Bank Vaults modular production. Assembled by an artist who also wrote A drawing dated 1963-64 (fig. 4.21) demonstrates that Judd, against depiction and order in art, they will"d a materiality around the time of his Green Gallery show, was alr-eady into the productive forms of New York, as if that materiality reconceiving the possible forms of his art. Although the might be made to predominate. Any such predominance, sculpture imagined here was never .executed, it clearly however, was always tentative, the gritty surface only just marks oul a new direction: the pointless, vaguely industrial refusing its ordering stripe or grid. -Soon, it seems, Judd felt mntraplions of his last couple of years were to be followed that it was no longer adequate to dw,,11 on his city's out- by simple boxes.44 While the sketch still evokes a feeling of ,I i FIG. 4.21 A LOFT WITHOUT LABOR: JUDD Donald Judd Study for a wood sculpture, 1963-64

Pencil, 11 x '4 in. (27.9 x 35.6 em)

I ! I I especially as compared with later works in shiny materials s'uch as stainless steel, copper, and brass-caUs attention to I the materiality of the work itself. Galvanized iron, after all, I is the stuff of furnace ducts, not of gleaming corporate I lobbies; it is a substance of .utility, not-semiosis.46 I In fact the surface of DSS 64 is rather particular, ir­ regular enough to invite dose looking. Broad splotches of zinc, the resuit of its protective galvanization bath, spatter the imn. These ftecks create a slightly mottled look, even while appearing just uniform enough to make a neat, if hardly showy, finish. Indeed, the zinc marks create a visual tension between order and randomness that recalls the loosely organized sand gobs in some of Judd's early paint­ ings. This dynamic is deepened by an interplay between the splotches and a faint black pinstriping-barely visible in frustrated utility~what moving parts, we wonder, are meant photographs-created in the laying of the iron. The flecks of to emerge from and recede into those slots, and to what zinc on D55 64 largely obscure these stripes, but Judd and end?-the vocabulary has shifted. Unlike the earlier works, his fabricators must have been conscious of them: they run this object does not appear to have been plucked from a precisely parallel to the sculpture'·sseams.47 tangled infrastructure of pipes and forklifts; instead, sitting 05564 has a bifurcated character, too, on the basic lev­ neat and squam, this box emphasizes simultaneously el of its fabrication . .Like Judd's other Minimalist sculptures, both its own crisp autonomy and its potential for seam- the box looks as if it had been mass-produced on an assem­ less integration into an imagined system of matching bly line,-evoking, as one critic put it, "the slow, determined modular units. beat of a stamping machine."" In fact, like all of Judd's The definitive turn came in lS)6s. It was in the spring of early Minimalist work, the sculpture was made by hand, that year that Judd ordered the fabrication of Untitled (OSS at a piecework shop called Bernstein Brothers"Sheet Metal 64) (fig. 4.22), his first totally rectangular wall box.45 Made Specialties, Inc. The process, adapted from the shaping of from three sheets of galvanized iron, the work-although ventilation ducts and industrial sinks, involved measuring now a dear herald of the artist's Minimalist style-was an and cutting the sheet iron, notching it with hand shears, incongruous object, at once the plainest and the oddest of and folding it in a brake die. Whoever undertook the things. Even today it seems strangely blank and isolated, an work-possibly Jose Otero, soon Judd's favorite techni­ empty horizontal object in the place of painting's semiotic cian-finished the sculpture by tming its angles with a functions. (Hung horizontally at eye level, its dimensions rubber mallet and, finally, reaching inside the back to solder are about those of a half-length portrait.) Its matte finish- lis three piec-es "arefully together.4' FIG. 4.22 Donald Judd Untitled (DSS 64), 4 examples 1965, 6 examples 1970 (i!!ustrated example 1965) Galvanized iron, 6 x 27 x 24 in. (15.2 x 68.6 X 61 em) I! i I

I ! i I! I I ~

FIG. 4.23 {left) FIG. 4.24 (above) Donald Judd Donald Judd Untitled.(DSS-66),1965 Untitled (DSS 63), 1965 "Ga1vanized iron, Galvanized iron, 6 x 27 x 26 in. (15.2 x·68:6 x 66 em) 6 x 29 x 24 in. (15.2 x 73.7 X61 :em) Private collection Private collection

As part .of the same order, Bernstein Brothers made Judd had already ordered his first wall stack: a sculpture two other works quite like 055 64. The three works, built at that adopted the form and material of D55 64, at a slightly the same scale and in the same material, formed a kind of iarger scale, in a column of seven iterations (fig. 4.26). "Soon suite. One, Untitled (DS5 66) (fig. 4.23), took the shape of the artist was ordering similar boxes with Plexiglas tops

a box capped with a bullnose front; the other, Untitled (OSS and bottoms, in a variety of -colors. 50 63) (fig. 4.24), projected a flat, ovoid front from curved At the sour<:e of Judd's new direction lies the fact that ·sides. It may have seemed to Judd at the time that the three just about eV€fything about OSS 64-its form, the details of sculptures offered a panoply of essential geometric-shapes, its surface, the look and means of its fabrication-seems but ultimately it was 055 64, the perfectly rectilinear one, to teeter uncertainly between the specific and the general. that would prove uniquely generative. In fact, this sculpture On the one hand, the work seems almost a purely indepen­ seemed to feplicate itself from the very beginning: Judd dent object: a unique thing to be encountered in space. asked Bernstein for two instances (.or examples, as the On the other, it suggests a total generic fungibility. As we cataloguers call them) of 055 64 in that first job, and, by the shall see, it is this perpetually indeterminate identity, poised end of the year, he had ordered two more, as well as four between objecthood and abstraction, that allows 05S'64 examples of an identical form in stainless steel (fig. 4.25). to represent so fully the oddness of its own historic and Even as the original trio of sculptures was being made, .geographic context. 170

FIG. 4.25 FIG. 4.26 Donald Judd Donald Judd Untitled (055 72), Untitled (DSS :65), 1965 3 examples, 1965, 1 example 1966 Galvanized iron, 7 units, Galvanized iron, each 9 x 40 x 30 in. 6X27x24in. (23 x 101.6 x 76.2 em), .(15.2 x '68.6 x 6, em) with 9 in. (23 em) intervals Moderna Museet, 'Stockholm

In seeking a firm to fabricate his work, Judd may have together with what looks like a model of several high­ decided on Bernstein Brothers for. the simple reason of rises (fig. 4.27). proximity-their shop lay just three blocks from his Nine­ tate in his 1ife, the artist recalled, "When I first went teenth Street lofl. But the artist certainly had other options. to Bernstein in New York, they made kitchen5inks out Sheet-metal shops doUed much of lower Manhaltan in the of stainlesssteellairly well and they made ventilating period, and Judd had lived immediately adjacent to three ducts, .. out of galvanized iron," According to their invoices, of them for most of the 19505. (A & A Sheet Metal Works, Bernstein Bmthers made objects for many industrial uses, Eagle Sheet Metal Works, and Emil Vanderleenden Sheet .too, including "ventilation systems for aU-purposes, dust Metal had been clustered right by his home on the 300 collectors, spray booths, photo engravers, ... drain boards, block of East Twenty-seventh Streel.") When the artist, she1ves, ... smoke stacks, boiler breeching, general mofing, making a sketch toward his first metal progression piec--e, hit {and] skylights."" Established in 1916 under a different on the idea of having a sculpture fabricated in such a shop, name, the firm was graduaUy taken over by its employees he jotted down the names of no fewer than five possibilities, Arnold and Sandor Bernstein, immigrants from --Hungary. FIG. 4.27 FIG. 4.28 171 Donald Judd Sandor Bernstein and exterior Studies for sculptures, of Bernstein Brothers, sketchbook 4, no. 22, 1963 191 Third Avenue, Manhattan, Pencil on paper c.19505 ,I Collection of Judd Foundation I

I I !

By the time of Judd's arrival, the shop had been passed :rhe 1961 zoning change accelerated this process, and -down to Edward Bernstein, who oversaw the jobs, and his according to an article that year in the New York Times, ten brother in-law Martin Kornbluth, who kept the books. The new'luxury apartment buildings had just been built in the shop occupied a nineteen-foot brick walk-up at 191 Third immediate neighborhood, while twenty-six others-ranging Avenue and, eventually, the one next door at 193 as wel1. 53 in height from six to twenty stories-were under construc­ in an early Polaroid Sandor Bernstein stands, half­ tion or plan""d for .completion by 1963.55 The resultfng.con­ proud, above the avenue's paving stones and in front of trast in grain and scale was dramatic; by 1964, Bernst.ein's the building's fire escape and simple decorative stonework little three-story brick houses shared an intersection with (fig. 4.28). The shop appears crowded inside and out, its two of the smooth new towers (figs. 4.29,4.30). entrance framed by no fewer than six business signs and a Bernstein Brothers finally succumbed in the fall of 1964, trash can with an ill-fitting lid. barely six months after Judd had taken his firstjob there." Manhattan's lo'ss of small industry in these years did The firm was paid handsomely for its storefronts, which not spare the borough's sheet-metal shops: between 1950 were soon demolished to make way for a new high-rise.57 and 1961 the number of such businesses fell by more than Like many other light-industrial concerns, the shop relocat­ 2o'Percent. S4 for Bernstein Brothers, a move became inevi­ ed to Long Island City, just across the East River, in Queens. table. Their stretch of Third Avenue had been undergoing Judd stuck with them through the move, and it was in fact rapid redevelopment since-the demolition of its elevated in Queens that DSS 64 was made. Here Bernstein enjoyed a train i111956, and new high-rent apartment·towers were much larger floor, in a low-slung eight-year-old brick build­ replacing many of the storefront row houses in the area. ingon Twenty-fourth Street'S' I . i, IT ! I 1 I I

FIG. 4.29 FIG. 4.30 150 East Eighteenth Street (southwest 205 Third Avenue(northeast corner corner of Third Avenue), 1<)60, of East Eighteenth Street), 1964, photographed 2007 photographed 2007

Even after the move, BemstBin hardly operatBd a pris­ like all of Judd's sculpture since 055 64-appears to belong tine assembly line. Jobs were piecework, "xBOuted by hand. less to the manual labor of the Bernst"in shop floor than to We do not have a photograph of the making of 05564, the uniform modularity of Third Avenue's new towers, but an image tak-en during the fabrication of one of the later Judd sometimes emphasized the antiquity of his fab­ Minimalist works (fig. 4.31) shows Judd and a Bernstein rication methods, remarking, for example, to John Coplans, employee working together to dose a joint.59 Exposed "I use an old-fashioned technique-basically a nineteenth­ belts, hanging wires, and dented buckets fill the space, century metal-working technique."'o Although the artist and someone, perhaps Ed Bernstein, stands at the back, also refer

FIG. 4.31 Donald Judd, right, at Bernstein Brothers, long Island'City, probably, 1966

production at which Bernstein never operated, but which versions of t.he ornate stone and wrought-iron neoclassical the·s-culptures forever propose. Riding this uncertainty, Judd styles that then dominated New York City as a whole (see eventually declar-ed, "I like the quality of mass production," figs. 4.11, 4.12). The much lar.gerilew plants and warehouses he said, "but I want them to do one or two."" at the edge of the city, by C

The early postmodernization of New York had a visual style. It was difficult to recognize as such, because it Jabored to demonstrate its own neutrality, efficiency, even naturalness, but it was a style nevertheless-one founded on the modu­ lar metal box. It was this vocabulary that came to dominate new architecture, new modes of manufacturing, and new technologies of administration and ex"hange. And it was this style, too, that came to characterize Judd's art. Even as we recognize that the work pointedly resisted direct quota­ tion as such, we must briefly 'Consider the several currents by which Judd's Minimalist sculpture rhymed with the new visual forms of his city. Consider first the architectural forms of manufactur­ ing itself. Manhattan's nineteenth-century lofts had been stitched into .the urban ·Iandscape, adopting inexpensive FIG. 4.32 From "An Enlightened look at a factory," Buildings for Industry, Architectural Record Books {New York: F. W. Dodge, 1957), 14

FIG. 4.33 From "Plant of '970 Is Here in '64," Factory, februarY 1964,-62-65

FIG. 4.34 (opposite) Photograph from Farnsworth fowle, "Container Port Marks fifth Year," New York Times,

20 August 1967. General Re­ search Division, The New York Public library, Astor, lenox and Tilden foundations I I I I ! ! I I,

Meanwhile, the-standardized--shipping container was vessel to just 42. All in all, loading and unloading acontainer thoroughly transforming, and further ·enabling, the transpor­ ship cost anywhere from 39 to 74 pe,centless than break­ tation olthe goods produced in new factories. For centu­ bulk work'S ries, freight had been handled by the break-bulk method, It was Malcom McLean, owner of a trucking-company, by which longshoremen used pids and dollies to move who conceived and initiated containerizat1on, 'car.efully se­ individual crates, barre1s, and sacks. Manhattan's economy lecting Elizabeth as his hub. At the fringe of America's larg­ had depended Dn the proximity olthe port and on the fringe est city, the port enjoyed ample room for storing containers businesses supporting its slow labor.'4 All this changed with as w.ell as direct access to the New Jersey Turnpike, which containerization, which began in earnest in 1956 at Elizabeth had opened five years earlier. In 1960, McLean Trtlcking Seaport in New Jersey, just across the Hudson River. The adopted the name Sea-Land Service, Inc.; by 1962, it was new technology aggregated cargo into identical, corrugated serving ports in Miami, Tampa, San Juan, and Oakland, ali steel boxes that could travel unopened ali the way from from New Jers.ey.66 The area's port authority, meanwhile, manufacturer to retailer. Containers-eventually standard­ converted ali the piers at Elizabeth, making it a designated ized the world over to a size of eight leet tali, eight feet container port.67 The metropolitan dock lands, more heavily wide, and either twenty or forty feet long-could be moved contaiMrized than any other port in the world, adopted a straight kom ship to truck or train. Ships, fitted with steel new advertising slogan, "The Port of New York-America's supporting grids called spar decks, could carry hundr.eds Container Capital," and by 1966 the two-state harbor was and, before long, thousands of containers at a time. tven in moving 13 perc.ent of its cargo in containers.'68 An article in the early years, containerization could cut a ship's standard 1967 noted that Elizabeth Seaport, which

The shipping industry in Manhattan was decimated. In The architectural backdrop there contrasted nicely with the 1964, the Port of New York Authority joined the City Plan­ glossy finish and parallel lines of a shipping container, for-tu­ ningCommission in directing all port.expansion to the outer itously parked on a flatbed out front (fig. 4.35). We almost boroughs and New Jersey. The Authoritis executive direc­ forget that this apt image, used as the frontispiece for Judd's tor, Austin J. Tobin, deciared, "Manhattan Island ,s no place .catalogue raisonne, does not in fact picture the artist with for cargo piers .... (It has been] obvious forten years that one of his sculptures. indeed, a picture of Judd and his work Manhattan could not keep pace with flew trends in cargo taken the same year at the Whitechapel Gallery (fig. 4.36) handling."70 Without direct freeway access or adequate simiiarly positions him-confident, in the midground-as a space for storage, the central city could not compete; along -casual claimant on the metal rectangles beside him.12 a stretch of piers on the West Side, employment fell 14.5 percent between 1965 and 1966 alone, while one Manhat.tan A, industry and shipping took on the look of metal rectan­ local reported a deciine in membership of over 70 per<:ent gles in this period, so did the increasingly predominant work in ten years. An economic historian has argued that this of administration. As we -have seen in previous chapters, shift5ignificantly fueled the exodus of the city', manufac­ the new·boom in ofIke building had a uniform style of boxy turing, too, which competed to·remain close to the freight glass-and-steel grids, while new housing projeds were-only

network.11 This sub urbanization of ~abor was accompanied slightiyiess simple and homogeneous. Judd worked in a by a change in thecharacler of the labor itself. While the similar visual vocabulary. Some early sketches{for example, break-bulk method had been defined by manual work, figs. 4.37, 4.38) indicate that he was considering modernist containers were literally impossible to move by hand. The architecture, both inside and out. Thee

FIG. 4.36 (below right) Donald Judd with Untitled (DSS 719), 1968, at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, '970 Courtesy Whitechapel 'Gallery, :~;(i;:r~i Whitechapel Archives

h: ff!kr:':'" t;;;;::, '1; ...... - ~).'-

--""1' I. I

FIG. 4.37 {above) Donald Judd Architectural study: cubic rooms within a large room with skylights, 1964 ," Pencil on paper, 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm)

FIG. 4.38 (right) Donald Judd Architectural study; skylights above four rooms, 1964 P-enciJ on paper, 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35:6 em) THE DISAPPEARANCE OF OBJECTS

FIG. 4.39 Donald Judd Untitled (D55204), 1969 'Copper, 10 unfts each 9 x 40 X 31 in. (23 x 101.6 x 78.7 cm), with 9 in. (23 em) intervals Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza -Collection

FIG. 4.40 Union <:arbide Building, 270 Park Avenue, 'Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1955-60 NYC Municipal Archives FIG. 4.41 (below) FIG. 4.42 (right) Donald Judd interior, Union Carbide Building, Untitled (055 85), 1966 270 Park Avenue, 1955-60 Blue lacquer on aluminum, I galvanized iron, 40 x 190 x 40 in. FIG. 4.43 (bottom) (101.6 x 482.6 x 101.6 em) IBM System/36o, model 85 I Norton Simon Museum, (introduced January 1968; I Pasadena, Calif., Gift of Mr, and earlier System/36os I Mrs. Robert A. Rowan introduced 1964) I I I !i I I , 1 180 THE DISAPPEARANCE OF OBJECTS

I! ':1 ,! I I times," Predicated on the promise of modular compatibility, lined up across the floor or attached to the walls," A Time I the System/360 allowed users to make.custom configura­ magazine artide appearing at the same time likened Judd's i I tions of interchang-eable units, each of which was encased art to "an assembly line or bank vault," while characterizing I in a rectangle of thin sheet metal, sometimes punctured by the broader sculptural movement as Ita cool school of binary I a plane of translucent Plexiglas (fig,4-43), (It has since been "sthetics which would delight an IBM research mathemati­ I claimed that the invention of this product was the single cian."76Computers, assembly lines, bank vaults, futuristic biggest revolution in the history of the computer industry; warehouses-these were the paradigmatic forms of a new, by 1970 IBM had installed 35,000 of the systems,) If Judd -post modern capitalism, then displacing the iron hardware had little oc;:asion to operate a System/360, he might well of New York's modern manual labor, But the critics had little have seen one, The New York World's Fair of 1964-"" was to say about the content of Judd's quotations. It remains to open just as the artist was making the transition to using us here to ask how Judd's work represented its moment in boxes of sheet metal and Plexiglas in his sculpture; with history, and to what effect its own pavilion at the fair, IBM would have been touting Certainly -these Minimalist sculptures, in quoting the its new product. Other corporations with pavilions-com­ forms of New York's new economy, engage in a repre­ panies such as American Interiors, Bell, duPont, Formica, sentational project far richer and more.complicated than 'Simmons, and Westinghouse-were boasting new modular aesthetic mirroring, First of all, they peel the style of the new designs of their own.14 dty away from its functions, rendering it properly visible as Computers resembled the new buildings that housed style. At the same time, these sculptures also exaggerate them, inside and out But their repetitive modularity also the uniformity and departicularization of the new city­ expressed the digital nature of their work, which processed Untitled (DSS 119)\see fig. 4,36), for example, is even more information in binary strings of 1s and Os, Thus both the uniformly planar, even more devoid of detail than the ship­ form and the logic of .computers echoed a trend already ping container with which Judd's portrait-photographers in popular evidence, William H. Whyte's 1956 book The subtly compared it Approaching their world in this fashion, Organization Man had portrayed the postwar employee the sculptures manage to represent not only the forms of the as a victim of the quantitative analyses of an increasingly new 'Stage in capitalism but also the logic that those forms abstract power structure. 7S endeavored to naturalize or hide,n One of the rhetorical claims of new design in this Critics of Judd's work after DSS 64 emphasized, if obliquely, period was that it derived naturally from utility, In some his work's relationship to the modular forms of the new cases, per Louis Sullivan's dictum, form reallyiJid follow economy, John Perreault, writing for the Village Voice in function: modular assembly lines produced goods more 1967, saw "IBM numerology" in Judd's sculptures, A year efficiently, and containerization got those goods to mark€t later, reviewing the Whitney exhibition (see fig, 4.1), he in less time. In other cases, however, function was mme added, "The entire floor looks like a science-fiction war-€!• emphatically represented than embodied, As we have seen, house, dramatically lit to emphasize the gleaming hardware "Critics could praise a new International Style skyscraper as A LOFT WITHOUT LABOR: JUDD

.1 I ! ·1 ! a "superbly efficient instrument for work/' even while many revealing, showing us with unusual clarity the essence of such towers proved downright anti-utilitarian: inefficient to postmodernity in its early days. heat and cool because of their glass walls, and uncomfort­ I have already mentioned John Perreault's 1967 associa­ able because of their rigid furnishings. 78 tion of Judd's work with computers. In making the sugges­ Much of the appeal of the functionalist style lay in its tion, Perreault intertwined it with a·related evocation of the claim to timeless and natural efficiency. for centuries, neo­ futur-e of banking. His remark, both offhand and startlingly classical styles had served structures of power by associat­ specific, was that the" 'mystery'" of Judd's work lay in "the ing them with idealized historic-civilizations. Critiquing just implied IBM numerology and the icy/science-fiction sur­ this mystification, functionalist design had developed in the faces of Flash Gordon bank vaults.""lf any particular work early twentieth century as a spur toward a more democratic 'suggested this formulation to Perreault, it was probably society, one adhering to reason and the laws of sdence. Untitled (05579) (see fig. 4.3), recently on view at the Functionalism was for decades a phenomenon of the avant­ center of Judd's solo exhibition at the Leo Castelliualiery. garde, at least in the West; only in postwar New Y<>rk, with A littl-e ov-er thr"e feellall and exactly six feet long, the box the rising dematerialization of the city's economy, did the is t-otally regular ex-c..ept for its upper horizontal surface, plain metallic box finaliy become the house style of corpo­ dropped a few inches from the top to emphasize the thin rate.capitalism,19 Using this form, economic power in the .edge of the semi-matte aluminum. 82 The sculpture does period aimed to express its own inevitability, its adherence 's-eem implacable enough to suggest a bank vault, although to the immutable law of the invisible hand. The economy's one oddly lacking thick walls, heavy lock wheel, or any vis­ many rectangular, modular parts-from assembly plant and ible aperture. If it were to be opened, we imagine, it would container to office block and computer-were to appear be through the ethereal technology of a computer pas-s­ united in a single grid of maximum, r.easonabte productivity. word, or by a hand waved through an infrared beam. Judd's Minimalist sculpture, like and unlike New York's Despite Perreault's allusion, Judd's sculptures did not other new boxes, can help us now to see this ascendant much resemble the future represented in the Flash Gordon ideology of the 1960s. But it was not the artist's chief aim television s-eries of the '950S, populated as that had been by to represent the conditions of the city in his work. Judd levers, decorative orbs, and heavy iron machinery finished hoped instead that the shiny, translucent box could be in Art Deco detail. Perreault may have been thinking instead

used to r~alize his own late-modernist utopia-one in which of a more real and immediate future, then appearing in New truth might supplant rationality, in which things, rather than Y<>rk. In 1954, in response to its president's argument that being instrumentalized, might simply be laid bare. At the weighty, fortress4ike architecture was no longer appropri­ same time, however, Judd also signaled that such a project ate for banks, Manufacturers Trust had opened a Skidmore, mighteventualiy amount to a kind of representation: "The -Owings & MerriH-designed branch on fifth Avenue (fig. experience of another time and society," he later claimed, 4-44). The look of the building's four-story box of glass and "can ... almost uniquely be gained through art."80 At not aluminum elicited the response; from one critic, that "it is a yet fifty years' distance, Judd's Minimalist work is indeed design, oot of substance, but of color, light and motion." The FIG. 4.44 f\;lalllli.Ktur('rs TrlJst COlllpan\" SlO Filth A.venue.

SkiomOJe, OWings & ~·Jkrrill, 1'):;4 '1

I A LOFT WITHOUT LABOR: JUDD

very hallmark of this shimmering new bank was its sleek, refused sheer.expedience.ln the event, however, the w-orks unornamented vault, confidently exposed behind a sheer had remarkably unstable€ffects: any anti-instrumental wall of glass." uniqueness in them always strained against their infatuation With his -formulation, Perreault, j:lerhaps more than with abstract modular systems. With the making of Untitled any of Judd's other critics, seems to have understood the (05564), Judd's articulation of this tension hit upon what stakes of Judd's Minimalist sculpture. The world this art would become its settled-form. It is significant that in Judd's

ima.gines is the future-a futur.e characterized by the metal scu1pture-unlike most of the rest of the art considered ~n modules of a postindustrial.economy. The work imagines this book-this form was{)ne in which abstraction domi­ a society in which the most impenetrable things, retreating nated and particularity was reducedto the faintest trace. from touch,

II i 1 ,I

I! FIG. 4.45 i Mark DiSuvero I Are Years What? (For Marianne Moore), 1967 Painted steel and cable Hirshhorn Museum I and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

FIG. 4.4£ (opposite) Anthony Caro Prospect, 1964 Museum Ludwig, Cologne

presentation of them as discrete and independent. Judd, DSS 64 offers a rare particularization of the look of the new that is, imagines a world in which the forms of an integrated economy, but it meanwhile madly.courts thehighest levels

global economy sit ir€e and stable, disconnected from the of abstraction. Judd himself conceded to one rev~ewer, system. He stressed again and again that his work reject€d "Nothing made is completely objective, purely practical, the ordering inher.ent to r-epresentation ("1 can't even begin or merely prBsent."87 to think about reflecting 'universal order' as the Europeans It seems to me futile to try to hierarchize these op­ did. The work is-well, just like lining up eight boxes"). At posing vectors in Judd's work. Although art historians have the same time, Judd's work t€ntatively rejected another been joining a tug-of-war ov.er its political implications for -kind of order, too: that of the abstract and fully integrat€d decades, Judd's sculpture-both emphatically particular economy. His boxes are not fungible units, but rather "spe­ and all but totally abstract-cannot be made to sit neatly cific objects," "actual" things made "real" and "cr-edible."86 as safe critique or simple complicity, whatever the terms.88 If a pernicious ordering had for years afflicted painting, Rather, the promise of Judd's sheet-metal boxes lies pre­ Judd's practice suggests, a similar forc-e was r.eshaping dsely in their power as representation, their exaggerated the contemporary city. but unstable embodiment of the dir&tions of their society. Judd's effort to counter that force, however, is 'satu­ Judd's Minimalistsculpture isolated and hyperbolized rated with futility and ambivalence. His version of the new the new city. In

I

I mation, and the construction of glass towers-together in ,essay "Aft and -Obiecthood" envisioned a terminal antipathy I f.act formed a major historical transition, one that ~eft the pitting MinimaHst sculpture such as Judd's against modern­ (ejationship of human beings to the things around them ist'Sculpture such as Anthony Cam's (fig. 4-4<;). The former for-ever more g-eneraL was "literaHst" and "theatrical" -locked .perniciously into

! the viewer's everyday time and space-while the~aUer of­ The representational power of this ambiguity in Judd's I art does not derive solely from its forms. The mode of labor fered an -experience of suspended aesthetic timelessness, by which the sculptures were produced itselfdosely tracked an experience fried explicitly characterized as "grace." This

the ascendancy of administrat~on in New York. His work opposition, which Fried.-call-ed a "war," has come ,to domi­ entailed not chiseling, modeling, Dr-castinK but rather the nate the subsequent 'literature on Minimalism.90 With some conspicuously abstract act of pr.eparing scbematics. In one distance, however, the severity of this opposition .registers

of the 1968 reviews, James R. Mellow expressed the ~rtist's as a fact needing historlcal explanation. Why did it app~r role this way: "In pr<>paring for the Whitney show, Judd that these two kinds of sculpture, both using industrial found tnat the problems of his art had become managerial­ metals, wereeng.ag-ed in "Such a bitt-erdisagreement? specifying materials, scheduling their shipment to the metal shop, overseeing the production of the works themselves." Asked late in his life about his working methods, Judd thought back to the loft on East Nineteenth Str<>et, former homeof Hughes & Thomas's garm<;nt factory: "I had a lot of cactus in it and I mostly sa! around making sketches .... [MJostly, my work is done by me carrying a bunch of papers around and sitting around and thinking." At his next house on Spring Street-as recently as 1962 the noisy home of a machinist, an offset printer, an envelope company, and four other light-industrial firms-judd even more 'Commodi­

ously appropriated seven lofts for the a.ctivities of~iving, sketching, and viewing art. 89 His doing so was itself a richly ambiguous representation of his rapidly changing world, In the context of the removal of manual labor from Manha!­ tan and the retooling of his city for the look of n"turalized administr.ation, Donald Judd occupied the leftover spaces of industrial modemity in order to think, In closing, I would like to return briefly to the discourse that has animated most of the sophisticated-discussion.of Minimalism over the pas! forty years. Michael Fried's 1967 186 THE DISAPPEARANCE OF OBJECTS

It now seems clear to me that this debate, just follow- rather than bodily industrial ones. I mean rather to argue ing the canonization of Oementmodernism, despite their animated in part by a larger cultural dialectic forever just supposed hermeticism, were in fact a means of thinking under the surface. 91 That is, the oppositions between -Hterai- about a changing world. It seems to me no coincidence that ism and grace, between flatness and pictoriality, were mor.e materiality and abstraction, awkwardly contest-ed in every- than coincidentally parallel with the transition, everywhere day life throughout the twentieth century, became central working itself out in New York City, from materiality to ab- obsessions of modernist art. In the years around 1960, -straction. The debates over what -character or ,essence was however, in lower Manhattan, the terms of modernism desirable for art, that is, were also debates about whether and of capitalist history became especially intertwined. it was correct {or deSirable) to see the world as having a for Judd-as for us now again in our own moment- transcendent order. the ascendancy of abstraction was for a time especially Putting it differently, we might say that New York art visible and unresolved. in the twenty years after World War II was obsessed with materiality-with the physicality of Pollock's paint, the self-evident nonreferentiality of Judd's boxes. At the same time, it was obsessed with -abstraction-with concept, with pictoriality, with the graceful transcendence of the everyday world. One could shade this division as a displaced reli- gious dispute-I'm not the first to note fried's use of sacred language-over the degree to which god or some human- ist correlatesubtends the material world. But in New York in this period, the abstract order in question was not only quasi-religious. The ancient materialist-idealist debate was intensified and modulated in this period by a salient transi- tion in the history of capitalism. Extending the ambivalence of Pollock's painting into the environment of the new city, Judd's early sculptures staged tensions-then especially ap- parent in New York-between cast-iron loft and glass-clad tower, between hand truck and container port, between the manufacture of things and the administration of-capital. I do not mean to reduce pictoriality to a transparent sign for late capitalism, still less to suggest that fried and Greenberg were simply complicitous in the effort to rebuild lower Manhattan,:to serve abstract corporate functions 212 NOTES TO PAGES '43-50 I I I ,\ 79 Dylaby exhibition-catalogue, and he borrowed CHAPTER FOUR Ught timing reported in Spiegel, "2 One-Way for it the image of the one-way sign he had used A Loft Without Labor I Shifts." Quotations from Kate P. Durrell, letter to in Black Market. In the hand-drawn .catalogue the editor, New York Times, 25 July 1960. illustration, however, the drip from the simple black I 80 arrow is made longer and messier, and the arrow's john Perreault, "Plastic Ambiguities," Vii/age Voice, Stanley M. Isaacs, letter to the editor, New York corralling function-its systematizing and uniting 7 March 1968, 19· Times, 28 July 1960. In mid-1961, Commissioner purpose-is defeated by its apparently nonsensical 2 I Wiley declared that traffic deaths on Third and painting in two directions at once. Mahonri Sharp Young, "The Great Gromboolian Lexington were down 60 percent since the switch. 8' Plain," Apollo, July 1968, 65; -Gordon Brown, "Month "Traffic Deaths Down," New York Times, 15 June Rauschenberg quoted in Young and Davidson, in Review; Geometry and Other Matters," Arts 1961. "Chronology," -S61. Rauschenberg seems to have Magazine, April 1968, 53. 81 learned about silk screenS from Andy Warhol, who 3 Because its economy is one of barter rather than had -himself only just begun to use them: ibid. ElizabethC 8aker, "Judd the Obscure," Artnews, monetary exchange, any surplus value carried by 87 April 196B, 44ft.; James R. Mellow, "Everything the traded objects (to put it in Marxist language) It is tempting to declare, in keeping with a Sculpture Has, My Work Doesn't," New York Times, is at least materially embodied and not carried traditional model of art-historical narrative, that 10 March 1968; Jane Harrison Cone, "Judd at the in the abstraction of money. Here again the work the works after 1962 are falien-simply shadows Whitney," Artforum, May 1968, 36;-Grac-eGlueck, marks out an ambiguous relationship to systems of of Rauschenberg's earlier, critically engaged "A Box Is a Box Is a Box," New York Times, 10 March abstraction. works. I am trying instead to complicate the story. 1968. ·'82 Nevertheless, itis'striking how well Rauschenberg's 4 That the artist expected the object exchange not to silk-screen style has accommodated itself to its Barbara Rose, "Donald Judd," Artforum, June 1965, work is reported in Robert Rauschenberg, National appropriation by advertising. The telecommunica­ 32; Lucy R. Lippard, "New York Letter; RecentSculp­ Collection of Fine Arts, 114. In reality, Rauschen­ tions company Sprint, for example,-ran ads in 2005 ture as Escape," Art International, february 1966, berg's own exchanges were of course not money­ that used the signature look of Rauschenberg's 50; James R. Mellow, "Hostage to the-Gailery," less: by early 1961, he was already-seHing works for silk scr-eens (overlapping images of planes, docks, New Leader, 14 March 1966, 3~. On the occasion as much as $3,600 each. Panza Papers. arrows, and construction sites) to promote their of Judd's retrospective at the National Gallery 83 wireless service; see, for example, New Yorker, July of Canada in Ottawa, Dudley Del Balso, Roberta Quotation from "Is Today's Artist," 56. 11 and lB, 2005. 1t is a style of eclecticism made Smith, and 8rydon Smith compiled the catalogue 84 seamless, and it was picked up in the early 1980s raisonne, assigning a number to every work made Spoerri was the only artist given two rooms. See by MTV, too. since August 1960. Brydon Smith, Donald Judd: Dylaby: Dynamisch Labyrint (Amsterdam: Stedelijk 8B Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings, ·Objects, and Wood­ Museum, 1962). Simon Sadler notes that Constant Through {he remainder of the 1960s, Rauschenberg Blocks, 1960-1974 {Ottawa; National Gallery of and the Situationist International proposed the idea maintained a secondary interest in sculpture, of Canada, 1975). It is surprising, given this effort, how of a labyrinth to the Stedelijk's director, Willem which perhaps the most probing case was Oracle infrequently art historians uniquely identify Judd's Sandberg, in 1959. This project, never realized, of 1966-65. The work concealed five radios within Minimalist works, generally preferring instead to must have been the inspiration for the exhibi- scrap-metal objects mounted on .casters. His per­ assume that his seriality was total. tion mounted in 1962. For more on Dylaby, see formances, too, included incongruous objects. , Rauschenberg, interview by Seckler; Young and Da­ 89 Hilton Kramer, "Display of Judd Art Defines an vidson, "Chronology," 561; and Meredith Malone, Note that in Estate, Rauschenberg also makes Attitude," New York Times, 14 May 1971; R{lbert "Nouveau Realisme: Exhibition Strategies and the use of photographs shot from the window of his Hughes, "fxquisite Minimalist," Time, 24May 197/, 'Everyday' in Post-World-War-Il France" (Ph.D. Broadway studio. A one-way sign also appears in 68; Richard Shiff, "Donald Judd, Safe from Birds," diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2006). another stencil Rauschenber:g used frequently in in DonaldJudd,-ed. Nicholas Serota (New York: 8' the period; it can be seen, for example, in N.V. Bird Distributed Art, 2004), 61, 33. It was at Dylaby that Rauschenberg's work most Calls forOyvind fahlstr6m (see fig. 3-44), where it , resembled that of Tinguely, his fellow exhibitor hangs before a pedestrian whose way is blocked by Robert Hughes, "ExquiSite Minimalist," 68. there. Rauschenberg designed the cover for the a moving taxi. NOTES TO PAGES '50-54 213

i

7 "Rec-entness of 'Sculpture," in American'Sculpture as "New Nihilism or New Art?" W8AHM, New Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Artforum, of the Sixties (los Angeles: los Angeles-'County York, february 1964, Pacifica Radio Archive number Ig June 1967, reprinted in Gregory Battcock, ed., Mini­ Museum of Art, 1967), reprinted in 8attcocK, B83394, first published (edited by,lucy Lippard) mal Art: A Critka/ Anthology (Berkeley: University of Minimal Art, 186. in Artnews, September 1966, reprinted in Battcock, California Press, 1968), reprinted in fried, Art and ,. Minima! Art, 155. Dan Flavin participated in this in­ Objecthood (Chicago: University of "Chicago Press, 10nathan Flatley, "Allegories of Boredom," in A terview; it appears thaHiPpard edited out his com­ I 1998), reprinted in James Meyer, ed., Minimalism Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1908, ed. Ann ments. A recording of the interview (mistakenly (London: Phaidon, 2000). Citations below are from "Goldstein{los Angeles: Museum of Contempo­ dated December 1965) is held in the lucy Lippard BattcQck, Minimal Art. I will return to Fried's view of rary Art, 2004), 63. Flatley's is an unusually subtle Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Minimalism, and to the canonical account of Judd's account, arguing that Judd's art delivers to the Institution, Washington, DoC.; the recording reveals work as literalist, in the conclusion to this chapter. attentive viewer, in the face of contemporary over­ that a woman, almost certainly Lippard, also s stimulation and boredom, a means of contempla­ participated in the original interview. Glueck, "Box Is a Box"; "Exhibitions: Mathman's tion.lnthe best-known account, Anna Chave, while 17 Delight," Time, 22 March 1968, 54; Barbara Rose, disavowing the work's literalism altogether, has ar­ Donald judd, "In the Galleries," Arts Magazine, Sep­ "Don Judd: TheComplexities of Minimal Art," gued that Minimalism·recapitulates the rigid forms tember 1963, reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings, Vogue, March 1969, 105. of patriarchy.Chave, "Minimal ism and the Rhetoric 1959-1975,93; "The NewSculpture:' panel discus­ • of Power," Arts Magazine, January 1990, 44-63. See sion, 2 May 1966, New York, in Meyer, Minima/ism, Stuart Preston, "Art: Jasper Johns Retrospective also Chave's important essay on the interpersonal 2000,221. Show," New York Times, 15 February 1964; john Ash­ aspects of some of the Minimalists' success, 18 bery, "Paris Notes," Art International, 20 December "Minimalism and Biography," Art BulfetinS2, no. Glaser, "Questions to-Stefia and Judd," 156, 151; "Is 1962,51 (emphasis in the original). See chapter 2 in 1 (March 2000): 149-63. Other accounts of the Easel Painting Dead?" panel, New York University, the present volume. referentiality of the works include Charles Reeve, 10 November 1966, transcript, p. 34, Archives of 10 "Cold Meta!: Donald Judd's Hidden Historicity," Art American Art-Oonald Judd, interview byHarbara John Coplans, "Don Judd: An Interview with John History 15, no. 4 (December 1992); 486-S04; David Rose and Frank Stella, [1966 or 1967 (mistakenly Coplans," in Don Judd, ed. Coplans (Pasadena, Batchelor; "Everything as Colour," in Serota, Donald dated 1965)]. transcript, pp. 35, 16, Jeffrey Kopie <:alif.:.f'.asadena Art Museum, 1971), 30. Judd, 65-75; and Josiah McElheny, "Invisible Hand," Archives, Brooklyn. See similar remarks in Donald 11 Artforum, Summer 2004, 209-10. Judd, interview by lucy Lippard, 1968, transcript, Harold Rosenberg, "Defining Art," New Yorker, 25 15 Archives of American Art; and Donald Judd, "In February 1967, reprinted in Battcock, Minimal Art, Batchelor, "Everything as Color;" 75. the Galleries," Arts Magazine, September 1964, 303,298. looking back at the artistic environ­ 1. reprinted in Judd/Complete Writings, 1959-1975, 133. ment from which critics and art historians have Donald Judd, "Specific Objects," Arts Yearbook ,. plucked the canonical Minimalists, one indeed 8 (1965), reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings, Judd, interview by Lippard, 27. Decades later, Judd finds a telling obsession with architecture. Books 1959-1975{Halifax: Nova,ScotiaCo!iege of Art bemoaned the falsity of even the rudiments of and exhibitions included explicitly architectural and DeSign, 1975), 184. Judd said that he wrote linguistic representation: "The Don QUixote of our works by artists such as William Anastasi, Richard "Specific Objects" in 1964; see, for example, James time would be against aU stories and words. We're Artschwager, John-F. Bennett, Mel Bochner, An­ Meyer, Minimalism.· Art and Polemics in the Sixties brought up on stories: children's stories, literature, thony Caro, Tom Doyle, Dan flavin, Judy Gerowitz, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), movies, trite expectations, if this then that."'Donald Dan-Graham, Patricia Johanson, SolleWitt, Robert 134. It invites,C(lnfusion that. in this essay, Judd Judd in unpublished note, 15 November 1988, Mangold, Robert Morris, Richard Van Bursn, and used the word literal disparagingly, denoting not an quoted in David Raskin, "Judd's Moral Art," in lawrence Weiner. absence of extrinsic reference but rather the act Serota, Donald Judd, 91. 12 of faithful transcription of the world. In "The New 20 "Mathman's Delight," "54. Sculpture," Clement Greenberg had used this word Donald Judd, "In the Galleries," Arts Magazine, 13 with both these meanings: "The New Sculpture" february 19"62, r.eprinted in Judd, Complete Writings, R-osalind Krauss, "Allusion and Illusion in Donald (1948, rev. 1958), in Art and.(ulture: Critical Essays 1959-1975, 44· Judd," Artfarum, May 1966, 24-26, reprinted in (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 139-45. Bruce{Jlaser, Meyer, Minimalism, 2000, 212; Clement Greenberg, "Questions to Stella and Judd," originally broadcast 214 NOTES TO PAGES '54-61 I I I

I! I I 21 "the loft, three flights up." This·lease, for a two-year one million manufacturing jobs between 1953 and Donald Judd, interview by Bruce Hooton, tran­ term, is dated to begin August 1, 1960. Judd may 1965, adding, "It was precisely at this moment I script, p. 7, Archives of American Art. hav.e held an earlier lease on the same space; in his that artists became interested in factory work 22 recent·chronology of Judd's life, Kopie indicates themsel'tes." See her excellent artide "Hard Hats I Roberta Smith indicated that Judd was inspired to that Judd moved to this location on August 1, 1959. and Art Strikes: Robert Morris in 1970," Art Bulletin I, make this freestanding object because he liked the Jeffrey Kopie, '~hronology," in Serota, Donald 89, no. 2-(June, 2007): 333-59 (quotation 344); and , way that Untitled (DSS 29) (see fig. 4.14), an-earlier Judd, 248. The 1975 catalogue raisonne indicates herre!ated book, forthcoming from the UniverSity boxlike work made as a relief, looked when left on that Judd arrived at "East Nineteenth Street in 1960 of California Press. for one contemporary report on the floor. Roberta Smith, "Donald Judd," in Brydon (Brydon Smith, Donald Judd, 92, 40), while Thomas the causes of the shift, see Walter H, Stern, "Indus­ Smith, Donald Judd, 21. Kellein, in "The Whole Space: The Early Work of trial Parks<:hange Suburbs," New York Times, 2 July 23 Donald Judd," Donald Judd: Early Work, 1955-1968 19'61; ·for an early general discussion of deindustrial­ Roberta Smith refers to the metal part of DSS 36 (New York:-Distributed Art, 2002), 34, has errone­ ization, see Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial as a "wire mesh insert," while the entry in the ously written that Judd moved to the loft in 1961. Society: A Venture in Social forecasting{New York: catalogue raisonntkaHs it a "metal lathe," dearly Ketlein also writes that Judd had previously rived Basic Books, 1973). intending to identify a lath, a sheet made as a on Eighty-fifth Street, and, indeed 326 East £ighty­ 33 support for plaster. Brydon Smith, Donald Judd, 23, fifth Street is entered in the 1960 lease as Judd's Simpson, SoHo, table A3 on 249. 54,112. home address. This entry may have been a cover, 3' 2. however, intended to hide the fact that Judd was in Manhattan Address Directory, January 1955; and Brian O'Doherty, "Recent Openings: Don Judd," fact living, as well as working, on East Nineteenth Manhattan Address Directory, January 1962. New York Times, 21 December 1963; Barbara Rose, Street; I know of no other evidence suggesting that Although no telephone was registered in Judd's "New York Letter," Art International, 15 February Judd in fact ever lived on the Upper.£ast"Slde. name, there was a listing in the building that year 1964,41. A year later, thinking in part of Judd, 28 for Yayoi Kusama. The Judd literature has ignored Rose would comment that the works of "'object' Manhattan Address Directory, January 1962. Among the personal relationship between the two artists, sculpture" "appear to be functionless objects rather the listings were, for example, "Atlee Printing but scholarship on Yayoi Kusama acknowledges than sculpture as we know it": Rose, "looking at .Corp.," "Efficient Litho [nc.," "NeotypeCo type it-directly: "Let's say it like it is: Judd was Yayoi American Sculpture," Artforum, February 1965, founders," and "US Dye Wks Inc." Kusama's first lover." Eric Troncy, biographical text, 34. Sidney TIllim, "The New Avant-Garde," Arts 2. Yayo; Kusama, trans. Simon Pleasance (Oijon: Les Magazine, February 1964, 20. Manhattan Address Directory, January 1955. Photo­ Presses du Reel, -2001), 60. According to Troncy, the 2S graphs of buildings nearS3 East Nineteenth Street idea of making box sculptures came to Judd when Roberta Smith, "Donald Judd," 21. in New York City photog.raphic tax survey, 1939-41, Kusama kicked over a cardboard box that the two 2. Municipal Archives, New York City Department of had been using as a coffee table. Judd admired Coplans, "Don Judd," 23. Judd said, "I didn't really Records and Information Services. Kusama's work, moderately, in reviews written care if the wood was sloppy or bad. And I still don't 30 in 1959 and 1904:seeJudd, Complete Writings, care the way some people care .... I want my work Statistics according t9 Arthur l. Sheer, president of 1959-1975,2,134-35,189. well made, but I don't necessarily want it made an industrial leasing company, quoted in "increase 35 with a great deal of precision." Coplans asked, "You Is Noted in Movement of Related Trades to Same Nancy l. Gr-.een, Ready-to-Wear, Ready-to-Work: A mean industrial precision?" Judd replied, "Yes, a Area," New York Times, 18 November 1962. Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New certain amount of variation doesn't detract from 31 York (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 2. them." Judd kept for decades a fourth plank, dearly Charles R. Simpson, SoHo: The Artist in the "City 3. from the same panet. It now sits at the back of the "(-Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), table Judd claimed that he liked the way-the signature Safeway Building in Marfa, Texas, which Judd used A20n 248, 130-31. ·color of his early oeuvre, light cadmium r.ed,made as an art studio late in life. 32 the shapes 01 his works stand out in high definition. 27 Simpson, SoHo, 117. The art historian Julia Bryan­ Coplans, "Don Judd," 25. Peter 8allantine, who Lease for a loft at S3 fast Nineteenth Street, Kopie Wilson, writing-chiefly about the sculptor Robert worked as Judd's studio assistant from around 1969 Archives. The lease indicates that the space was Morris, has observed that the United states lost until Judd's death in 1994, said in a conversation NOTES TO PAGES 164-70 21 5

with the author, 9 January 2006, that the canvas 42 In 1965, however, postindustrial chic had not yet of DSS 29 was stapled to the wood, and that a The copper· disk, now dented, appears smooth in -blossomed. previous blue painting lies underneath the one now the photograph used forthe catalogue raisonne in 47 visible. 1975: Brydon 'Smith, Donald Judd, 110. The bulging The prominence-of these stripes varies among 37 gobs of material on the surface of this work, while different examples of DSS 64, as it does in Judd's "Designs for New SkyscraperShow Zoning Im­ shaped irregularly by hand, are located at holes other galvanized iron sculptures. pact," New York Times, 17 September1961. Buildings that the artist drilled through the surface at precise 4. could grow even taller if developers included public intervals. Jane GoHin, "Donald Judd," Artnews, April 1966, 17. space at ground level. 43 4' 3. Donald Judd, interview by·Paul"Cabon, 1989 or Fabrication records for some of Judd's works are "New Name Helps Fourth Avenue Segment," New after, transcript, pp. 11-12, Judd foundation Archive, held by the Judd Foundation (New York and Marfa, York Times, 6 September 1959. Marfa, Texas. Judd suggests that he is speaking of a Texas) and by Richard Bernstein of Bernstein Sculp­ 3. different and slightly later sculpture, Untitled (055 ture "Restoration (Deer Park, New York), but these Land Use, 1955-56 (New York: City of New York, 47){1964).lt seems, however, that the artist was are not now available to scholars. The method'by I City Planning Commission, Department of City confusing the two works; 055 47 is not perforated, which Bernstein Brothers made Judd's sculpture Planning, 1955-S6), map 8. Zoning Mops (New while DSS 43has 780 holes in a grid of30 by 26. was reconstructed by Richard-Bernstein, son of York: City of New York, City Planning Commis­ 44 Edward Bernstein, in conversation with the author, sion, Department of City Planning, 1961), map ad. for a discussion of Judd's use of sketches toward 8 June 2006. The shop obtained its sheets of metal Mac'hine shops and automobile mechanics could sculpture, see Donald Judd: Zeichnungen/Drawings ready-made from foundries in Pennsylvania. late operate in some commercial zones, although this (Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, 1976), 8. Judd did in his life, Judd told an interviewer that Otero had appears not to have been the<::ase on Park Avenue make two wooden floor boxes in 1963, Untitled been his favorite technician at the shop: Judd, inter­ South, which was<::oded C5-2 for "restricted (D5539) and Untitled(D55 41), but these had viewbyCabon, 9. The early fabricated works in iron central commercial." 'See Thomas W. Ennis, "New strong compositional asymmetry and parts with cost Judd about $80-$100 apiece. See the invoices Zoning Laws in Effect Friday," New York Times, 10 curved edges. reproduced in Sertoa, Donald Judd, 251; and Kopie December 1961. 45 Archives. See also a costlier 1966 invoice in Meyer, 40 Although it proved less directly influential fornis Minimalism: Art and Polemics, 177. "Mall on Park Ave. 'South Advances," New York {ater work than D5S 64, Judd had already made a 50 Times, 16 March 1962. totany rectangular box for the floor, UntiNed{DSS Although his cataloguers identified only one 41 53) (1964). Other works had included rectangles example each of DSS 63 and DS5 66, Judd may Judd had praised ·Pollock's materialism ("I think as parts of larger shapes. DS5 64 dearly came out have ordered two of these as well. A very slightly Pollock's a greater artist than anyone work'lng of thinking related to Untitled (D55 47){1964), misshapen object in the form of 055 66 now sits in at the time or since .... The dripped paint ... is which, although it had a trough like some of the the back of Judd's"Safeway Building in Marfa, Texas, dripped paint"), and 055 29 extrapolates from this early floor boxes, also measured 6 x 27 x 24 inches its face labeled "NG" in black marker; the letters materialism, resisting not only the abstraction of (15 x69 x 61 cm) and was mounted on the wall. were the artist's notation for an attempt at a work pictoriality but also that of the city itself. Donald Judd was invoiced for D5564, together with several that was "no good." In '970, Judd had Bernstein Judd, "jackson Pollock," Arts Magazine, April 1967, other pieces, on 22 June 1965; his previous bill had Brothers build six additional examples of DS5·64. reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings, 1959-1975, 195. been dated 24 May. Brydon Smith, Donald Judd, -(He had kept all of the 1965 examples for himself.) Judd's longtime studio assistant, Peter Ballantine, 94,126-28. The artist's single-unit wall pieces are The artist first-combined steel and Plexiglas in a has said that Judd' mixed cigarette butts into the installed so that their upper edges hang just over floor box in 1964. painted surface of 05529, as Pollock famously five feet (61 to 63 inches, he stipl:tlated) above the. 51 did in Full Fathom Five>(1947), but my own visual floor. Ibid., 93. Judd lived at 304 East Twenty-seventh Street for inspection of the surface could not-confirm this 4. about seven years; Eagle Sheet Metal was at num­ claim. Ballantine, conversation with the author, 9 Galvanized iron is now sometimes used for .expres­ ber 306, while A & A and Vanderleenden shared an January 2006. sive purposes, as in counters for hip boutiques. address and a phone at number 309. Theseshops 216 NOTES TO PAGES 170-73

probably occupied the only storefronts at Judd's 'begun in 1957. Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Web site, New York(New York: Sanborn Map C-ompany, 1915, end {)f the block. At the other end, by First Avenue, www.pcfandp.com/a/P/570s/s.html. accessed .reprinted 1948, updated to 1964), vaLl. Today, this the block accommodated shops for textile printing, 12 June 2006. This new development typified the area is still dominated by light industry, even by a cabinetmaking, and lumber, as well as two compa­ smoothing and lightening of Manhattan's visual kind of activity that seems in some ways beneath nies selling lasts, fooHhaped forms for the making texture: "With their boldly scaled concrete grids the systematized legibility of international1ate and repairing of shoes. See Jeffrey Kopie, "Chronol­ and.extensiveglazing, the buildingsIof Kips capitalism. Sounding like a page out of.Oldenburg's ogy," 247; and Manhattan Address Directory, January Bay Plaza] were a deliberate·departurefromthe notebooks, the businesses remaining on this block 1955. Judd discusses this home in Judd, interview prevailing neighborhood ·fabric of brownstones and indude Michael Mazzeo Electrical ·Corp., Municipal by lippard, 144. tenements." Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, Electrical Company, and liberty Construction Sup­ 52 and David fishman, New York, '960; Architecture ply and Material Corp. Judd, interview by Caban, 5-6. Bernstein Brothers and Urbanism between the Second Warld War and the 59 invoice, reproduced in Serota, Donald Judd, 251. Bicentennia/{New York: Monacelli, 1997), 2.B8. In a iecent publication, this photograph has been 53 56 dated 1968, but it seems more likely that the work The firm had been founded by Ignatz Weiss. By Judd 'first""Contracted with 6ernst.ein Brothers being assembled is Untitled{DSS 79), 1966. 1940, it seems to have been called Weiss and to help execute a work in March 1964: dissatis- 60 Bernstein. One ninety-three Third Avenue had once fied with the look of Untitled (DSS47), which he Coplans, "Don Judd," 37. been the home of J.1Jnterman Trusses and Braces. had made in wood (probably with the help of his 61 Richard Bernstein, conversation with the author, 'father), he had Bernstein 'coat it in aiitted sheet of "I've had a tinsmith make a few when I'vegotten long Island City, N.Y., 8 June 2006; Manhattan Land galvanized iron:Foliowing this job, the artist im· hold of some money": Judd, interview by Hooton, BookoftheCityofNew York, desk and library ed. mediately moved most of his fabrication out of his 10. #He maygoto long Island City and have the (New York:G. W. Bromley, 1955), plate 44; New own studio and into the shop. On Judd's first use Bernstein Brothers, Tinsmiths, Pl:It 'Pittsburgh' York 'City photographic tax survey. of Bernstein Brothers, see BrydonSmith, Danald 'seams into some (Bethcon) kon boxes": Robert 54 Judd, 24, 92, 118; Serota, Donald judd, 183-84, 250; Smithson, "Donald Judd," 7 Sculptors (Philadelphia: According to the several "sheet metal" he'adings and Judd, interview by Caban, 11-12. for discus­ Institute ot-Contemporary Art, 1965), reprinted in Manhattan telephone directories, the borough sion of fabrication at Bernstein Brothers, see Ann in Meyer; Minimalism, 2000, 210. Smithson seems housed 299 such shops in 1950 and 238 in 1961. The Temkin, "Wear and Care: Ann Temkin Charts the to suggest, with his use of the word Bethcon{for loss may in fact have been heavier; chang.es in the -Complicated Terrain Surrounding the Pr-eservation Bethlehem Consolidated) that he understood that listing of "sheet metal specialties" make it difficult of Donald Judd's Work," Artforum, 'Summer 2004, the metal waS not rolled, in "fact, in New York City. to know for sure. Of the firms on Judd's block in the 204-8,289. Bernstein Brothers appears to have for Judd's use of the word factory see, for e15ample, mid-fifties, only one, Eagle Sheet Metal Works, sur­ moved in October or November 1964: an invoice of "From New Materials, a Dynamic SCUlpture," vived to 1961. N.Y.c. Telephone Directory; Manhattan October 2 still shows the Manhattan address, while National Observer, 20 February 1967, 22.; Robert Y.ellow Pages, 1950; Manhattan Yellow Pages (New one from November 4 has this old address lined Hughes, "Exquisite Minimalist"; and Judd, interview York: New York Telephone'Company, 1961). out and the new one hand-stamped in its place. 'See byCabon. 55 Kopie Archives and Serota, Donald Judd, 2.51. 62 All these buildings were located in the twenty 57 Judd, interview by Cabon, 13. The artist Josiah blocks north of Fourteenth Street, along Second Richard Bernstein discussed the payment in a McElheny has recently observed that while Judd's and Third Avenues. Any prOjects planned under telephone conversation with the author, 4 January sculptures look mass-produced, "the reality ... is the old zoning law needed approval by October. 2006. The new bullding, occupying the full length of that Judd's work was made in a setting much closer Thomas W. Ennis, "Housing"Cnasing3d Ave. 'EI' the block along Third Avenue, was not completed to the average person's pictuie of a wood shop in a Ghost: High-Rent Apartments AreChangingthe until after 1970, when several remaining buildings garage." McElheny, "Invisible Hand," 2.09. Scene from 14th to 34th Str.eet," New York Times, 22 had been cleared. ManhattanLandBook of the City ., .) January 1961. On East Twenty-seventhStieet, Judd of New York, desk and libraryed. (New York G. W. For accounts of the increas'lng automation, "See had also Jived just three blocks down from what Bromley, 1970), plate 44. articles in Factory magazine, such as "Robots: From was to become the ten-acr.e, thr.ee-block, 1,136-unit 5. Fantasy to Fact," F-actory, January 1964, 76-79; and project by l. M. Pekalled Kips Bay Plaza. Although Invoice reproduced in Serota, Donald Judd, 2$1. "Plant of '970 Is Here in '64" factary, f-ebruary 1964, construction didn't begin until 1961, planning had Insurance Maps afthe Borough of Queens,.(ity of 62-65 (as in fig. 4.33). NOTES TO pAGES 175-80 2'7

6' 70 about half scale. See for example Serota, Donald Marc Levinson indicates that the Port of New York "Planners' Stand on Piers Backed," New York Times, Judd, .cat. no. 37. Paul Katz's photographs of Judd and related businesses employed 100,000 people 24 September 1964. Shipping historian frank afSpring5treet have been-dated 1970 in Donald in 1951, and that 90,000 manufacturing jobs were Broeze put it simply in Globalization-of the Oceans, Judd: Selected Works from the Judd foundation (New "fairly-directly" tied to the port in 1956. Levinson, 32: "Manhattan would play no role in containeriza­ York:Christ(e's, 2006), 36.-Gordon Matta-Clark's The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World tion." 1975 work Day's End operated in the space proffered Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, 71 by the decline of Manhattan's piers. Matta-Clark N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 78, 79. The International Longshoremen's Association had spoke about the "containerization of space" in Wftold Rybczynski, in a review of Levinson's book, initially resisted containerization, but the union a 1974 interview by Liza Bear: "Gordon Matta­ "Shipping News," New York Review of Books, 10 struck a deal with shippers in 1959, agreeing to Ciark:Splitting the Humphrey Street Building," in August 2006, 22, writes that ships often spent as -handle the new boxes in exchange for increased Gordon Matta-Clark, ed. Corinne'Diser.ens (london: much time in port as at sea. pay and other benefits. Containerization was so Phaidon, 2003), 164· OS successful that overall port employment in the 73 On standardization, see especially Marc Levinson, region as a whole actually increased in some early Judd explicitly associated his stacks with archi­ "Setting the Standard," in Box. 127-149. Reduction years. Figures dted from "Port of New York Made ·tectural elevations in a schematic sketch, drawn of necessary labor: ibid., 91; and Jacques Nevard, Gains in '66," New York Times, 24 June 1967; and in 1968 or 1969, of the five floors of his new home "Trailership Cutting Pier-Loading TIme," New York George Horne, "Dockers Critical of Plans for Port," and studio at 101 Spring Street. The floors are given Times, 23 November 1958. Nevard claimed that cost New York Times, 2-3 October 1966. For a history of the 'shape of Judd's boxes, and they are spaced savings could run as high as 95 percent. labor's response to.(:ontainerization, see Marc one from the other as in the sculptures. See Donald 66 -Levinson, Box, 101-26. It is Levinson who argues Judd: Architecture (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, Meanwhile, the Matson company containerized that industry followed shipping out of town; "the 2003),43: much of the West Coast, while also building con­ local economy," he adds, "was left devastated as 7. tainer cranes at -dock-Mclean had had them on new technology made the natlon's largest port It was Reinhold Martin's book, TheOrganizationol board-creating the first dedicated container ports. obsolete" (76). See also "Jobs on Local Waterfr-ont Complex: Architecture, Media, andCorporate Space Frank Broeze, The Globalization of the Oceans: Con­ Rose to 392,672 in May," New York Times, 11 June (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), that drew tainerization from the 19505 to the Present, Research 1962;·Charles G. Bennett, "Longshoreman Picket my attention to the System/360, and to its visual in Maritime History (St. John's, Newfoundland: City Hall," New York Times, 10 November 1964; and assonance with Minimalist sculpture. The text from International Maritime"Economic History Associa­ Werner Bamberger, "2,500 Quit Docks to-Prod City Fortune is quot-ed, undated, in'Emerson W. Pugh, tion, 2002), 33-34. on Pier Revival," New York Times, 19 September Lyle R. Johnson, and John H. Palmer, IBM's 360 and .7 1967. Witold Rybczynski ("Shipping News," 23) has farty 370 Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pr-ess, New Jersey governor Hughes declared that the claimed that the volume handled by New York City 1991), xi. Pugh, Johnson, and Palmer make the'lf transformation of the port "would not have been docks fell fully 98 percent between 1960 and 1970. cfaim for the importance of the System/360 onp. possible if an 'adequate' network of highways had 72 xv and cite-sales statistics on 174_ Westinghouse not first been constructed." -George Cable Wright, The sheer scale and number of the containers was advertising office cubicles at the time; see, for "Authority Spurs Port Elizabeth," New York Times, should remind us that New York's transformation in example, Architectural Record, January 1964, 254. 23 March 1962. this period hardly meant that materiality itself dis­ Information about the fair is drawn from New York 68 appeared; the new landscape of things, rather, was World's fair 1964/65: Official Souvenir Book (New Marc Levinson, Box, 94. The New York Times sug­ more modular than the older dty being scrapped, York: Time-life Books, (1964]). In addition to cor­ gested that the containerized portion of the area's smoother and less palpable. ·For contemporary porations, nations and states of the-United States shipping was higher-perhaps representing 20 reportage on the dereliction of the piers, see, for had pavilions at the fair. percent of its cargo. Werner Bamberger, "Progress example, "Planners Stand on Piers Backed"; '~PfOg­ 7' Report Given,on Harbor," New York Times, 26 April ress Report Given on Harbor"; and McCandlish William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New 1964. Phillips, "Seaport Museum Urged Downtown,"New York: Simon &5chuster, 1956). 6. York Times. 15 May 1967. A group of large, untitled 76 Farnsworth Fowle, "Container Port Marks Fifth Judd sculptures from around 1989-90 took on John Perreault, "Minimal A-bstracts" (1967), in Year," New York Times, 20 August 1967. roughly the dimensions of a .container, at Battcock, Minimal Art, 259; Perreault, "Plastic Ambiguities," 19; "Mathman's Delight," 54. 218 NOTES TO PAGES 180-84 I I I

I 77 earlier artists had imposed on their world. (Such 84 ! Indeed it is not just in their abstraction that Judd's a distinction, however, shows us that Judd shared Note the thick·Pittsburgh seams in To Susan Buck· ! sculptures pick up the new logic of their world. .one of the central dreams of the new economy wafter(1964). Judd made a notation rejecting the They also mimic, for example, the shipping contain* itself: the fantasy of a place where the shapes of Pittsburgh method in a 1965 drawing; see Donald I e(s everyday workings. A container conceals the things were dictated by physics·rather than by Judd: Zeichnungen, cat. no. 105. specificity and diversity of its cargo, effectively Whim, style, or desire.) I should add that, however 85 I reducing it to a few variables (hardly more than deep the assonance between Judd's works and, say, DiSuvero famously declared, while on a symposium how much it is worth, where it is bound, and what International Style office buildings, his sculptur.es panel with Judd, "I think that my friend Don Judd it weighs). Similarly. Judd's boxes-on the level are never images of those buildings.l owe thanks can't qualify as an artist, because he doesn't do the of their first apprehension-work to bracket or to Huey Copeland and to Matthew Witkovsky work." "The New Sculpture," panel discussion, 2 suspend content, measuring out a blank, enclosed for their conversations with me on the nature of May 1966, New York, in Meyer; Minima/ism, 2000, space on the galJery wall. I thank Jennifer L Roberts representation in Judd's work. David Batchelor 220. For his part, Judd praised DiSuvero'S sculptur-e, for proposing this idea. argues explicitly that we should think of r-epresen· while acknowledging its distance from his own 78 tation as "pointing in certain.directions rather than work: Judd, Complete Writings, 1959-1975, 22, 91, Ogden Tanner with David Allison. Peter Blake, and stating a finite'Set of things." Batchelor, "Abstfac· 112-13,1n Public sculpture was rapidly fiUingthe Walter McQuade, "The Chase-Portrait of a Giant," tion, Modernism, Representation," in Thinking Art: new plazas spawned by the 1961 zoning law, and Architectural Forum, July 1961, 94, quoted in Stern-et Beyond TraditionalAesthetics, ed. Andrew Benjamin it is little wonder that it usually looked very little aI., New York 1960, 176. Note that P-eter Blake, one (London: Institute ot-Contemporary Afts, 1991), S5. like Judd's. The softly biological forms of lsamu of the authors of this laudatory review, would ~ater 81 Noguchi (666 Fifth Avenue, 1957; ·Chase Manhat· become a major critic of the false functionality of Perr.eault, "Minima! Abstracts," 259. tan Plaza, 1960; 140 Broadway, 1907), for·example, the International Style: see the·end of chapter 1 in 82 or Jean Dubuffet{Chase Manhattan Plaza, 1972) the pr-esent volume. For further mention of Chase Judd mentioned this as a reason for setting the top provided an inoculating "garnish," as Barbara Manhattan Plaza, see chapter 3 in the present vol· surface below the.lJpper edge. See Coplans, "Don Kruger would later put it, for the corporations in the ume. W-e now know that computers operate (and Judd," 41-44. new towers, proposing an indemnifying harmony sell) perfectly well in curved housings emblazoned 83 between the body and the society of abstraction. with perky logos, butfn the early 1960s, IBM's My mention of the Manufacturer's Trustbuilding W. J. T. Mitchell, "An Interview with Barbara president claimed that the design of their machines relies on Stern et al., New York 1960, 372-75. The Kruger," in Art and the Public Sphere, ed. Mitchell was dictated simply by "what they are." Martin, quotation is from Ada Louise Huxtable, "Bankers' {Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 234. Organizational.complex, 174. Showcase," Arts Digest, 1 December 1954, 12-13. 86 7. Another critic added, "Banks used to sell security. The longer quotation here is drawn from Glueck, The age of the International Style corporate sky· But now, with their deposits federally insured, "-Box Is a Box." The other words Judd used frequent· scraper may have been the world historical zenith they are selling service." "Big Banking and Modern Iy; all appear, for example, in "Specific Objects." of the roofing of authority in appeals to mecha· Architecture Finally Connect," Architectural Forum, 87 nistic efficiency. Quite soon, abiding inequalities September 1953, 134-37. Perreault may also have Mellow, "Hostage to the Gallery," 33. of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation been thinking of mor-e contemporary filmic images 88 dramatically cracked the face of this ideology, and of the future, in which stand·alone objects are few, The major accounts attributing a radical criticality not long after, postmodernist styles of archit-ecture and work is accomplished by push button (ather to Judd's works are Rosalind Krauss, "Double Nega· and design cheerfully (and compensatorily) began than by tool or winch. Although it was released a tive: A New Syntax for Sculpture," in Passages in claiming to embody difference. year after Perreault's review, Stanley Kubrick's 1968 ModernScu/pture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 80 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, explicitly 1.977); Hal Foster, "The-Crux of Minimalism"-(1g86), Donald Judd, "Art and Architecture," lecture at used the forms of rectilinear abstraction to link in The Return of the Rea/{Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Yale University, 20 September 1983, in Donald Judd: the prehistoric past with the technologized future. Press, 1996); Yve·Alain Bois, DonaldJudd:New Complete Writings, 1975-1986 (Eindhoven: Stedelijk A simple black monolith-looking very much like Sculpture (New York: Pace Gallery, 1991); and van Abbemuseum, 1987), 33. In distinguishing a model of the Seagram Buildiryg'stfipped of its David Raskin, "Specific Opposition: Judd's Art and between t.ruth and rationality here, I follow Judd's fenestration-appears both at "the dawn of man" Politics," Art History 24, no. 5 (November 2001): insistence that he eschewed the human order that and at a futuristic lunar excavation site. "682-706. Foster's artide expr.esses ambiguity, NOTES TO PAG'ES 185-92 21 9

I Bois's misgivings. Krauss later declared, along Germany: Westfalischer Kunstverein, 1989), 18. 85-93. for a different account of the historicity of with Benjamin H. D. Buch/oh, that Judd's work Specifically, the 1962 occupants had been A '& F Greenberg's formalism, see Caroline A. Jones, Eye­ participated woefully in thespectacularization of Envelope,Co., J. P. Carmel Hardware, Je'hm Sports­ -sight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the I culture and in capitalist modes of production; see wear, l. D. $wiss-Embroidery Works,lanigan & Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: -University "The-Cultural Logic of the LateCapitalist Museum," Cross Inc. machinists, New Mtn. Offset 5upply-Co., of-Chicago Press), 2oo5,-especially chapter 9, "The OctoberS4{fall 1990); 3-17; and Krauss et aI., "The and Trevi Fountain Mfg. 'Corp: Manhattan Address Modernist Sensorium." I Reception of the Sixties." 69 (Summer ! October Directory, January 1962. Around 1940, H. H. Silver­ 1994): 3-21. The major accounts of the complic- man & Sons Hardware, Tools and'factory Supplies ity of Judd's art are Karl Beveridge and Ian Burn, had operated at 101 Spring; Judd found and kept CONCLUSION "Don Judd" ("What would you say," they asked one of their business caras. New York City photo­ Into Air: The late 19'605 and After Judd, "if people started referring to you as the first graphic tax survey; Kopie Archives . .originally, 101

complete capitalist.artist?"), Fox 2 (1975): 129-42, Spring Street had probably housed a garmentfac~ reprinted in Meyer, Minimalism, 2000, 260-64; and tory aod showroom. Serota, Donald Judd, 99; Joyce Marx and,'Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Chave, "Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power." Gold, "SoHo," in jackson, Encyclopedia of New York Party" {1848, 1888), in The Marx-Engels Reader.:.ed. In his introduction to Minimalism: Art and Polemics City, 1088. As New York's transformation continued Robert,C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, in the Sixties, the major history of the movement, in the 1970S, Judd complained, "Several hundred 1978),476. Marshall Berman of course draws on James Meyer states that Minimalism holds an thousand more office workers mean the end of ev­ this source in titling his important book All That "irresolvable position of conformity and critique erything in Manhattan buttusiness. Manhattan's 'ls'Solid,Melts into Air: TheExperience of Modernity within the New York art world and late capitalist one big local business, incidentally, is real estate." (-New York: Penguin, 19:88). ForHerman, Marx and society from which it emerged." Meyer, Minimalism: ':General'Statement," Newspaper--i.owerManhattan Engels's formulation expresses the -rapid and disori~ Art and Polemics, 8. later, however, Meyer goes on Township, January 1971, reprinted in Judd, Complete enting change endemic to modernity. Applying it to offer an account of Minimalism as a dialectical Writings, 1959-75, 204. Eventually, Judd more or here to a slightly later moment, -.J mean to draw out negation in Adorno's sense. It is an art, he writes, less abandoned New York for his remote home in specifically its-suggestion of etherealization. that offers a critique by "desemanticization," by Matfa, Texas, where he spaciously elaborat.ed his 2 "resisting interpretation" and "-refus(ing] to'signify" imagined alternative to urban expedience. Warhol addressed the news media just as James (185,187). Jonathanflatley and Alex Potts 'have 90 Rosenquist addressed billboar.ds and Allan offered accounts of Judd's work that speak with Fried, "Art and Objecthood"; see especially 135, 147. D'Arcangelo Zlddressed American roadways. The unusual subtlety to the ambiguities in the work. Mor.e recently it is Hal Foster's "Crux of Minimal­ whole American Pop art movement was driven by Potts, The Sculptum/lmagination: Figurative, Modern­ ism" that has perpetuated the centrality of Fried's the increasingly departicularized look of the United ist, Minimalist (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University terms to the discourse on Minimalism. Both of 'States, but it was Warhol-the one to train his Press, 2001); Potts, '~Minimalism and Junk," tran­ these essays implicitly privilege Robert Morris's focus most relentlessly on media imageS-Who has script of lecture, 2004, Getty Research Institute; works and writings over Judd's, which leads them proved by far the most revealing of these artists. Flatley, "Allegories of Boredom." Thomas Crow to emphasize the phenomenologic~l aspect of He recognized in TV and magazines what Judd has importantly argued that much of modernism Minima!ism-an aspect in which Judd did not, at recognized in architecture. is both critical and complicit: Crow, "Modernism least in the 1960s, take interest. 3 and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts," in Modern 91 lucy Lippard's landmark record of the movement Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Themajor essays of -Greenberg's maturetheory was in fact titled Six Years: The Dematerialization of University Press, 1996), 3-37. of modernism, in which materiality is·forever en­ the Art,Object, 1966-1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973). 89 tangled with the pictorial, appeared in these years. 1t has been argued that conceptual art, .taking a JamesR Mellow, "£verythingSculpture Has"; Judd, See, for example, "Abstract and Repr-esentation?!" bare minimum of materia!form, imitated Madison interview by'Cabon, 1, 3. Of 101 Spring Street, Judd (1954), reprinted as "Abstract, Representational, Avenue's pursuit of the salable idea, and also that later wrote, "There had been a separate business and So Forth," in'ClemenU;reenberg, Art and'Cul­ it imagined a radical alternative to consumerism. on each floor, most with machines leaking oiL The ture(Boston: Beacon, 1901), 133-38; and "Modernist I would claim instead that conceptual art .richly -trash was so much that Arman<:ould have bought Painting" (1960), reprinted in'CiementGreenberg, r-epresent-ed the persist-ently awkward relationship the building and left it alone": Donald Judd, "101 The Collected Essays and Criticism., ed. John O'Brian, between abstraction and materiality, just as that SpringStfeet," in Donald Judd: Architektur{MGnster, vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), relationship seemed everywhere to,be shifting.