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Maximizing Minimalism
John Haberin New York City
Donald Judd
For a Minimalist, Donald Judd had maximal ambitions for his art. They must have challenged him, too, for it took him till his mid-thirties before he could even begin, and they kept growing.
Formerly a painter, he took his colors, shapes, and materials into three dimensions, where they could make their own space. He used cadmium red for a maximum impression. Not content with what he could do on his own, he soon hired metalworkers to forge boxes up to a meter on a side—and then he multiplied them, side by side on the floor or in stacks ascending the wall. 
As the work grew more site specific, mathematics vied with the gallery or museum to give it scale. He moved late in life from Soho to Marfa, in west Texas, where he could dream of matching the dimensions of the land. A MoMA retrospective follows all these moves and raises the question of what Minimalism means after all. To hammer it home, Judd's Chelsea gallery shows him over the course of twenty-five years of thinking big.
Displaying the pedestal
Donald Judd never cared for the term Minimalism, but he shrugged it off easily enough, as well he might. He did not care much for calling his work sculpture either. Besides, with Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, he remains the movement's archetype. Like Flavin with neon tubes nestled into a corner of the room, he was most often content to stick closely to the walls. Like Andre, too, with metal plates, he was content the rest of the time to let his materials rest on the ground. Where Constantin Brancusi had taken sculpture literally off its pedestal, Judd displayed the pedestal.
Others more obviously throw their weight around, but not him. Yayoi Kusami does so visually with her Infinity Rooms, while Robert Irwin extends Flavin to dozens of fluorescent fixtures, for the dazzling illusion of mirrored walls. Richard Serra does so physically, with flung lead and rusted, curved, and towering steel walls that dare one to come close—while Michael Heizer back in Marfa and in Nevada keeps digging up more and more dirt. Agnes Martin can seem minimal enough, with near monochrome canvas, until it reveals its deep and gentle color. Judd does not "do" subtlety and richness, and he does not ask for time. What you see is what you get, now.
In turn, that immediacy is much of what makes it maximal. Born in 1928, he sought a plain impression even as a painter. Others around 1959 were emulating Abstract Expressionism, but he had already moved on. Curved white bands anticipate later work by Brice Marden—while parallel bands of red, in woodcuts or cut right into wood, come roughly as Frank Stella was turning from black stripes to color. Judd's paintings mix in sand, to make their materials inescapable, and his first work in 3D mixes sand and Liquitex (marketed as the first "acrylic gesso") on Masonite or board. All he had to do now was to take his surfaces to a higher dimension.
He needed help. At first, in 1962, he reveled in what he found on the streets. He picked up aluminum tubes to nestle into wood boxes, and one curved wall piece looks like the world's largest automobile fender, give or take the cadmium red stripes running centrally across. He sought help, too, from his father, a carpenter. Apparently custom boxes ran in the family, and so did relief from the demands of fine art. When that no longer sufficed, he turned to Bernstein Brothers, near his first New York studio on East 19th Street, for galvanized or stainless iron and steel.
Some pieces still bulge outward, but Judd turns more and more to rectilinear shapes for his rhythms. The colors are as strong as before but stranger. A turquoise shelf runs across bare metal boxes, while a brass shelf tops blue verticals, as Overview. Block elements may grow longer as they run beneath a shelf, along with the distance between them. The rule could be a progressive doubling or the Fibonacci series, in which each number sums the two before it (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, . . .). Angled partitions within a wood box or tall grouped frames have rhythms of their own as well.
He may not emulate Agnes Martin, but color is increasingly his secret weapon, and he may not emulate Flavin, but he directs the fall of light and color on the wall. Plexiglas sheets within boxes cast their glow. The raised edges of a box may suggest a floating pane of color a few inches below. As a final break or a logical conclusion, Judd takes the color palette as his subject and the raised edges as its divisions—divisions that one can walk around. He hires a Swiss firm, Lehni AG, to manufacture aluminum boxes in black and primary colors, which grow in 1991 to an array nearly five feet high and even longer across. He applies variations on a theme, too, with black borders or the screws showing.
Demanding progressions
The progressions may have their rhythms, but they are going nowhere fast, no more than Judd's ideas changed much from the 1960s until his death in 1994. That can be off-putting, much like his materials. Hey, you can walk on tiles from Carl Andre, but here a guard keeps you at a safe distance. The mammoth aluminum resembles shipping crates—and indeed an early critic panned his "sci-fi warehouses." He struggled to get by for some time, although you would be amazed at how little his suppliers charged. (Oh, for the days, in an older New York.)
Still, Judd exhibited early on with the influential Green gallery in midtown and then with Leo Castelli, and he had a Whitney Museum retrospective in 1968. He appeared in the breakthrough exhibition of "Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum in 1966, and the title still describes him better than anyone. Then, too, Minimalism has hardly gone out of fashion, although with an imperative to broaden it. Now you are more likely to see surveys of Neo-Concretism in Brazil or Mono-ha in Japan—or the rediscovery of such women artists as Sheila Hicks, Phyllida Barlow, and Bettina. And that, too, dares one to define Minimalism. Judd is maximal once again in the sheer number of his answers.
Carpentry links his work to interior design and furniture, like dysfunctional objects in Minimalism for Richard Rezac, metal boxes and frames to architecture. The mathematical series link him to conceptual art. Like it or not, too, this is still painted or unpainted sculpture. Primary structures have sounded to formalist critics like the very essence of art, but Michael Fried dismissed Minimalism as theater for opening the art object onto the viewer's space and immersing the viewer in both. Those who look up as James Turrell rolls back the ceiling at MoMA PS1 will understand. So will those who tried to hold their silence at the Guggenheim for Doug Wheeler and his soundproof room.
Judd partakes of all these. So does his delegation of the art object, although one can overstate its distinction. Workshops had long served as low-tech factories, even for the greatest of artists, and Sol LeWitt leaves his wall paintings to others, too. Dada and Robert Rauschenberg turned art into scavenging and collaboration before them, and John Chamberlain had his industrial metal from automobile wrecks. Chamberlain does, though, participate in the wrecking as a skilled welder, while Judd cares more for polished construction than for his own hand. One can see his legacy a few floors down at MoMA, with Neri Oxman and "Material Ecology." Her Mediated Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab draws on nature for its shapes and 3D printing for their replica.
The very idea of minimal or maximal has a new dimension here that brings alive his influence. The curators, led by Ann Temkin, can rely on photos of the 1968 installation at the Whitney, but it need not limit them. The show is the fourth to fill the museum's sixth floor, formerly split in two. If that sounds maximal, the installation feels leisurely and uncrowded. It also feels almost bafflingly at home. It calls attention to the surrounding space as not even Fried could have imagined.
Where does it begin or end? A small bookstore dedicated to the show has plywood display cases all but identical to Judd's angled boxes. Two more serve as benches, sharing the final gallery with a single work of art. Keep looking, and the low glass walls and banisters start to feel like his conception, too—and also yours. The only difference is that Judd insisted on Douglas fir for plywood. He may have kept his hands off, but he was never less than demanding.
A very big deal
Donald Judd in Chelsea is a big deal, a very big deal. He gets every one of his gallery's spaces on West 19th Street, filling half a city block, and the works are no small thing either. You may think first of his plywood boxes, a meter on a side and unpainted, other wall-mounted work, or the colorful aluminum stacked in a greater mass on the floor, and they are all there. Judd partitions the first once or twice over, and you may have marveled or puzzled at their clarity and variety. It takes thirty of them in three rows to fill a long wall in the gallery's garage-like eastern space, where their collective presence is unmistakable. They invite one to measure out the variations, left to right and top to bottom.
The partitions begin with red acrylic sheets, at right angles to the wall, giving a solid box its touch of translucency and color. Before long, the acrylic gives way to more plywood, and by the second row the divisions start to assume arbitrary angles, exchanging color for volume and shadow. By the third row the partitions have multiplied, along with the shadows. Big enough for you? A work from 1970 covers the lower portion of the western-most back wall with galvanized iron sheets, again of uniform dimension. They would be imposing enough even if two more at each end did not allow Judd to keep to the gallery floor while snaking around its corners.
The zinc applied to galvanized iron protects it from corrosion, but you might not know that from the textured surface. Here the optical variety defies measurement, while bringing home the work's industrial weight. It sticks to the walls, its dimensions fixed by them, while going its own way. Judd was always the most sculptural of Minimalists, at a time when plain materials ruled but so did engaging the space of the viewer—what Michael Fried back then derided as theater. Talk all you like of "art and objecthood," but one might have trouble seeing or feeling anything but the room in the face of Serra's flung lead, Andre's plates like floor tiles, or Flavin's fluorescent light fixtures that threaten to dissolve the more one stares at them. With Judd, keep the room in mind, but go ahead and talk of art.
A show of him might not seem like a big deal while an entire floor of Judd still runs at MoMA. (Not that a gallery can help doing its best to capitalize on a museum retrospective.) Still, it can claim work from 1970 to his death in 1994. Freed from the need to include early pieces, where an aspiring painter could not give up the marks of hand, or even to be representative, it can shoot Judd as he might have wished to see himself. And that is big, but also weighing out the variations. From his display at MoMA, I thought of him as becoming more and more massive, but sure enough the galvanized iron is the oldest work on hand, and the thirty boxes date to 1986.
Judd's twin sides, visual and sculptural, appear in an unusual variant on his rectilinear pipes at eye level on the wall. You might not think it right to peep in from either end, but the temptation is irresistible—and it leads to a patterned white rectangle centered on a dot. It may seem at best a flourish or disturbance, like a bow as gift wrapping on a painting that mars its surface. Still, I could not help wondering if he intended the resemblance to what one might see through a gun sight. That, too, is a thing, but also a way to get one's bearings by seeing. Other wall mounts have the shine and rounded edges of fresh-minted automobile hoods.
Big deal or not, I hesitated to go near this in words after the retrospective. Rather than repeat myself or start over, let me leave you, then, with an abbreviated paragraph. Let me leave you, too, with how I began then. For a Minimalist, Judd had maximal ambitions for his art.
Donald Judd ran at The Museum of Modern Art through January 9, 2021, and at David Zwirner through December 15, 2020. Neri Oxman ran at MoMA through May 25, 2020.