Spatial awareness
Andrew Lambirth
Donald Judd Tate Modern, until 25 April
The American sculptor Donald Judd (1928-94) is hailed by many as one of the heroes of Minimalism — the 1960s art movement which was in reaction to the
overt 'personality' of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Minimalism concentrated on impersonal, clear, simpli fied forms, but Judd himself rejected the label as a description of his work. He preferred to call his sculptures 'Specific Objects', and said that they were 'the simple expression of complex thought'. Certainly Judd was a thoughtful artist.
He studied philosophy and art history at Columbia University before practising as a painter for the first third of his career. During this time (1959-65) he had a greater reputation as an art critic. He later said: 'I wrote criticism as a mercenary and would never have written it otherwise', and, 'obviously art critics should be paid much more'.
The large Judd exhibition at Tate Modern, accompanying the poignant homage to Brancusi in the adjoining galleries, is curated by Nicholas Scrota himself, and is the first full retrospective of Judd's sculpture since 1988, timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of his death. It is further marked by the publication of a truly sumptuous catalogue (£40 hbk, £29.99 pbk) — the photographs of the permanent Judd installations in Marfa, west Texas, are stunning — with essays by various experts. All this is a mark of the high esteem in which Judd is held — 'one of the most significant American artists of the postwar period' — and it places a weight of responsibility on the viewer which may be a trifle overwhelming. I don't think Judd would have wanted that — he just wanted people to respond to his objects, to establish a dialogue with them, and be aware of how these forms made and articulated the space within a building. It is this spatial awareness that is central to Judd's art.
The exhibition begins with a few of Judd's paintings, including an Arp-like 'Untitled' in blue, which sadly looks rather better in reproduction than in the flesh. The sinuous white line centrally threaded with black which bisects the picture is less sensuous in reality, and the blue ground is uncomfortably scruffy. By 1962, Judd was beginning to incorporate found objects into his two-dimensional work, Here an aluminium baking pan is set into a textured black upright rectangle, several inches deep. A year later, free-standing sculpture emerges; but the juxtaposition between a 1963 floor-piece and the Tate's prominent ventilation grilles does not help this early work. There is something adolescent and self-conscious about these early solutions, though Judd was well into his thirties. It is apparent that he has no real feeling for materials, that his work is ideasdriven, and that the sooner he gives up making it by hand the better.
From the mid-1960s, all of Judd's work was made for him by professional fabricators. It is now that the mature Judd vocabulary of forms and materials is established. The materials are industrial — coloured Plexiglas, aluminium, steel, copper and plywood. Surfaces are often deliberately blank and ineloquent. Projecting units or components are repeated, boxes are constructed, the space of a room is made to speak. Forms are stacked or echoed in progressions. There are long sequences of open and closed shapes. This is an art devoted to volume, interval, space and colour, expressed in the most impersonal way. It is art for an industrial society, concerning itself specifically with man-made order and materials. Precision engineering of the mind.
'Frequently as much thought has gone into the placement of the piece as into the piece itself,' the artist assures us. For this reason Judd set up permanent installations of his work in a disused garment factory at 101 Spring Street, New York, where he lived and worked from 1968, and the extended Foundation at Marfa, where he began to establish his work from 1971. Judd considered that so much art was badly installed in museums whose curators were ignorant or careless that he wanted total control over how his work was shown. To this end he set up the Foundation, with the idea of researching and revising environments for living and for making art. He believed that space was a precious quality, that could be made visible by good art and architecture, but that was everywhere compromised in the modern age. He determined to do something to keep his principles before us, and so the living monument at Marfa was commenced.
I wonder what Judd would have thought of the installation at Tate Modern. The first half has some very effective changes of pace, and it is good to be able to admire (and spend time with) just two sculptures in a space, as one can in room 5. To move into room 6 is quite another order of experience: a sequence of seven large plywood boxes hop down the far wall, facing a long aluminium wall-piece. From there it is different again to move into room 7 and sit contemplating a wall-mounted stack of ten aluminium elements, a six-part cuboid series in cold rolled steel, and a copper box
with a red enamelled interior, with St Paul's in the background beyond the Wobbly Bridge. It doesn't get much better than that.
In fact, the show is too extended. Plywood can get a bit wearing after a time. I know the point of it is its anonymity and blandness, hut you can have too much of a good thing. I kept thinking of pigeon-holes outside a common room; not a useful association. Then in the mid-1980s Judd began to make (or rather, ordered to be made) multi-coloured metal wall-pieces of rimmed panels or shallow boxes enclosing space. But the intense colours are vulgar in comparison to the dancing hue of his favourite light cadmium red, which he used so often because it showed up the edges and lines of his structures. These wall-pieces are altogether too Swiss, too clockwork, like Mondrian without the perfect pitch. They don't have the refinement or subtlety of the gorgeous blue stack (the metal coloured this time, the glass clear) in room 8, for instance, a late work from 1990. Even the anodised aluminium boxes in room 10 like silent tombs refuse to sing.
The Judd exhibition is about precision and disruption, about trying to catch you offguard, and make you more visually aware. It is revealing to compare Brancusi with Judd, and the fact that these two exhibitions coincide rather suggests that this is what we are being encouraged to do. In a certain sense, they couldn't be more different. Brancusi is spiritual, aspirant, whereas Judd is material, perfectionist. But both aim for purity, and both in their different ways achieve a degree of serenity in the process (not that you'd be allowed to think about 'process' for a minute in Judd's company). Someone once described Judd's work as 'Mondrian meets the oil business'. It's an interesting take on a complex man whose legacy continues to provoke thought and provide beauty.
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