The persistent disbeliever: on Donald Judd's writings.
Donald Judd identified his work as “specific objects,” a term intended to describe his three-dimensional works that were divorced from organic lives and instead dependent on architecture and geometry. In his essay “Specific Objects,” (1965) Judd stated, “actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat.
In his classic essay Specific Objects, Donald Judd described an art that is “neither painting nor sculpture,” and which “doesn’t constitute a movement, school, or style.” Judd published the text in 1965, at a time when his own body of work had only just begun to reject the conventions of gallery appropriateness.
Minimalism and early abstraction. Although radical, and rejecting many of the concerns of the immediately preceding abstract expressionist movement, earlier abstract movements were an important influence on the ideas and techniques of minimalism. In 1962 the first English-language book about the Russian avant-garde, Camilla Gray’s The Great Experiment in Art: 1863-1922, was published.
Minimalist art often confounds the viewing public. In his seminal 1965 essay “Specific Objects,” Donald Judd explained: “It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting.” Much clearer.
Donald Judd Minimalist sculptor who worked with industrial materials to create geometric objects either singly, or in serial arrangements, placed directly on the floor, or stacked on the wall Identify this work.
The most withering criticism of Judd came from his contemporary Michael Fried in a 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood,” published in Artforum. Fried called Judd’s art a mere “genre of theater.”.
In 1964, Judd wrote Specific Objects, a manifesto-like essay calling for a rejection of the residual, European value of illusionism and advocating an art based upon tangible materials. Judd aligned himself with other artists working in New York, such as John Chamberlain, Jasper Johns, and Dan Flavin, whose work also incorporated non-traditional materials such as found objects, steel.