C108
Review
London: Donald
Judd at Tate Modern
Tate Modern is hosting the first retrospective
of Donald Judd's sculpture since his death in 1994. The
exhibition provides a thorough sampling from his sculptural
practice, prefaced by a dense arrangement of early paintings
and wall reliefs. These early pieces signaled the artist's
shift into the three-dimensional forms that he notoriously
referred to as "specific objects"; work that was neither
painting nor sculpture.1
Cleverly paired with the Constantin Brancusi retrospective
next door, a visitor can witness an important transitional
moment in the history of modern sculpture. The use of
the museum pedestal is absorbed into the compositions
of Brancusi and then altogether eliminated by Judd, bridging
the distance between work and viewer, assimilating the
space between them.
A steadfast ideologue, Judd built
himself an impenetrable fortress of rhetoric to protect
his work and the context within which it was seen. As
a critic, he broke relationships and ideas down to their
primary components. When he was good he provided lucid
and prolific interpretations of art practices, especially
his own. When he was not so good, he made sweeping generalizations
of a tenacious and sometimes myopic caliber. Refusing
the reductive taxonomies of other art critics, Judd wanted
to protect his role as one of the first to use floor-based
structures addressing atmospheric concepts of space that
anticipated 'Installation Art'. Inadvertently, Judd reestablished
notions of the artist's studio and its layers of concept,
process, production and placement, eventually becoming
a pioneer of the modern-day permanent installation.
Even today it seems impossible to
talk about Judd without speaking in Judd, as the
essays in the catalogue, the texts in the exhibition and
even recent articles regarding the show have demonstrated.
Only a decade since his death, his voice resonates throughout
the Tate's exhibition. In one of his essays reprinted
in the catalogue, Judd asserts that there is a widespread
ignorance of the existence of a relationship between space
and architecture. He proposes that it can be articulated
through something that reinforms its presence.2
Curating his first exhibition in ten years, Sir Nicholas
Serota's selection of forty-one works uses Judd's solution
as curatorial strategy to map out the artist's thirty-five-year
practice. Exploring the spectrum of his technique, the
show allows a comprehensive look into Judd's use of color,
materials, scale and site-specificity in his attempts
at creating these pure forms. In this abbreviation of
his legacy, the Tate has given a reminder of and reinforcement
to his career and what it means to have a committed project
of a near-utopian order.
Aaron Moulton is a critic
of post-war and contemporary art based in London.
