Art
The Minimalist
How did Donald Judd go from painting generic nudes to creating the works that have made Marfa the art Mecca it is today?
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By 1965 Judd was arranging his boxes in orderly rows. To Susan Buckwalter (1965) is composed of four unpainted thirty-inch galvanized-iron cubes, placed about six inches apart horizontally along the wall; the boxes are linked by a slender, blue-lacquered aluminum beam running across their tops. Judd hung other, similar sequences of regularly spaced galvanized-iron boxes vertically on the wall or placed them on the floor, sometimes connecting them with beams, sometimes not, defying the viewer to categorize them as painting or sculpture. But the object of all the genre-confusion was simplicity, not obfuscation. "The thing as a whole . . . is what's interesting," Judd wrote. Within a year he had pushed even further to reveal the whole, making boxes of transparent, tinted Plexiglas. Now every part of the structure, both inside and out, was visible at once, nothing hidden or withheld, nothing presented except the unvarnished facts of form, volume, and color. At a time when "credibility gap" and "cover-up" were about to become part of the American lexicon, there was something of a prescient political message in Judd's artistic full disclosure. And in eliminating allusions to church, state, or as Judd said, any "extraneous meanings, connections to things that didn't mean anything to art," his work also prophesied the zeitgeist of the Vietnam era on another level: With the counterculture about to flower, Judd had already cleared his garden of the old perennials.
By 1968, when New York's Whitney Museum of American Art mounted the first major survey of Judd's work, "Minimalism" had become as much a buzzword as "action painting" had been in the early fifties. Judd always hated the term, but he couldn't escape being labeled the leading practitioner and ideologue of Modernism's ultimate ism. To Minimalism's admirers and bashers alike, the sculptural qualities most evident in his work—large geometric "primary structures" fabricated from industrial materials like plastic, plywood, or aluminum, their uninflected finish machined rather than hand-crafted—defined the movement. By the time Judd had arranged the first round of financing for his Marfa project, in 1979, he had already entered history as a Minimalist sculptor.
But there was a secret hidden in Judd's transparent volumes: To a large extent they were still paintings, as much about light and color as they were about form and space. The final work in the Menil exhibit, made the same year as Judd's Whitney show, is constructed of six large stainless-steel boxes with transparent amber Plexiglas ends, spaced eight inches apart in horizontal sequence on the wall; walking to either end of the piece, one can see entirely through a tunnel of amber light. But being able to peer inside the array of boxes is no longer the point; the real action takes place in the empty spaces between the boxes, where the hue and intensity of the amber-tinted, glowing ambient light passing through the Plexiglas panels varies as subtly yet spectacularly as the minute-by-minute progression of a sunset. Judd once wrote admiringly of Pollock's cheeky response when his respected mentor, Hans Hofmann, admonished him to work more from nature: "I am nature." Much like Pollock, Judd wasn't trying to create an illusion of nature; he created a new version of nature, as it might exist in some Platonic parallel universe of pure geometric shapes—or simply in the artist's head.
Don Judd and nature as most of us know it met in Marfa, and the result was an epochal collaboration. Driven west by the inability of conventional galleries and museums to showcase his unconventional, increasingly large-scale works, Judd initially wanted to install his magnum opus farther out "on the range"; at his patron's insistence, he settled for the former Fort D. A. Russell on the outskirts of town. Replacing the walls and doors of two large artillery sheds with expanses of glass, Judd created a luminous repository for one hundred immaculately machined, regularly spaced aluminum boxes. Framed by a limitless horizon, bathed in a stunning display of natural light, these structures are anything but monolithic. Instead, they are infinitely mutable registers of their natural setting, literally reflecting variations of light, shadow, and color so subtle and fluid that no pigment could possibly convey them. It is the same transcendental play of light that transfixed nineteenth-century American Luminist painters and Western panoramists such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, rendered on a three-dimensional canvas that only Judd could have imagined. The most significant feature of Texas' cultural landscape, Judd's rows of boxes are fundamentally a giant, futuristic 3-D landscape painting—the culmination of an ambition that must have germinated, in some inchoate form, in his unremarkable little abstract landscapes of the mid-fifties.
The Menil show illustrates the extent to which Judd's profound impatience with the ancien régime was balanced by a profound patience in figuring out how to topple it. Instead of cooking up clever art-marketing strategies, he had the equanimity to simply endure youthful mediocrity, working at his easel like a prophet chanting in the desert, waiting to receive his vision. He found his way through study and trial and error, following step by step the path dictated by his own work. Judd's hard-earned convictions would later foster furious impatience with sloppy workmanship and recalcitrant patrons, but they were the bedrock on which his Marfa project was built.
But the real revelation of Judd's early work (at least that from the sixties) is how far ahead of its time it looks—not simply its own time but ours as well. In the Menil Collection's beautifully installed exhibit, there is no sense that the work has been diminished by decades of progress, like the tarnished futurism of forty-year-old science-fiction films (or four-year-old computer animations). The forms still gleaming and perfectly fabricated, the strikingly original palette still defying imitators, the complex aura of light and color on and around the surfaces appearing even more otherworldly in our age of digital effects—this might be art from outer space as much as from one man's extraordinary inner space. That science-fiction quality might also explain the fervor Marfa inspires in its pilgrims: the sense that Judd's increasingly venerable monument nevertheless remains more a message from the future than an artifact of the past, inspired by a faith we have yet to comprehend, preached by a prophet still waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
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