Judd’s objects aspire to the condition of natural beauty. This goal is suggested in his work in several ways. For example, he often organizes his objects using the Fibonacci series, in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc)—a sequence also found in natural things like pinecones, spiral shells, and the spacing of flower petals. Also, like a mountain range, tree, or waterfall, Judd’s works demand one’s physical presence in order to apprehend them; they do not lend themselves to reproduction. Because Judd’s objects always produce multiple and variable images, any single view and the photographic image it might produce is always radically partial.43 Furthermore, the frequent use of translucent and reflective material means that what one sees also varies with the quality of light present, and thus in cases where the work is displayed in natural light (always Judd’s preference) what one sees also depends on the season, weather, and time of day.
3.2 Donald Judd, untitled (DSS 120), 1968. Stainless steel and yellow Plexiglas; 10 units, each 9 × 40 × 31 inches. Private collection/Bridgeman Images. © 2016 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Judd’s “wall stacks” with the Plexiglas tops and bottoms (one of the examples Judd himself frequently mentions) provide good examples of the variability and complexity of the visual experiences offered by his work. When one faces a wall stack at a distance of approximately twenty feet, for example, one sees a row of shiny metal rectangles that seem to float in the air in front of the wall, a sense that is amplified by the glowing light that renders the wall to either side a light yellow (or orange or pink). As one moves closer or walks to the side, the cantilever from the wall becomes apparent, as does the nature of the construction of the shelflike boxes themselves. From very close, one can look through the Plexiglas inside the work and see the internal seams, the width of the material, how the different pieces are joined. Up close one also begins to notice the complicated views established interior to the column formed by the work. Light that has filtered already through one piece of Plexiglas casts a different light onto the piece of Plexiglas below it than does the natural light alone, so that the Plexiglas itself appears to be multicolored.44 With this work, as with much of Judd’s work, every view seems to reference its own incompleteness, its own proximity to other, oblique views that may be surprisingly distinct.
This is one aspect of the visual complexity of Judd’s objects, which, when combined with the work’s significatory silence, produces an aesthetic experience akin to the one we associate with natural beauty. That is, Judd’s works attempt to refuse to mean, allude, or express, but at the same time offer surprisingly complex, even internally contradictory, visual experiences.
The significatory silence is the result of Judd’s rigorous efforts to avoid “composing,” probably the most distinctive element of his aesthetic ideology. Noncomposition for Judd meant avoiding the hierarchical ordering of the parts of an object, such that, for example, there are central and marginal figures, foreground and background. This hierarchical relation among parts is where figuration, the invitation to interpretation, and the attribution of a subjectivity behind the work sneak in. It is nearly impossible to avoid this effect in painting, since, as Judd wrote, “Anything on a surface has space behind it.”45 Painting, in other words, is about giving you a feeling that you are seeing through the painting into a space; inasmuch as “a painting always has a model on its outside,” it “is always a window.”46 Thus, like Gertrude Stein, who “made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense” but found that “there is no such thing as putting [words] together without sense,” Judd “tried to get rid of spatial illusionism, but … couldn’t.”47 While three dimensions helped to relieve the window-effect that Judd sometimes called “spatial illusionism,” a hierarchical relation between parts remained a problem. This is the basis of Judd’s critique of Mark di Suvero: “A beam thrusts, a piece of iron follows a gesture; together they form a naturalistic and anthropomorphic image. The space corresponds.”48
In a modern update of the biblical prohibition on graven images, Judd’s task was to produce an object that gave one nothing to latch onto in order to make guesses about what the artist might be saying or feeling.49 At the beginning, achieving the effect of noncomposition proved to be quite difficult. Speaking of one of his early pieces, a red plywood box with a recessed semicircular trough across the top, Judd noted that “I did a great deal of juggling to make it uncomposed. I spent a lot of time determining where the trough should be on top of the box, having to do with it not being in any particular or obvious spot… . I wanted to get rid of all the extraneous meanings—connections to things that didn’t mean anything to the art.”50 Later decisions were motivated by a similar desire to avoid the appearance of mystery or ambiguity as much as possible, to avoid elements that might invite “reading in.” For example, the move from plywood to factory-fabricated metal and Plexiglas removed traces of the artist’s hand. Likewise, in order to disclose the nature of the material that he was working with as much as possible he would do things like recess the top of a box to make visible the thickness of the material, or use Plexiglas to open up the interior of constructions so that they were not hidden. Seriality (“one thing after another”) and instantly recognizable geometric forms became Judd’s main strategies for avoiding the appearance of hierarchical relations between parts.
Like Leibniz’s monad, the Juddian object offers no windows “through which anything could come in or out” but at the same time contains the surrounding world by reflecting and refracting it.51 That there is no representation going on in Judd’s works does not mean there is not a lot to see. Indeed, with Judd’s works it is not always possible to determine what it is that you are seeing, even as oblique angles and refracted, colored light beckon one to explore what is there. One frequently gets the sense that there “appears to be more than what is literally there.”52 In the slightly glowing floating rectangles of the wall stacks, or the boxes with colored or reflective interiors that seem bigger than the shiny metal that encases them, we are often confronted with visual information that seems to exceed or contradict the rigorously noncomposed object before us.
This surprising visual information is often presented in oblique or apparently marginal spaces or surfaces. One might examine, for example, the space between the horizontal wall boxes. At first these spaces seem empty. But in keeping with Judd’s refusal to hierarchize—to allow any element of the work to be background, empty space, or part of a figure—one finds in this space a beguiling set of reflections. There is one set of reflections on the external surface of the Plexiglas and another inside the box. The two cannot be seen at the same time, since one has to refocus one’s eyes to shift from one to the other. The interior reflection redoubles the space between the boxes. One sees reflected a stripe of wall the same width as the gap between the boxes. But upon close examination, the reflections do not match up with the adjacent brick wall, so the reflection must be coming from somewhere else. The “outside” of the work is represented—in a confusing, distorted way—as an effect of reflective and refractive relations “inside” the work. The work thereby performs its own internal differences, its nonidentity with itself as an object of perception.
By not “meaning,” avoiding composition and thereby discouraging the beholder from attributing a subjectivity to the work, Judd’s objects are freed from the burden of identity: it is not so much that we see them “in themselves” as that we see the impossibility of seeing them in themselves; we see that there is no object in-itself available to perception. This is perhaps what Robert Smithson called the “uncanny materiality” he saw in Judd’s works.53 Such an uncanny lack of self-identity is usually reserved only for “nature.”
Adorno argues that “natural beauty is the trace of the nonidentical in things under the spell of universal identity.”54 The trace of nonidentity is an escape from the mutually reinforcing logic of identity and universal exchangeability that governs eve
ryday life. In this logic, everything—land, cows, square meters of sheltered space, diamonds, organically grown arugula, human labor, shoes—must be available for abstraction into the universal exchangeability of money. The flip side of universal exchangeability is self-identity or genuineness: exchange demands that there be a measurable, specifiable, knowable “thing” to be exchanged. Thus, Adorno is as suspicious of the genuine as he is of universal exchangeability itself:
The discovery of genuineness as a last bulwark of individualistic ethics is a reflection of industrial mass production. Only when countless standardized commodities project, for the sake of profit, the illusion of being unique, does the idea take shape, as their antithesis, yet in keeping with the same criteria, that the non-reproducible is the truly genuine.55
That which announces its internal contradictoriness for the same reason resists this logic. Perhaps it would be more precise to say that we hold onto the thought of an outside of reification by reserving a setting for perception that is neither “genuine” nor subjected to the “spell of universal identity” but that resists both in its ambient, nonidentifiable quality. Thus, “nature” does not offer its visual pleasures to the objectifying (identificatory) gaze of the person who has made the trip to a famous site in order to gaze at beauty (“oh, this is beautiful!”) but only to a relaxed, unconscious apperception in which we attain a state of “free-floating attention,” the affective state Freud suggested for the analyst, which is also how Adam Phillips describes “boredom.” Juddian “interest” requires just such a boredom.
3.3 Donald Judd, untitled (100 untitled works in mill aluminum) (detail), 1982–1986. Aluminum; 100 units, each 41 × 51 × 72 inches. Collection Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX. Photograph: Douglas Tuck. © 2016 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
3.4 Donald Judd, untitled (100 untitled works in mill aluminum) (detail), 1982–1986. Aluminum; 100 units, each 41 × 51 × 72 inches. Collection Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX. Photograph: Douglas Tuck. © 2016 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Judd’s 100 Aluminum Boxes (1982–1986) vividly dramatize the aesthetic effects most characteristic of his work more generally. The boxes are permanently installed in Marfa, Texas, in two former Army artillery sheds. There are forty-eight boxes in one room and fifty-two in the other, arranged in long rows on the floor. Each box has been altered in some way: a side missing, the top recessed, the sides taken off and another box put inside, diagonals running from one edge to another.
3.5 Donald Judd, untitled (100 untitled works in mill aluminum) (detail), 1982–1986. Aluminum; 100 units, each 41 × 51 × 72 inches. Collection Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX. Photograph: Douglas Tuck. © 2016 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
In the Aluminum Boxes, as in the horizontal wall boxes with the Plexiglas sides, an internal fold reflects something outside of the object as an effect of the folding itself so that what we see when we look at the box is much more than the box itself—such as the surrounding landscapes—yet at the same time nothing but the box. The visual experience is an effect of an internal refraction or fold, much like the camera obscura or the eye itself.
This produces a couple of effects. Extraordinary specificity of views is accompanied by apparently infinite variability, replacing the identity-difference binary with a expansive field of similarities. The movement of one’s own eye is matched at every point by a new and different view, setting up a mimetic relay between your eye and the eyelike aperture made by the fold in the box. This effect is redoubled by the fact that in trying to figure out how what it is that you see there got to be reflected there, one finds oneself trying to imagine one’s eyes at various points inside the box: What would I see from there? Where is the light coming from? What are the relevant angles? For a moment we see the world from the point of view of the box, and even if the effort does not fully succeed, a mimetic relationship is enacted. The box is not a window through which we see another reality, but itself an eye (which mimes our own even as it operates according to another systemic logic), which teaches us to see a different world in flashes of mimetic apperception.
Thus, if Judd’s objects aspire to the condition of natural beauty, it is important to add that this “nature” is not ours. Smithson suggested this in comparing one of Judd’s works to a “giant crystal from another planet.”56 Rather than represent reality from a distance, Judd has cut it open like a surgeon and implanted a natural object from a nature that is not ours. Or perhaps it is we who have been dropped into a landscape that does not exist. This is a mode of sheer artifice to which neither painting nor theater aspires. It is closer to film, which also aspires to give us a feeling for a natural world that does not exist. (Perhaps this is why other planets have from the very beginning been a privileged mise en scene of film.)
In Judd’s alternate world, the places of nature and modernization in the artwork are reorganized. In the landscape painting or still life, for example, nature is a raw material for the artwork, just as it is for industrial modernity. Realistic depictions of nature offer us windows onto that distant nature, which remains an object for our subjectivity. Judd’s works, on the other hand, take the seemingly unspectacular stuff of industrial modernity as raw material.57 With this material he produces objects that do not imitate nature but nevertheless end up resembling it in their rigorous silence and perceptual-experiential complexity. In fact, Judd’s own practice as an artist mimes the total control and factory production that characterize the modern domination of nature. Judd’s objects are no less refined, precise, and washed clean of any human trace than any factory product—they are paragons of a machine aesthetic. If the very function of the commodity form (in the trademark or brand name, for example) is to hide the labor that went into the object and gave it value, “so as not to reveal that the one who sells it did not in fact make it, but rather appropriated to himself the labor that went into it,” then Judd has made the work of art into an absolute commodity.58 Inasmuch as the effacement of the subjectivity of its maker is the goal of Judd’s noncomposition, it is also a perfection of the commodity form, a carefully prepared and controlled intensification of the reification of human labor.
One of the many ironies here is the way that it is precisely the imposition of a strict order on the materials and the attempt to erase traces of the human hand in them that allow their material substance—their “obduracy,” Judd called it—to come into existence as such.59 Judd radicalizes reification, excising all traces of subjectivity in an object that appears to be of no use to anyone. Only thereby does he allow us to listen to what we might call “the language of things.” And like factory workers conversing, gossiping, or complaining on the assembly line, even as they are dominated by a totalizing order, these things—Judd’s materials—preserve their own quiet language. They carry on secret conversations with the world around them, murmuring with the echoes of Plexiglas jukebox windows, car parts, cutlery, and shiny metal turnstiles. The colors are more gregarious, looking at us with familiar eyes: we all know red, yellow, and orange personally, even intimately. Judd’s materials surprise us like crumbs of madeleine. They do not provoke full-fledged Proustian “involuntary memories” so much as they animate shards of affect from the collective history of everyday life.
By so starkly framing his objects as unmeaningful and nonexpressive and then stimulating these secret feelings that can only be apprehended passively, as it were, Judd seems to be reminding us of the value of this relaxed attitude toward the world. The thrill of this reminder is that our mimetic capacities are reawakened, if only for a moment, within an artistic space governed precisely by the principle of the rational, mechanical ordering. Briefly, we have an experience in a world that does not exist, and in so doing, we gain a momentary glimpse of the finitude of our own subjectivities. Only then can the closedness of our monadic subjectivity be glimpsed and felt. Even if the reawakening of the mimetic faculty that has occurred in relation to Judd�
��s objects cannot easily be translated back into the world, at least we can have an affective relation to our inability to be affectively open to the world. We can mourn the absence of our connection to the world around us.
Put differently, in Judd’s specific objects we become interested in our own reification. And inasmuch as we are allowed to step back from our reification for a moment, or witness the process of reification turned inside out, we can consider the ways in which this reification is shared, how it too dwells in a field of similarities.
*
Of course, even as Judd exemplifies a paradigm of noncompositional art, his example—not entirely intentionally—also demonstrates its limits. This is because, despite Judd’s avowed desire to make his artworks about nothing but themselves, the fact remains that they are immediately recognizable as “Judds.” Even the erasure of one’s own authorship can be recuperated by the art market as an authorial gesture like any other. Only a completely anonymous art would escape this fate, and then one could not be a functioning (i.e., moneymaking) artist in the art world. In order to operate on the art market, the artist must submit to the iron rule of self-identity, ultimately guaranteed by the (unique, individual) person of the artist her-or himself. Like any other commodity-producing entity, the artist must guarantee brand recognizability and authenticity; Judd cannot help but produce one “Judd” after another. Thus, even though the works as such are obstinate in their refusal to represent, express, signify, or refer, in order to be exchanged, they must borrow an identity from Judd. Inevitably (as in this very chapter), Judd’s works are talked about in terms of the arc of his career, his development as an artist, the coherence of his various works as an oeuvre, the going rate for a good Judd at auction, and so on.
Judd found his need to comply with the rules of the market distasteful, and he tried to insist that it was not his intention to create commodities; it was just how he happened to make his living: “My work and the work of my contemporaries that I acquired was not made to be property. It’s simply art.”60 There is more than a little bit of what used to be called “bad faith” here, and I suspect Judd knows it. It is, of course, not so simple to separate “business” from “art,” but Judd clearly (and understandably) resents his own reification, and I suspect that this difficulty accounts in part for his vituperative attacks on the commercialism and careerism of Warhol, who irritated everyone by avowing what everyone else was trying desperately to sweep under the rug: that artists, as a condition for being artists, are also always advertisers and businesspeople, selling, moreover, mainly to the richest, most privileged capitalist class. If many artists, Judd included, could not bear to avow this, they nonetheless often allegorized it in their work. By contrast, Warhol embraced it, but in so doing he perverted the business of art, scandalously proclaiming: “being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art … Business Art. Art Business. The Business Art Business” (Phil, 92). For Warhol, this was not “giving in” to business; for him, “art” was bigger than “business”; the world of business, like advertising, movies, publicity, and so on was just more material.
Like Andy Warhol Page 16