Donald Judd: multipartite entities

photo courtesy of dia beacon

Excerpted from an essay by Lynne Cook
Celebrated as a preeminent Minimalist, Judd refined, honed, and parlayed his rigorous visual vocabulary through an enormous range of industrial materials. His simple geometric forms, whose mode of fabrication is directly exposed and immediately legible, are presented as single works, or combined serially into greater wholes, or composed according to conventional mathematical progressions. Judd stated, “the image, all of the parts, and the whole shape are coextensive.”

In relentlessly probing issues of similarity and difference, likeness and identity, Judd required that each of his works be closely and attentively scrutinized. The recognition of the specificity of each element informs the viewer’s appreciation of the relation of the individual to the collective, of the singular entity to the larger series, and of repetition to order. Such recognition has implications that are as much social and ethical in character as they are aesthetic. “Aspectual diversity”—the sequence of distinct vantage points required to navigate each work, and to negotiate its multiple faces, in an engagement that necessarily takes place in real time and actual space—plays a fundamental role in the apprehension of his work.

He closely engaged with issues of site and presentation and accorded greater emphasis to the problem of created space (as opposed to space treated as simply an empty surround).
Just as no rigid system has been exhaustively explored to determine all the different configurations possible with this elementary module, so no identifiable system accounts for their overall sequence—that is, for the juxtaposition of any one box with its often quite distinctively different neighbors.

Nevertheless, a sense of order can be apprehended, one that eschews both a hierarchical placement and the suppression of the individual to the whole. As art historian Dieter Koepplin aptly stated, Judd favored “free individuation” over structural subordination, the likely outcome of uniformity. Each box consequently retains its autonomy and identity. A multipartite entity, the work is constructed collectively, by consensus, as it were, neither given nor preordained.

Composed of twelve stainless-steel boxes with deep blue Plexiglas panels forming the back plane of each interior, untitled (1975) contrasts tellingly with the plywood piece discussed above, in that here all the units are identical. Once again, though, appearances change radically as the viewer explores each element in the sequence.

For example, the color of the inner spaces fluctuates according to the play of light, the back plane at times darkening almost to black—like the negative of a mirror—at other moments swelling with a sumptuous blue that diffuses the crystalline interior into a softly glowing ambience. A hue relatively new to Judd’s palette in 1975, ultramarine inevitably compromised the effects of “transparent factuality” (formerly considered axiomatic), since it permits shadow to modulate light, eroding angles and edges and rendering space indefinite.

Even as Judd tempered his desire for the uninflected clarity that had been a hallmark of his early endeavors, his approach was not fundamentally altered: rather, he now more fully acknowledged the contingencies inherent in the act of looking.