Specific objections: Yve-Alain Bois on Donald Judd in London and minimalism in New York and Los Angeles

ArtForum, Summer, 2004 by Yve-Alain Bois

The difficulty I just mentioned makes the phenomenal success of Nicholas Serota's installation of the Judd retrospective at Tate Modern all the more surprising. The place is one of the most inimical to art that I know (along with the Guggenheim, but more on that later), with harsh light, pompous proportions, and ridiculously high ceilings in its galleries and oppressive gloom in its common areas. Yet the Judd exhibition not only looked superb, it also uplifted Herzog & de Meuron's spectacular fiasco to the point that several moronically conspicuous details--such as air vents--suddenly looked well positioned and even interesting. The a contrario proof was furnished by the disastrous installation of the Brancusi exhibition next door, which was dominated by gigantic white saucers serving as bases to the artist's carefully crafted ones and returned the architecture to its original glibness.

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On the whole, the show was beautifully paced and offered a magisterial overview of the diversity of Judd's art without feeling jammed. Though it was by no means small, given the huge size of some of the pieces, it was highly selective, counting just under forty works. My only regret was that but two small rooms were devoted to the early works, with only two paintings and three low reliefs of that crucial period from 1962 to 1963, during which time Judd switched at top speed from two to three dimensions. Another small grudge: One was prevented from turning around the first fully enclosed volume in the exhibition, since, perhaps being fragile, it was securely perched on a platform. The first work in which Judd glued Plexiglas (purple) on wood (painted light cadmium red), the sculpture is one of very few that call to mind Rus-sian Constructivism, particularly in its use of the diagonal (to which Judd would return some twenty years later) and in its didacticism (evident in the way Judd turned a square box into a two-step staircase of inverted triangles via the simple gesture of a diagonal cut). I would have liked to circumnavigate it in order to make sure that the Russian heritage I seemed to be detecting was a red herring due to the trick of its frontal placement.

Small grudge, I said. From then on, with one exception, everything was arranged to perfection, with particularly fine attention devoted to symmetrical axes and vistas from afar. For example, from the preceding room one could see the opaque ends of the famous stainless-steel and amber Plexiglas Untitled, 1966. But only on approaching it did one encounter the transparent sides, revealing the tensed steel wires that hold the piece together. The same effect occurred with a glorious Untitled topless copper box of 1972. One noticed its inner glow from a distance, yet only after hovering over it was the spectator rewarded with the revelation of the cadmium red enamel, which covered the bottom of the interior. The sense of discovery generated by the installation of these two works perfectly highlighted the tension between Judd's interest in making manifest his modes of assembly and in evoking, at the same time, a picturesque sense of surprise. One exception to the otherwise impeccable installation was the crowding of four (out of a series of twelve) anodized-aluminum boxes of 1989 into a gallery so small that one could never fully experience them in their totality and bask in the luscious reflections that their variously painted dividers cast on their satiny inner surfaces. The room felt like a thoroughfare, and it is the only space in which I saw no one linger for long.