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

It would be dishonest for me to say that I learned a lot from the show. Except, that is, for the quite cheerful realization--given what one has come to expect from curators of contemporary art--that one does not have to be Judd to install Judd properly. One simply has to be sensitive to his work. But my appreciation for the artist's constantly counterintuitive use of materials and colors never ceased to grow, from his red-orange Day-Glo sand paintings and reliefs of 1962 to his stack of open wall boxes that concluded the exhibition. In the plywood units of this last work, the "bottom" of the box facing us on the wall is covered with colored Plexiglas, one of Judd's favorite materials. Unlike many early works, it did not demonstrate a glassy sheen, nor did its transparency condense light violently at the edges of its thin surface, but instead it subtly modulated the lackluster bluntness of the plywood. I have always been enormously attracted to Judd's take on materials, for me the quintessence of his poetry, but this aspect of his work was particularly well emphasized by Serota's choices: There was enough variety in format, size, and shape to make you aware of Judd's multifariousness, despite his reputation for having a very limited formal vocabulary, yet there was also enough repetition (three signature Stacks, for example) to appreciate his endless play between difference and identity.

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Perhaps the two best works included in the catalogue were not in the show, leading one to imagine that their loan was cancelled at the last minute by the Guggenheim Museum, where they were concurrently installed in the hastily assembled (and sophomorically titled) "Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present." There was little redeeming about this show, which is why, I believe, the two Judds stood out: a six-unit horizontal wall piece made of brass and pink-red Plexiglas, and a vertical ten-unit copper stack, both in mint condition. Their condition was so good, in fact, that, remembering Judd's diatribe against Panza's remakes of his work, I wondered for a moment whether they were not simply brandnew. The answer is no, but rather that since being acquired from Panza, they've been attended to with utmost zeal by the Guggenheim's conservator Eleanora E. Nagy, who has become one of the leading authorities on this matter--Judd's sculpture, especially in polished metal, being just as fragile as Brancusi's. (Were I in charge of the Judd estate, I would hire away this expert on the spot and dispatch her to advise every public collection with such works in its care.) The other work that stood out in the Guggenheim's hodgepodge was Robert Irwin's eerie Soft Wall, 1973, a kind of black Reinhardt in space--except that it's all white. Although I have seen other works of its kind shown in better conditions elsewhere, you are supposed to experience it as follows: You are plunged into a room suffused with intense light, and it is only slowly that your vision adjusts; you move toward the large wall facing you, and at some vertiginous moment you realize it is actually nothing more than a semitransparent nylon screen partially obscuring the rest of the room behind it.