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

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I could go on and on: Having Marden's mesmerizing beeswax paintings and the wonderfully understated canvases of Ralph Humphrey, no doubt a great inspiration to Marden in terms of color, next to the fussy multipart shaped canvases of David Novros and the pseudomathematical flukes of Paul Mogensen is absurd until you discover while combing the catalogue (which is not user-friendly either) that they all exhibited at Bykert Gallery in New York. The juxtaposition of the hideously decorative pastel-painted, canvas-covered beams by Judy Chicago with a series of Robert Smithson's jejune early geometric objects (in poor physical shape) seems grotesque until you learn that such works were side by side at the famous "Primary Structures" show of 1966. The cohabitation of two rare galvanized-steel works by Chamberlain from 1967 and the well-known 1966 wall piece made by Judd in the same material seems at first a brilliant curatorial decision (one of the rare cases in which a point is made visually), since both works are all about surfaces and both condemn any idealist notion of interiority. Yet one suddenly wonders what Oldenburg's superkitsch Leopard chair, 1963, is doing in the same room, until, that is, one remembers that works by both Oldenburg and Chamberlain reigned high in Judd's pantheon of "Specific Objects."

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Another room assembles small yet bombastic sculptures by Douglas Huebler; parodic shaped canvases sprayed a la Olitski by Lawrence Weiner in 1968 (each in a color chosen by a prospective buyer who also determined their notched indentations); and amazing early Michael Ashers, including the slightly convex sheet of pink Plexiglas from 1966 with almost TV-like rounded corners. Its glowing edges mysteriously separate it optically from the wall, leaving it illusionistically suspended in midair. I take it that the jarring quality of these juxtapositions is supposed to carry the curator's message, but no one will get that putative point unless one is told what those three artists have in common: Very soon after making the works in this room, they would sever their youthful ties with Minimalism and propose some of the most radical and effective critiques of the movement to become pioneers of Conceptual art, especially of the brand now called Institutional Critique. Many more missed opportunities such as these abound in the exhibition. Indeed, I would not insist on them at length, if the show's flaws were due to mere carelessness or ignorance, as is the case for the Guggenheim medley. But it is doubly saddening here that the curator obviously knows her stuff. She just failed to find a way to get this knowledge across, and as a result, the fruit of her immense historical research is all but lost.

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Here I could also mention a few quibbles with the installation, such as crowding a huge room of Rymans and Mangolds with an enormous LeWitt and acknowledging Robert Grosvenor's vastly underrated suspended works of the mid-'60s with just a few skimpy photographs and a small drawing (why bother?). However, the installation is neither breathtakingly beautiful nor lamentably inept, and as such it does not deserve much comment. My real concern with the show, as should by now be clear, is of a conceptual order: All the necessary material is in stock for a great exhibition, but because Goldstein refused to offer a point of view on it--other than making sure that nobody was forgotten and that each artist got his or her niche--she failed to do the job she had so courageously undertaken and for which she had so superbly prepared.