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ARTFORUM
November 1976

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SEEING THROUGH THE BOXES
Donald Judd, Untitled 1964, steel and plexiglas, 31 x 45 x 20"

Donald Judd; Complete Writings 1959-1975, Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975, 229 pages, $14.50.

Donald Judd, a catalogue of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and a catalogue raisonné. Essay by Roberta Smith. Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada for the Corporation of the National Museums of Canada, 1975, 320 pages, $15.00. 

JEFF PERRONE

These two books (a complete catalogue and the complete writings) are, in effect, a semicompact way of increasing the importance of an oeuvre with immense amounts of supporting material reclaimed from a highly defined milieu. They both wrap up and codify a certain state of mind which represents a prevailing ideology of 1960s American art.

One difficulty with the catalogue is that one cannot name a work by Judd; he does not give them titles. (Untitled doesn't help.) There is no way of distinguishing one work from another without lengthy description. Judd himself uses a common device for identifying his works, but it has serious drawbacks. Instead of description, he says "the one that Stella owns," or "the piece in Robert Rowan's collection," or "the big box shown at the Metropolitan," or perhaps "Leo Castelli had it in his tenth anniversary show."

There are two disadvantages to these "descriptions": they are imprecise (it is still necessary to give long-winded descriptions if you want to speak in depth), and probably worse, they feed right into the hands of the works' owners. Nondescription and pedigree are hard to align with each other. It may not have been Judd's intent to cater to this situation, for he has said, "Art is not defined by the purchaser" (Writings, pg. 217). Nevertheless, I have seen little to indicate that he has resolved the conflicts. 

The catalogue raisonne (from the large Judd retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada last year) attempts to alleviate this state of affairs, but unfortunately the substitute proposed is just as difficult, and much more awkward. For an amber plexiglass and stainless steel box, we are given the identifying number "DDS 128." (Roberta Smith refers to works by their DDSes in her essay; DDS stands for the initials of the three people who compiled the catalogue.) This solves virtually none of the problems, however, for DDS 128 has the "same form" as DDSes 134, 144, 145, 155, 158, and 291. Besides not being a very handy way of discriminating these specific objects from one another, one would have to carry around this rather heavy book (it's nearly two inches thick) for reference, as it is unlikely that in the near future a "DDS such and such" is going to mean anything.

The catalogue lists the complete provenance of each of the more than 1,000 "objects," so, in any case, we again have ownership to fall back on (provided the current owners resist the temptation to sell) It was with some relief that I hit upon one or two objects whose "whereabouts" are "unknown." For instance, two DDS 72s somehow got away from this sleuthlike documentation. Lacunae of this sort make me thankful that the chance irregularities of the real world create doctoral topics for future art historians. But then, as Harold Rosenberg has said, "Today we know who did what." 

In case the reader is wondering why I am devoting so much time to this problem of naming, reference and ownership, I think it is important to ask what function such an enterprise, so exacting, exhaustive, and (nearly) complete, has to do with the world the work comes from. When a book takes on the proportions and style of an encyclopedia or Bible, I cannot help but react with a certain distaste, especially when the figurehead which the book means to canonize has little more than 10 years of mature work behind him. It is most difficult to keep one's perspective when the main valorizing essay must devote space to such things as "Art is the most important thing in [Judd's] life," or (in complete seriousness):

Judd's skepticism about order is basically affirmative. It applies to his view of contemporary art, to his opinion of governments, to his preference for unblended over blended scotch. (Catalogue, pg. 11)

This is no longer in the realm of the merely irrelevant, but in the universe of the groupie, the flatterer, the stooge. There is more than a thin line between making an artist seem more "human" (the writer's ploy when celebrating Picasso) and elevating personal habits to the status of profundities. This happens to be a carryover from the admirers of Duchamp, whom Judd, incidentally, never tires of protesting against. Judd's coherent development and unending devotion to boxlike forms certainly establishes an artistic personality by itself; the question is, what kind of personality would become possessed of such forms, what does it mean outside of his own personal psychology and the patterns of art world taste?

There is, in Ms. Smith's essay, such a reverence for