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Artforum Summer 1977 DJ

DONALD JUDD: PAST THEORY

Kenneth Baker

Seeing Donald Judd's 15 recent plywood sculptures reminded me of another critic's having once called Judd's work "anthropomorphic" because it was hollow. That remark assumed that "anthropomorphic" can have only a pejorative use in talk about sculpture. The best sense I can now give the remark is this: that a sculpture's clear division of outside from inside somehow confirms a misleading image we have of how our knowledge and ignorance of each other relate. The message in the "anthropomorphic" criticism was, I think, at least partly that we should eschew hollowness in esthetic terms if we are ethically serious about eschewing the idea of human beings as hollow. I mention this point of view because I think Judd's plywood pieces themselves discredit it in a striking way. For collectively, rather than singly, there is something affirmatively anthropomorphic about these pieces. Taken together, they evoke in material terms a metaphysical condition of human beings, the condition of being at once as similar and as different as possible.

All 15 pieces are of the same dimensions, five feet square by three feet high. They were installed so that the first six you encountered on entering established an assumption that each of the 15 is structurally unique. At a glance, and from a distance, several of the pieces are hard to distinguish formally, while others are immediately different. It is as if some distinguished themselves, while you had to distinguish others by deliberate inspection. The group comprises a sort of family of structural variations, yet there is nothing to suggest that 15 is their necessary number. Even a casual look, however, discovers extremes of similarity and difference.

Two pieces that were adjacent in the recent installation bear an extreme resemblance. Each appears to consist of an open cube within an open cube. But attention reveals that in one case the inner and outer cubes have a common bottom at floor level, while, in the other, the bottom of the inner cube is four inches above that of the outer. Comparing these two pieces makes you aware of the comparison of objects as a comparison of perceptions, that is, as a matter of personal judgment. (You also realize that each object helps you see the other, though neither is an instruction in seeing the other.) This observation, in turn, leads you to reconsider those pieces that seem to distinguish themselves with no effort on your part. You discover that the clarity with which some of the works differ from each other really expresses your own judgment as to the obviousness, or the objectivity, of the differences you notice. And with the notion of objectivity you project a judgment as to what must appear to everyone as so, forgetting that is a judgment at all unless some practical confusion makes conspicuous as such.

Judd's sculptures show us a liability of the commerce with abstractions that the modern world and our form of social life require of us. They allow us to discover, even to sense, that we are liable not to know whether our attention is focused on an abstraction or on concrete realities. (This liability is wholly practical: vast industries exist to promote for profit the confusion between concrete realities and ideas of the real - industries such as advertising, entertainment, and cosmetics. The modern state itself stands for the abstraction of all social relations from their immediate human terms.)

By their identical dimensions, their consistent material, and even by the unifying effect of their lumber smell, Judd's sculptures tempt you to see them categorically at first. If you had some of his earlier work in mind, you might see these new pieces as translations into a new material of some sculptural formats he had used before. But when you grant these particular objects more attention, you see that the plywood is not a way of generalizing them, as steel or aluminum could be, but a way of deepening their differences. Let go the assumption that the grain of each panel is incidental information, and you see that the faces of each sculpture are as elaborately different as handprints. You see also how the assumption as to what information is significant stands in the way of the perception of concrete realities. Although adjacent sides of a piece may have identical dimensions, they differ with a detail that defies visual memory and, so, defies close comparison. The grain is a structural, not a decorative, aspect of the material and of the work. Unlike some of Judd's earlier work, these plywood pieces cannot be taken to confirm the phenomenological notion that the perception of one side of a regular object implies the perception of its unseen sides.

Judd's new work makes it clear that no perception implies another without an interpretive convention mediating them, with an abstraction linking them. In the plywood pieces you see that no side represents the perception of another side, unless you assume

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Donald Judd, Untitled #6, 1974-76, plywood, 36 x 60 x 60"

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Donald Judd, Untitled #16, 1974-76, plywood, 36 x 60 x 60"