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A Staple Pined vertically on the top right of the paper, that the identity of each side is only a matter of its dimensions and its being called "plywood." These sculptures are as different as one has the attention to see. Indeed, they suggest that the capacity to see concretely is a matter of how free attention is from the way of unconscious patterning by abstractions. The freedom of attention in this respect is not just a matter of individual compulsion or serenity, but of the exigencies of practical life as well. To be brief, the freedom to see concretely is a social freedom, though under present conditions it is a freedom best known to the victims of social injustice, who know they have nothing to lose by telling truths that everyday social relations repress. Every aspect of that social condition that we call "the state" exhorts us to see, and to treat, each other categorically, because there can be no social convention for knowing the individual. Yet to know anyone well is to be in a position to understand that no individual, even oneself, is a guide to the knowing of another. Inevitably we generalize ways of apprehending each other. The difficulty, under economic and political conditions that generalize us, is to know when a habit of generalization governs what we see. Judd's plywood sculptures are amendable to generalized view only to let us experience the shift of attention from a generalized to a concrete view of them, and to feel a pleasure in that. They can be called anthropomorphic because they materially evoke the human condition of individuality, a condition which has become so problematic to us that we hardly know how to think about it. Judd's new pieces set up material circumstances that can become a way of thinking about the individual as the concrete reality of which the "subject" of philosophy and social science is an unacknowledged abstraction. They associate the relaxed vision needed to see reality concretely, with a tolerance of the human condition of individuality - of being one among many who are both similar and as different as possible. The idea is not that Judd has projected human qualities onto objects, but that the relation among the objects he has assembled parallels a relation among ourselves that we find difficult to acknowledge. The elaborate specificity of Judd's objects renders certain ways of talking about them empty or irrelevant. This is one way in which they make you feel the shift of your attention from a generalized sense of them to a concretely focused view. To see Judd's sculptures for what they are, your attention has to be committed to the present, particular reality that they offer. Only then do you see them as objects that recommend a use of attention appropriate to grasping human reality, or appropriate to grasping reality as human action, including your own. All one's feelings about individual pieces are likely to be qualified by feelings about other pieces. The formal refinement and economy of some of them makes me see others as forced variations. Untitled No. 6, for instance, is a piece whose top surface sits four inches above its sides. Through the four-inch gap, you easily see the inner pedestal supporting the "floating" panel. From a distance (and in photo-graphs) this device doesn't show, so the sculpture looks like a magical or mental object whose presence is required by some scheme of variations known only to Judd. Then looking at it closely is literally disillusioning. You see it only once as an idealized, gravity-free object phantom. The function of the inelegant internal prop is then actually to banish the very sense of idealization or mental prototype that the work initially invokes. Judd's new work is more insistent than ever upon a point he made some years ago: "Even if you can plan the thing completely ahead of time, you still don't know what is looks like until it's right here." Despite the sense it makes. United No. 6 has a certain didactic aspect that seems to detract from its sensuous qualities. The simplest unit piece, an open box with no internal format, also seems to be there partly to satisfy a sense of completeness or rigor in the ensemble. But this is more like the statement of a premise, although you might also treat it as a sort of exercise in not seeing the open object as a container, since several other pieces structurally disavow their emptiness. Since the form of many pieces requires you to look down into them, you soon find that the point at which you first grasp the work formally depends in the part upon your own eye level. The most dramatic piece of the group-in the sense that it has the greatest complexity with the fewest elements-is Untitled No. BM. Here it is as if the top plane of the box had slipped down inside, for it slopes from the top corner on one side of the box to the bottom corner opposite corners of the walls of the box at a third, and two thirds, their height, respectively. Looking down the slope, the tipped plane seems to go below floor level, giving a vertiginous feelings even after its structure has been read. In this piece, in Untitled No. PC, and in several others, the "internal" element has the double aspect of a structure integral to the object as a whole and yet an incident local to a place defined by the object. This double aspect repeats the dialectic of similarity and difference, of generality and concreteness that is the thrust, if not the theme, of the work. I favor those pieces-like the two just cited-in which structure successfully contradicts or thwarts its own intimation of feeling. The recent plywood sculptures are Judd's most resourceful and satisfying work so far. They might still be called "Minimal" in the sense that they keep parts and procedures to a minimum, but they no longer need theory. [[image]] Picture of two cartons or boxes, opened, with un seen contents Donald Judd, Untitled #PC, 1974-76, plywood, 36 x 60 x 60" [[image]] Donald Judd, Untitled #BM, 1974-76, plywood, 36 x 60 x 60"
