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"ART FORUM"   January 1979   DJ

REVIEWS
New York
DONALD JUDD, Heiner Friedrich Gallery;
MICHAEL BISHOP, Light Gallery; RALPH GIBSON
and JAN DIBBETS, Leo Castelli Gallery:

An oft-quoted tenet of minimalism reads: "Characteristic of a gestalt is that once it is established, all the information about it, qua gestalt, is exahusted." I thought crudely, and not entirely facetiously, that one could read, for "gestalt," a "Minimalist sculptor like DONALD JUDD," so nearly is the box an unequivocal sign of Judd sculpture and, metonymically, of Judd himself. What new can be said?

The new show is new; the work, though not unfamiliar, is defamiliarized. Seventeen oblong boxes, mostly open to us, are set evenly along the wall, just below eye-level. The box is a format, within which each interior (of more or less complex plywood planes) is unique. Thus a tension obtains; to and away from a norm, wholeness, series, or a logic of form. Neither given as a priorinor narrated in process, neither subsumed by a concept nor experienced first and last as an object, the sculpture is impervious to the usual critical probes.

As the box is a constant, it is like an armature, analogous to a canvas support, within which the interior planes are alike. Thus the problematics of the interrelation of external and internal design, debated by Stella and others in painting ten years ago, seem operative here. one is not sure whether to read the boxes from the to the outside or vice versa. Either way, one does read a content, distinct from the box form. This is important as it sets the work apart from Minimalist sculpture, in which, as Rosalind Krauss wrote of a Robert Morris piece, "the specific configuration of the work is not allowed to become a figure seen against the 'ground' of the object's 'real' structure" (Artforum, November 1973). That one may read the boxes so, i.e. as figure and ground, is partly because they are placed on the wall. Such a (re)alignment with the verticality of the viewer is proper to sculpture, but here, with the boxes on the wall, it may have more to do with the illusionism of painting: each box, like a canvas, is seen as a natural extension of our own visual field. 

I said that the material-illusionist relation of box and interior is analogous to that of support edge and interior. However, to go as far as to equate box with matter, and interior with illusion, is too simplistic: a metonymy of material confuses the two, for both box and interior are plywood. In general, as Judd has noted, "There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material." But I wonder if this is true of plywood; to be sure, it is a surface conducive, as a ground, to painting (in fact, I associate it now less with sculpture)

Perhaps other analogs will help the work disclose itself. A Judd box has roughly the same dimensions as a tele-vision set, and that too is an object effaced, in part, by an inner space that is read simultaneously before and be-yond the wall. Of course, the tension between materiality and illusionism is (was) very topical in experimental film; and the boxes can be read as frames that are effaced, as one "pans" the gallery to the film-like animation of the interiors. (It is important to note here that the order of boxes does not imply narrative: the variations from mox to box are not consecutive, nor does the order imply montage: the variations are not dialectical.) So too, as the boxes are on the wall, they recall relief, a medium in which context also projects materially as context also projects materially as content seems to recede. 

Sculpture that is Minimalist in orgin must face the brand of "theatre" applied to Minimalism proper by Michael Fried (Artforum, Summer 1967). To Fried the Minimalist object is theatrical insofar as it imposes as a presence, a presence that provokes a situation between viewer and itself. This he spurned as not self-critical. "What lies between the arts is theatre." "The literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing more that a plea for a new game genre of theatre, and theatre is now the negotiation of art." The new boxes are related to theatre is now the negotiation of art. "The new boxes are related to theatre——but to conventional theatre, the place of drama, not Friedian theatre. Open at front, they relocate experience within the object; and though there is no sign of drama there (as there may be in a Cornell box), there is a multiplicity of space that acts as a locus for potential drama. Each box is thus a kind of empty theatre. Inasmuch as a box or a theatre displaces space, it is an object; and yet, inasmuch as it also contains space, a space privileged for illusion, it is an object effaced. 

No single reading is secure: looked at longer the boxes map out other spaces. Open, with inner planes that angle outward, each box looks like a perspective device whose point of intersection is where we stand: in a sense it is as if we were an extension of its space as mere coordinates in an abstract system of axes, and real space were elsewhere (perhaps behind the box). 

The boxes cast shadows on the wall, and these must be taken into account. Indeed, they effect a radical reading of the boxes. One would assume that the shadows make each box more typical as sculpture, as a distinct object in space. However, if we read the shadows as modelling, and the planar edges as contour lines, each box becomes, in toto, a figure on the ground of the wall. Such a reading is corroborated by the fact that Judd translated that boxes into etchings. That translation makes of the boxes motifs——figures for a graphic art. Moreover, as etchings, the boxes do not project as forms. There is a "positive-negative" instability to that medium (an optical effect also of graphic cubes) that negates perspective. The etched boxes are flat, abstract lines.
 
In the essay that put forward the critical notion of "theatre", Fried detailed how the Minimalists shied away from sculpture that is relational in char-acter; he quoted Judd in particular as adverse to work "made part by part, by addition, composed." The strategy here was to negate anthropocentricity, both in image and in process, which was done, superficially. The tendency to see anthropocentricity negatively, as a bias that inflects all thought, and the enterprise to render it nugatory, are still very much with us, as the work of Jacques Derrida makes clear, and the strategy is now more profound. Hand in hand with anthropocentricity goes the notion of "presence," which, as Fried was perspicacious enough to note, Minimalism had not negated——had in fact promoted. Not only does Minimalist sculpture have a physical presence, i.e. command a situation or theatre, it also speaks to a metaphysical presence, i.e. to a plentitude, not an "exhaustion", of gestalts, forms, ideas, etc. 

In the past, as Rosalind Krauss noted, Judd used forms that seemed given, forms that were somehow a priori. This was done in order to delimit (or disguise)

[[image]]
Donald Judd, Installation at Heiner Friedrich Gallery, 1978. 

by Hal Foster

Transcription Notes:
image is room with a small wall in the foreground and wall extending towards camera that's across a row of support pillars. Along the wall are numerous boxes described in the passage, there seem to be about ten with the interior of each one revealing either a darker or darker shadow. the floor is made out a reflective surface and reflects the bottom of all the boxes.