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guise) intentionality, what she called "the intention-laden grammar of process," and the presence implicit therein. To Krauss the idea was to make meaning "a function of external space" as opposed to a function of internal space, that metaphorical realm where the operations of the constitutive mind occur. She saw the denial of such a space and such an operation is crucial, a break with the "Cartesianism" that was the ground of "Western illusionism." That is a brilliant idea, but I do not think that Minamalist sculpture made such a break. When I see a Judd sculpture, say of 1967, I cannot help but posit, as ground, a mental or internal space in which it is posed, if not conceived, as form, as a priori. Even a gestalt, as the tenet quoted above states, must be "established" as such. There is, thus, a presence "behind" the work.

In 1977 Judd showed several boxes that were set on the floor and open at the top. There are three basic elements to these works: an external space, an internal space, and the plywood itself as a transitional membrane. As derivations from a gestaltlike norm, the boxes cannot be internalized; rather, it is as if consciousness passes from viewer to object, from one receptable (the mind) to another (the box) in a conduction of presence. The "exhaustion" is of the viewer, the plenitude of the sculpture.

The new boxes counter all these forms of presence. The presence that promotes theatre in the Friedian sense is no longer an issue, for the boxes do not insist upon an objecthood; they are not monoliths of any absolute. The presence that is he mind which poses forms, conceives gestalts, is also no longer an issue, for the boxes seem automatic and are not gestaltlike at all. Lastly, the presence that is sensed in a kind of metaphysical equation of viewer and object is also no longer an issue, for the planar interiors of the boxes deflect any such exchange. There is neither an equation of presence nor a transendence into presence (as is the case when one "enters" a more hieratic art-object, like a Madonna and Child).

My discussion of presnece, given the rigor of philosophic discourse, I know to be crude. Nonetheless, I do see a relation between the topical notion of presence and Judd's new sculpture.