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UNTITLED (Continued)

Inattention is taken to its highest level. A series---persistent and bland---emerges without composition. Nothing is composed in this nerve-less structure. Judd has laid the foundation for the "specific" paralysis of art. "Painting is dead." he says. "Sculpture is dead." But the art habit continues. "The generality and the specific" are in his words "a handy device". Familiar forms take the eye into an ineffable and hermetically exclusive series of "doubles". Multiplicity hangs on multiplicity, not by any direct reason, but by a compounded into a maze of right-angles; some hidden, some visible. The mind is eclipsed by the promise of understanding something hidden. An amalgam of "perceptions" place iton the eye-level, till it decomposes into a memory. A unfathomable memory. Other artists spill into one's mind, as a possible clue to the object's meaning---Albricht Durer for example. Or Alfred Lord Tennyson, who said:
"Let me not cast in endless shade
What is so wonderfully made."
There is nothing to explain that this object is a metaphor of many nonentities, a parade of multiple aspects and confused object evolves into a vacant end. Judd's omissions are inspired. A lack of talent is at the root of all great art. Judd's object fits that root. It is the common factor in the substrata of emptiness. Judd has reconstituted his basic incoherence into a semblance of order. But not for long inthe mind of the viewer, all is reduplicated into a false impression. The ideal tautology fails. The eye's rapture is thrown off by chance distractions. The unity denies unity by asserting it. We are suddenly at the outskirts of futility. Dualism forces the mind into an artificial infinity for an instant, then goes back to torrential meaninglessness. This is the enigma of the hidden abstraction that overcomes one's expect-ation. Time crawls over the cubic regularity of the specific object, ever so slowly. Second by second, module by module, while the gray bar remains at rest. Deposits of Time build up and down. These thoughts are swallowed by Judd's