Donald Judd
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“Design has to work. Art does not.” — Donald Judd
Ideas have fathers
One of the many destructive assumptions nowadays is that ideas have no fathers. But ideas are thought up by someone. For example, the concept of placing a sculpture on the ground without a plinth was one of Judd’s ideas; it is now very common and no one is aware of this. Another one of his ideas was the concept of the installation, the use of the whole space. Many artists devalue this idea. Once again there is no discussion at all and mediocre works are created. Art historians who are concerned with the past are at least still interested in chronology, those who work with contemporary art are not, and they see art as the subject for their own speculations.
Artist Donald Judd (1928 – 1994) held the 1993 Mondrian Lecture called ‘Some aspects of colour in general and red and black in particular’.
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“I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you
paint a painting with brush strokes. It’s all right, but it’s already
done and I want to do something new. I didn’t want to get into something
which is played out and narrow. I want to do as I like, invent my own
interests. Of course, that doesn’t mean that people who, like Newman,
still paint are worn out. But I think that’s a particular kind of
experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass,
you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment. I
think what I’m trying to deal with is something more long range than
that in a way, more obscure perhaps, more involved with things that
happen over a longer time perhaps. At least it’s another area of
experience.”Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968.
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Donald Judd, Untitled, 1966
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“I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you
paint a painting with brush strokes. It’s all right, but it’s already
done and I want to do something new. I didn’t want to get into something
which is played out and narrow. I want to do as I like, invent my own
interests. Of course, that doesn’t mean that people who, like Newman,
still paint are worn out. But I think that’s a particular kind of
experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass,
you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment. I
think what I’m trying to deal with is something more long range than
that in a way, more obscure perhaps, more involved with things that
happen over a longer time perhaps. At least it’s another area of
experience.”
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968.
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“Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or
popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves
the artist’s artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a
free-for-all. The one struggle in art is the struggle of artists
against artists, of artist against artist, of the artist-as-artist
within and against the artist-as- man, -animal, or -vegetable. Artists
who claim their artwork comes from nature, life, reality, earth or
heaven, as ‘mirrors of the soul’ or ‘reflections of conditions’ or
‘instruments of the universe’, who cook up ‘new images of man’ – figures
and ‘nature-in-abstraction’ – pictures, are subjectively and
objectively, rascals or rustics.”
Judd spring in Winterthur.