The Minimized Life – The New Republic

Judd might be the rare artist you can think about in your home during a lockdown nearly as well as you can walking through a pristine gallery space. His aesthetic has filtered so thoroughly through American culture that its fundamental principles are often distorted, diluted, or lost in other ways. His ideas, his life, and his trajectory as an artist offer a fuller way to understand the promise of Minimalisminside and outside the museum. Judd and his cohort made the visual qualities of industrial mass-manufacturing as worthy of aesthetic appreciation as a Michelangelo. Even if they didnt create our material world, Minimalist artists invented how we see it.

After a sojourn in Korea with the U.S. Army, Judd studied art in the 1950s under the GI Bill. His own art practice, sustained by a side-career of writing art criticism, consisted of derivative Abstract Expressionist paintings that gradually reduced into linear abstractions in saturated solid colors. Then the two-dimensional image began projecting out from the wall, in a reverse of Ab-Exs race toward total flatness. Judd embedded found material in his paintings, like a baking pan that makes a shiny divot in a field of black in a work from 1961. The works jump off the wall into three dimensions in the box structures that Judd fabricated with the help of his father (an executive who also happened to be an experienced carpenter) and painted a blazing, inorganic cadmium red.

Theres a poignancy to these early pieces, the handmade joints and seams straining to look more industrial than they are. This vanishes in the mid-1960s, when Judd begins to outsource his work to local manufacturers like Bernstein Brothers Sheet Metal Specialties. The boxes that result are slick, gleaming, and perfect, such as a smaller brass number at MoMA from 1968. You could almost call it cute; it looks to us like a pedestal in a Prada boutique only because retail later adopted (or appropriated) Judds style. In the 60s, such work was perceived as alienating and obtuse. Critics argued over whether to describe the work of Judd and his compatriots like Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, and Yayoi Kusama as Boring Art or Literal Art.

Cantankerous and reclusive as Judd was, he became a kind of Martha Stewart of the avant-garde, a tastemakers tastemaker.

The term Minimalism came from the British philosopher Richard Wollheims 1965 essay Minimal Art. The work contained minimal art-content, Wollheim wrote. If Abstract Expressionism moved from figuration to nonobjective abstraction, then Judd et al. were going even further. Painters like Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning still purported to express stuff with their canvasesmessy things like love, disgust, nature. The whole point of Minimalism was that it didnt express. There was no narrative, no feeling to communicate, no lesson to teach. What you see is what you see, as Stella once said. Instead of dramatic brushstrokes or extravagant symbolism, artistic decisions were limited to a premade paint color, the size of a box, or the finish of a material.

Originally posted here:
The Minimized Life - The New Republic