This project was wrongly called sculpture and that was by
people who should have known better”, is what he said in 1969 when his
works were first shown in Berlin at the
Akademie der Künste. Some of the reactions were accordingly just
as unreceptive: Minimal Art in its self-reference was nothing more than a
theatrical staging of a current nihilism a la
Samuel Beckett, whereby the viewer is left to stand alone as if on an
empty stage in front of dumb objects. Such was the premise of the art
historian Michael Fried in his legendary polemic
“Art and Objecthood” which appeared in the American art
magazine, artforum in June
1967.
Donald Judd: Untitled, 1993, Deutsche Bank Collection, ©Art Judd Foundation.
Licensed by VAGA, NY / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
The reason behind Fried’s harsh deductions on contemporary art was an
interview that the journalist Bruce Glaser held with
Frank Stella and Donald Judd in 1964 for the New York radio station
WBAI-FM, and which was published in
Art News a short while before “Art and Objecthood”. In this
discussion, the two up-and-coming artists rejected every tradition,
dismissing
Vasarely,
Op-Art and “all European geometric painting” as “an art curiosity — very
dull” and explained that contemporary art from now on would be nothing
more than “non-relational”, without any relationship to objects, people or
emotions. Stella went even further in his provocations and described in a
bored tone the New York bohemia: “Well, you have a brush, you've got paint
on the brush, and you ask yourself why you're doing whatecer it is you're
doing, what inflection you're actually going to make with the brush and
with the paint that's on the end of the brush. It’s like handwriting. And
I found out that I just didn't have anything to say in those terms. I
didn’t want to make variations; I didn't want to record a path. I wanted
to get the paint out of the can and onto the canvas. I knew a wise guy who
used to make fun of my painting, but he didn't like the Abstract
Expressionists either. He said they would be good painters if they could
only keep the paint as good as it is in the can. And that's what I tried
to do. I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.” When the
moderator, dissatisfied with this declaration, asked if this might
ultimately destroy painting, Judd retorted, “Root, hog, or die”. No
question, nihilism as sixties punk had arrived in art.
Dan Flavin: (to Don Judd, colorist) 3, 1986, Deutsche Bank Collection
©Estate of Dan Flavin / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
But denial alone does not constitute a movement. Neither Stella nor Judd
wanted their statements to serve as a final blow to the Modernists, nor
were their works anything but antibodies of the art world. Given that
Judd, born in 1928, had his “specific objects” industrially produced, any
artistic personal touch was avoided. No individual expression was to
disturb the concept of art as a superior idea. The viewer could now decide
alone, without the stylistic guidelines of the artist, about his or her
own relationship to the works. For Judd, minimal meant that works develop
by means of minimal variations in order to create a system. With this, the
law of the series and of repetition was on one hand redeemed as it
dominated in the product world of Pop.
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Donald Judd (rechts) with José Otero
producing his sculptures at Bernstein Bros. workshop, 1968 © Photo: Archive
On the other hand Judd, who worked for art magazines a few years earlier, was
interested in a truly tangible, above all clear translation of the thought
processes: what is the material of art? How does it relate to its
surrounding environment? And what can artists learn from the achievements
of the industrial age? Judd also had an obvious feel for the beauty of the
everyday when he polished his objects to a glossy finish or later used
varnish paints from
Harley Davidson motorcycle production to give the works a flawless
surface. He did not want to abolish painting by doing this. He wanted to
shift it to the three-dimensional, since he considered every canvas a
three-dimensional object regardless, as he wrote in his essay “specific
objects” in 1965: “Three-dimensions are actual space. With this is the end
of the problem of illusionism and literal space, space in and around
markings and color — this means the liberation of one of the most
conspicuous relicts of European art, against the one to be challenged the
most”.
For Stella, this realization was not part of an
academic discourse, but came from daily practice — he did after all earn
his money painting houses while he was studying. There is nevertheless an
inherent magic in his early reduced completely black paintings which Carl
Andre once analysed using the example of the Stripe Paintings: “Art
excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella found it necessary to paint
stripes. There is nothing else in his paintings…his stripes are the traces
(paths) of the brush on the canvas. These traces (paths) lead alone into
painting”. In this conclusion Stella is a completely legitimate disciple
of the Abstract Expressionists, who were also not interested in what was
being depicted but in the act of it being depicted — or at least, this is
how
Clement Greenberg sees it in his extensive interpretations of
Jackson Pollock.
Frank Stella: The Marriage of Reason and Aqualor, II, 1959. Photo: Museum of
Modern Art Collection ©VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
This intellectual affinity was most likely another reason why the Museum of
Modern Art became aware of Stella quite early. In 1959, MoMA curator
Dorothy Miller visited the studio of the 23-year-old Stella and was
excited about his black paintings. In the same year, she chose four works
by Stella that were then shown in the exhibition Sixteen Americans.
After Stella was heavily scolded in the reviews for not being mature
enough, Miller took one more risk and suggested the museum’s board of
directors purchase a work. With this MoMA laid the foundation stone of its
collection of minimal art with Stella’s The Marriage of Reason
and Squalor II. It nonetheless took another ten years for the museum,
and them mainly due to the efforts of the architect
Philip Johnson, to purchase other minimal works. Donald Judd’s
Untitled Brass Box from 1968 was first purchased in 1980 — it even
took another twenty-five years for Dan Flavin’s neon tube installation
Untitled (to the innovator of Wheeling Peach Blow) from 1968 to be taken
into the collection.
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