94

Kunstlicht jrg. 31 2010 nr. 3/4 Beeldende kunst + architectuur

Wouter Davidts

FROM MR. BIG OF SOHO TO THE MAN WHO BOUGHT MARFA

Wouter Davidts is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the VU University in Amsterdam. He is the author of Bouwen voor de kunst? Museumarchitectuur van Centre Pompidou tot Tate Modern (2006) and recently edited The Fall of the Studio: Artists at Work (2009, with Kim Paice) and CRACK: Koen van den Broek (2010). He curated the show Abstract USA 19581968. In the Galleries at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, which runs until 11 February 2011.

95

Wouter Davidts From Mr. Big of SoHo to The Man Who Bought Marfa

Disgruntled by the illusory spatiality that lingered in even his most abstract paintings, Donald Judd went on to work in real space. But instead of becoming a sculptor, he focused on the qualities of space itself, using a three-dimensional form that [is] neither painting nor sculpture. By carefully calibrating scale, size, objects, and environments, he created works that actually inhibit pictorial space as well as in sculptural space.

the whole world + the work = the whole world. Martin Creed, work no. 232, 2000 When the artist Donald Judd issued a statement at the launch of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas in 1986, he stressed that the institution grew out of his personal concern to provide artworks with the best possible temporal and spatial conditions.1 In a by now well-known passage Judd remarked that [i]t takes a great deal of time and thought to install work carefully. This should not always be thrown away. Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved again. Some work is too large, complex, and expensive to move.2 The Chinati Foundation was to provide a gauge for installing present-day artworks: Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinumiridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place.3 Apart from the exemplary spatial precision and the temporal stability, Judd also pointed out the exceptional size of the endeavor: The Chinati Foundation [] is now one of the largest visible installations of contemporary art in the world, visible, not in storage. When it nears completion, or even now, if my own complex [of La Mansana de Chinati] is added, it is the largest, as bets Texas.4 On the invitation card for the opening that was sent to all international guests, however, a text was printed that surprisingly put the acclaimed largeness of the project in perspective. What is unique about the installations, so future guests were told, is not so much to be found in the scale and the magnitude of the whole. The distinguishing feature was the fact that here art is encountered in

the context of its surrounding architectonic spaces and in a natural situation and not isolated in a museological anthology.5 The Chinati Foundation on the grounds of the former Fort Russell in Marfa was the most extensive in a series of building and installation projects that the artist Donald Judd initiated during his life, in order to permanently install his own work and that of a selected group of artists that he liked and admired. It all started with the acquisition and refurbishment of the 1870 castiron building on 101 Spring Street in SoHo in 1968, and after having moved to the little town of Marfa in the South of Texas in 1971, continued with the purchase and renovation of several small to large buildings in and around town.6 Due to this incremental accumulation of real-estate in New York and later in Marfa, the artist received such nicknames as Mr. Big of SoHo and The Man who Bought Marfa.7 Yet at many occasions in his writings and during interviews, Judd expressed his distrust of sheer size. Even though the artist was creating some of the biggest art installations of the twentieth century, he did not blink to state that [s]mall is beautiful and that one never ought to make anything [] bigger than necessary.8 In the many essays that he wrote on the subject of art and architecture, the artist never felt obliged to defend the actual dimensions of his building and installation efforts. They were, so he noted in 1977, urgent and necessary.9 In 1985, one year before the ofcial opening of the Chinati Foundation, Judd penned down that proportion and scale were qualities that were very important to him. In contrast to the prevailing regurgitated art and architecture, he argued, he was working directly toward something new in both.10

96

Kunstlicht jrg. 31 2010 nr. 3/4 Beeldende kunst + architectuur

1. Donald Judd, 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum (interior view), 1982-1986, The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.

97

Wouter Davidts From Mr. Big of SoHo to The Man Who Bought Marfa

98

Kunstlicht jrg. 31 2010 nr. 3/4 Beeldende kunst + architectuur

2. Donald Judd, untitled (Brass Box), 1968.

The subsequent installations in the 101 Spring Street Building in New York, La Mansana and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa then are, if we are to believe the artist, not so much the product of the artists megalomania and privileged nancial position and institutional power, but the launch of a new paradigm in terms of size and scale for the encounter between artworks, buildings and nature.11 Judds use of the notion of scale was based on one of his so-called counterintuitive intuitions.12 Instead of dening scale as public, that is, as being constituted between the art object, the body of the viewer and the (architectural) context, Judd thought of scale rst and foremost as a built-in quality of the art object itself.13 Don, sculptor and friend David Rabinowitch recalled, thought of scale as fundamentally inherent in an object.14 A noteworthy example of Judds use of the idiosynchratic notion of internal scale is to be found in his well-known 1965 review of the work of Lee Bontecou, an artist that would later that year also prominently gure in his landmark essay Specic Objects.15 Lee Bontecou, Judd started the review, was one of the rst to use a threedimensional form that was neither painting nor sculpture.16 Bontecous reliefs signaled to Judd a vital departure from the compositional hierarchies, representational illusionism and thematic allusion that marked previous art, and European paint-

ing in particular. Bontecou belonged to a small number of Americans artists that had developed a new scale.17 In order to abandon the type of unication necessary for the representation of objects in space, Judd wrote, the new work had a larger internal scale and [] fewer parts.18 The new scale, especially in case of Bontecous simple reliefs, was pragmatic, immediate and exclusive and allowed the work to manifest itself as an object in its own right, as a work with a power that was remarkably single.19 An object gave evidence of internal scale when the three primary aspects, the scale, structure and image, were in balance, albeit

3. Donald Judd, untitled (Brass Box), 1968.

99

Wouter Davidts From Mr. Big of SoHo to The Man Who Bought Marfa

4. Donald Judd, 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum (interior view), 1982-1986, The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.

not a placid balance but a powerful polarization of the latter elements and qualities within the work as a whole.20 Polarization on its turn was a value of long standing for Judd, most clearly elaborated in his critical appraisals of the work of Jackson Pollock.21 In his 1967 article on Pollock, Judd praised the painters works for the paradoxical combination of the lack of compositional hierarchy between the particular material marks of paint on the one hand, and the resulting experience of the general composition of the canvas as a whole on the other: Everything is fairly independent and specic.22 Judd realized that not a single part, let alone a fragment of a Pollock painting, matched the powerful experience of the painting as a whole. Yet every single drip of paint nevertheless manifested itself as an sovereign and specic element. Polarity then was constituted by the divergence between

the particularity and the generality of a work. The elements and aspects of Pollocks painting, Judd concluded, are polarized rather than amalgated.23 Although Judd also held Pollock responsible for the introduction of a new size of painting, he did not consider a works degree of polarity to increase along with its size.24 Polarization rather was correlated with the internal scale, that is, with the inherent proportional relation between the parts and the whole. In his 1983 essay Abstract Expressionism, Judd stressed that the large size and the great scale of Abstract Expressionism were not the same thing. While he admitted that the large size and fairly simple parts of paintings like Number 32, 1950 by Pollock, or Annas Light by Barnett Newman produced a great scale, he stated, almost paraphrasing the latters famous exclamation, that scale is not dependent on size.25

100

Kunstlicht jrg. 31 2010 nr. 3/4 Beeldende kunst + architectuur

Yet for Judd painting was not the most appropriate medium to achieve his artistic ambitions. While he started out as a painter of abstract works, he gradually grew disgruntled with the medium, in particular with the residual spatial illusionism that continued to haunt all paintings, even the most abstract works.26 Anything on a surface, he noted in his essay Specic Objects, has a space behind it.27 Judd decided to work in the three dimensions of real space.28 Yet this did not imply that the artist immediately converted to the medium of sculpture. His true artistic objective, so one could read in the opening sentence, was to work in the area in between both media: Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture.29 The very newness of his work, so the artist claimed in his last essay Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular, consisted in developing space as a main aspect of art.30 Judd regarded space as one of the distinct qualities of his art, to be sensed along with shape, color, light and proportion. His space, Richard Shiff has rightly pointed out, was a primary among equals. It became an active element rather than a passive container, no longer the homogenising background of a picture.31 Judd granted objects a particular shape, materiality (that is, color and surface), and proportion (that is, an abrupt cantilever from the wall or rise from the oor) so they could resolutely occupy space as three-dimensional entities. Yet while space turned into a vital constituent of the experience of works by Judd, these works were not intended to activate the space they dwelled in.32 Even though space no longer acts as a homogenizing pictorial background, the spatial formation of Judds works remains fundamentally pictorial. Or put differently, while Judds works indeed identify actual space as a constitutive aspect of an artwork an element that they project into, as well as enclose, shape, and contain, like a sculpture they nevertheless continue to relate to that actual space in frontal fashion like a painting. The works use the oor on which they are placed, or the wall on which they are hung, as a backdrop, that is, as a surface from which they abruptly emerge, or, put differently, from which they arise, either vertically or horizontally. This applies not only to the vertical wall stacks or the horizontal wall progressions,

5. Donald Judd, 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum (exterior view), 1982-1986, The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas.

but as well to the many shiny boxes in either brass or aluminum, the surfaces of which both reect and merge with the oor on which they rest. In this essay I would like to argue that it is precisely the acknowledgement of the dual nature of Judds work the existence, as Robert Pincus Witten remarked in 1970 about one of Judds brass boxes, in two spheres of being, in pictorial space as well as in sculptural space that provides us with a critical framework to assess the scale of his work in general, and the scale of his installation and building activities in particular.33 Judds scale, I contend, consists of the transposition of the polarity that he detected in an artwork, respectively a Pollock painting or a Bontecou relief, into the actual space of an art installation. The inherent scale that he discovered within the works of the aforementioned artists is transferred into space: it is spatialized. Judd managed to arrive at the quality of polarization that he avidly wanted to achieve

101

Wouter Davidts From Mr. Big of SoHo to The Man Who Bought Marfa

in his three-dimensional work via the medium and practice of installation, that is, via the calibrated relationship between the scale of his works and the scale of the setting.34 The artists consecutive installations, I will argue here, can be read as spatial renditions of the pictorial quality of polarization. From SoHo to Marfa, Judd provided his abstract works with different yet utterly specic spatial backdrops, in terms of both size and materiality. That activity, which spanned a period of more than 25 years, is marked by a major difference between the change of the size of the works on the one hand and the change of the size of the settings on the other. Throughout his career, Judd continued to produce work that retained the body as a basic measure.35 The enlargement or extension in the work of Judd was, as Barbara Rose presciently remarked in 1968 in her article Blow Up The Problem of Scale in Sculpture, laterally rather than vertically.36 The artist did not so much blow up his

work vertically to tower over the viewer, but did rather extend it sideways. If the work grew bigger, it was due to the multiplication of the units. While the one hundred untitled aluminum boxes in the Artillery Sheds at Fort Russell make up an undeniably vast installation, the respective one hundred boxes remain comparatively small objects (img. 1-5). Judd moreover always stressed that all boxes were to be considered as individual works.37 The architectural contexts in which and the spatial backdrops against which Judd successively placed his work, however, did gradually grow bigger: there is a major leap in size from the interior of the Spring Street loft building in the urban fabric of New York, over the assorted spaces within the walled garden of La Mansana, to nally the industrial sheds of the Chinati Foundation in the vast natural landscape of Marfa, Texas. It is signicant that Judd in all of these cases did not create environments from scratch. If the architecture of the artists projects might give the impression of being tailor-made, it remains important to remember that he always started with existing buildings that he subsequently refurbished. Judd notoriously took pleasure in criticizing new architecture and applauding existing, vernacular architecture.38 Every context he chose to install his work in was marked by a certain degree of materiality and historicity. He was uninterested in a neutral setting and wanted to provide his works with a real backdrop. All idealizing spatial and architectural strategies would end up putting the works on a pedestal again.39 Yet this urge was rst and foremost driven by the gradual development of the artists works. The less reference to reality his works came to possess Smithson once famously referred to Judds pink plexiglass box as a giant crystal from another planet the more the backdrop had to be a marker of that very reality.40 My work, he once complained, has the appearance it has, wrongly called objective and impersonal []. Yet my rst and largest interest, so he continued, is in my relation to the natural world, all of it, all the way out. This interest includes my existence, a keen interest, the existence of everything and the space and time that is created by the existing things. Art emulates this creation or denition by also creating, on a small scale, space and time.41 Judds installation practice, I would like to argue, examined the relational difference between

102

Kunstlicht jrg. 31 2010 nr. 3/4 Beeldende kunst + architectuur

6. Donald Judd, interior view of the bedroom of 101 Spring Street, SoHo, New York.

art and all other things material, either natural or man-made, that we encounter in our daily existence in time and space. The more wordly the backdrop and the more abstract the work, the more polarized the installation as a whole could become. Judd consciously installed his works against different backdrops, each being marked by a different spatial regime, ranging from the urban bustle of New York, the domestic tranquility combined with the idyllic nature of the hortus conclusus of La Mansana de Chinati or The Block, and nally the vast stretch of landscape in the Artillery Sheds of the Chinati Foundation.42 Judd already started this practice in 101 Spring Street in SoHo. The view at the city through the windows of his bedroom was framed by a work by Dan Flavin, itself being a succession of frames of tubular light xtures (img. 6). In his studio on the ground oor he frontally juxtaposed his own works with the life on the streets. In two portraits of the artist in the ground oor workplace in the early 1970s, one can discern two of the artists early paintings mounted on the solid wall panes that alternate with the windows (img.7).43 Later he exchanged these paintings by a wall sculpture consisting of two small aluminum boxes. The domestic spaces of the house and the enclosed space of the garden of The Block, however, pre-

7. Donald Judd, interior view of the ground oor studio space of 101 Spring Street, SoHo, New York.

103

Wouter Davidts From Mr. Big of SoHo to The Man Who Bought Marfa

remarkable unity in which the different elements nevertheless stand out and retain their discrete character. This succession of radically different settings from 101 Spring Street, over The Block to The Chinati Foundation represents an ever further move away from the workday world of industrial modernity and consumer culture with which Judds work, as Joshua Shannon has convincingly argued, had inescapably entered into a mimetic relation.44 In each of these distinct contexts Judd never aimed at a synthesis, but forced the works in an utterly balanced yet fundamentally contrasting relation with their setting, whether architectural or natural, that is, whether building or landscape. While the artist to a certain degree went as far as to blend his artworks with their everyday environment, he nevertheless frontally juxtaposed both with each other, as in a picture. Judds subsequent installations in New York and Marfa may serve as prime examples of a fertile meeting between art and architecture, even between art and life, yet the actual artworks never fully merge with their surroundings. They remain to claim their difference. This sensation is the product of what David Raskin has termed Judds aesthetics of disparity, an artistic enterprise that generates complexity in the face of unity.45 Just as much the works at times even literally frame their context, that very context frames the works too. The most famous picture of the installation of the one hundred aluminum boxes in the artillery sheds in Marfa consists of the view along the axis of the artillery sheds (img. 4). Judd himself however indicated that it was not the longitudinal view within but the perpendicular view through the building that was the most important: The long parallel planes of the glass faade enclose a long at space containing the long rows of pieces. The given axis of a building is through its length, but the main axis is through the wide glass faade, through the wide shallow space inside and through the other glass faade. Instead of being long buildings, they become wide and shallow buildings, facing at right angles to their length. (img. 5).46 By prioritizing the frontal view through the building instead of the internal view amidst the boxes, Judd highlighted the necessity to see both the interior space of the installation and the landscape together, that is,

8. Donald Judd, interior view of the living quarters of the East Building with view into South East Gallery, The Block (La Mansana de Chinati), The Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas.

sented the artist with a radically different backdrop than the loft building and the surrounding urban environment of New York (img. 8). La Mansana de Chinati somehow seems to have served as an intermediary stage between the domestic and exhibitionary conditions of respectively 101 Spring Street and The Chinati Foundation. While Judd used both the large warehouse spaces in the south-west and the south-east buildings as galleries to present his works, the boundaries between these exhibition spaces and his living and working quarters were far from absolute, yet nevertheless distinct. Judd tried out the different levels of coexistence and juxtaposition between his works and the props of his private life, and in doing so he tested and put at stake the difference between the respective regimes of these very material objects and surroundings. The result is a

104

Kunstlicht jrg. 31 2010 nr. 3/4 Beeldende kunst + architectuur

as both are framed through and by the building. In doing so, he indirectly conrmed the pictorial constitution of the installation as a whole. The building not so much juxtaposes as it pictures two worlds that could not be more distinct from each other: articial on the one hand and natural on the other. While the artillery sheds deliver the material framework for the individual works, they rst and foremost deliver the pictorial outline for the installation as a whole. It is via and through these buildings that we understand that the real backdrop for the one hundred aluminum boxes is not the architecture but the vast Texan landscape, that is, the landscape as it is framed by the architecture. Judds key statement that [t]he greater the polarity of the elements in a work, the greater the works comprehension of space, time and existence, applies to the installations as a whole.47 By taking control of the spatial installation of his own works the artist made sure that the latter were going to be viewed against that very material world that they want to differ from, yet fully partake in, albeit in such a fashion that both the difference and the partaking come into the picture. The scale of either Judds works or the institutional enterprise of the Marfa efdom, I would like to argue, can only be critically assessed by measuring the intense process of installation that went with it, in both temporal and spatial terms.48 In every installation being an at once spatial and temporal translation of Judds conception of a polarized entity that is marked by a balanced internal scale neither the size of the works nor the size of the surroundings matter at rst. What matters to assess the scale of Judds work in general is the extent of polarization that results from the juxtaposition of the different elements. The uniqueness of the different permanent installations by Judd is indeed not so much to be found in the scale and the magnitude of the whole, but in the experience of a contrasting encounter between artworks and different types and magnitudes of nature urban or rural, domestic or exhibitionary, private or public, man-made or natural in the respective installations. Contrasting indeed, since Judd was not involved in providing his art with an ideal setting. He was rather testing out the viable spatial and temporal conditions to grant (his) artworks a meaningful place. The spatial precision

that is, the well-proportioned balance between the artworks and the buildings and the temporal consistency that is, the aim to have that equilibrium tested by the course of time created a model and a gauge. Yet the model-quality of Judds installations, I would like to argue, is not so much to be found in the perfected conditions of presentation as they are to be situated in the realistic assessment of the relative dimensions of arts place and status in the world, that is, a place mediated by the practice of installation. In comparison to all things produced and existing, Judd once indicated, art is no more than creating on a small scale, space and time.49 But that didnt prevent him, as bets an artist, to claim a proper spatial and temporal enclave to accommodate art and to test out its probable dimensions. In a present-day world and society where things are ever more directed towards total instrumentalization and rapid exchangeability, Judds installations, both in New York and Marfa, serve as a solemn reminder of how small yet considerable arts place in the world is. But more importantly, they involuntarily also reveal how difcult it is to safeguard and maintain that place. It was a belief that the artist already voiced in 1985 when he most presciently remarked that [it]'s a lot easier to make art than to nance and make the space that houses it.50

105

Wouter Davidts From Mr. Big of SoHo to The Man Who Bought Marfa

A first version of this essay was delivered as a paper during the session The Age of Enlargement at the College Art Association (CAA) 98th Annual Conference in Chicago on February 13, 2010. The research is part of a book-length project on size and scale of postwar art, architecture and art institutions. D. Judd, Statement for the Chinati Foundation / La Fundacin Chinati, in: D. Judd, Complete Writings 1975-1986, Eindhoven, 1986, pp. 110-114 (111). The writings of Donald have been published in two separate editions: the aforementioned Complete Writings 1975-1986 and D. Judd, Complete Writings 1959 -1975. Gallery Reviews, Book Reviews, Articles, Letters to the Editor, Reports, Statements, Complaints, Halifax 1975/2005.

the centre of Marfa, the latter structure for the installation of Chamberlains work. After financial decline in 1985, Dia Art Foundation is forced to abandon Judds project in Marfa. In 1987 Dia Art Foundation transfers the ownership of the property and artworks in Marfa to the newly founded, public organisation of The Chinati Foundation/La Fundacin Chinati. For a survey of the different architecture and installation projects I refer to: M. Stockebrand (ed.), Donald Judd. Architektur, Mnster 1989; P. Noever (ed.), Donald Judd. Architecture / Architektur, Ostfildern-Ruit/ Portchester 2003; U.P. Flckiger, Donald Judd: Architecture in Marfa, Texas, Basel 2007. Most recently a lavishly illustrated book on the history of the Chinati Foundation was published by the foundation itself: M. Stockebrand (ed.), Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd, Marfa/New Haven, 2010. 7 P. Gardner, SoHo: Brave New Bohemia, ARTnews 73 (1974) 4, pp. 56-57; P. Wright, The Man Who Bought Marfa, Radio Program, BBC 3, Wednesday 1 September 2004 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3). 8 D. Judd, Art and Architecture (1987), in: Stockebrand 1989, op.cit. (note 6), pp. 194199 (197). 9 Idem, In defense of my work, in: Judd 1975/2005, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 9-10 (10). 10 Idem, Marfa, Texas, in: Judd 1986, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 96-102 (102). 11 For a critique of Judds alleged megalomania, see a.o. Y.A. Bois, Specific Objections, Artforum 42 (2004) 10, pp. 196-203, 289. 12 R. Shiff, Donald Judd, Safe from Birds, in: N. Serota (ed.), Donald Judd, London 2004, exh.cat. Tate Modern, London, pp. 29-61 (46). 13 In this regard Judd fundamentally differs from his contemporary and colleague Robert Morris, who in his landmark essay Notes on Sculpture II of 1966 states that minimalist work resorted to larger size in order to avoid the private relationship towards small objects and to obtain a public condition: Much of the new sculpture makes a positive value of large size. It is one of the necessary conditions of avoiding intimacy.

[] If larger than body size is necessary to the establishment of the more public mode, nevertheless it does not follow that the larger the object, the better it does. Beyond a certain size the object can overwhelm and the gigantic scale becomes the loaded term. This is a delicate situation. For the space of the room itself is a structuring factor both in its cubic shape and in terms of the kinds of compression different sized and proportioned rooms can effect upon the object-subject terms. See R. Morris, Notes on Sculpture II (1966), in: R. Morris (ed.), Continuous Project Altered Daily. The Writings of Robert Morris, Cambridge, Massachusetts/London/New York 1993, pp. 11-22 (15-16). 14 Rabinowitch, as cited in Shiff 2004, op.cit (note 12), pp. 29-61 (46). Rabinowitch himself, so he adds, saw it as a function of [the] conditions of observation. 15 Judd uses the term internal scale for the first time in the review of an exhibition of Kenneth Noland in Gallery Emmerich in 1962 (April 10-May 5) that starts with the famous sentence that Noland is one of the best but not the best, nor is he the leader of the best group. Noland exemplifies the new tendencies in Abstract art towards material singularization of the art object that Judd himself avidly wanted to achieve in his work, such as greater immediacy, continuous single surfaces, making him work a single object without conspicuous parts, greater internal scale and further simplicity and so on. See D. Judd, In the Galleries (1962), in: Judd 1975/2005, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 54-60 (57). 16 D. Judd, Lee Bontecou (1965), in: Judd 1975/2005, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 178-180 (178). 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. Judd, as he would not much later write in Specific Objects, was interested in [t] he thing as a whole, its quality as a whole. D. Judd, Specific Objects (1965), in: Judd 1975/2005, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 181-189 (187). 20 Ibid.

3 4 5

Ibid. Ibid. As cited in: R. Fuchs, The Ideal Museum: An Art Settlement in the Texas Desert, in: P. Noever (ed.), Donald Judd. Architecture / Architektur, Ostfildern-Ruit/ Portchester 2003, pp. 85-89. The rest of the card reads as follows: Chinati moreover stands for the idea that the installation and exhibition of art must be supervised by the maker of it, the practicing artist, who otherwise only loses control over his work all too often. Aside from the works of Chamberlain, Flavin and Judd, Chinati is planning to install works of other artists, to establish a graphics workshop and a library for art and architecture, and to create an atmosphere which will lead to the making and exhibiting of art as an inherent part of life.

Judd acquired the building in New York and the grounds and buildings of what was later to become La Mansana de Chinati as a private person. In 1978 he enters into a dialogue with the founders of Dia Art Foundation, Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil, to realize a large-scale project in Marfa. While the Dia Art Foundation initially supports the realization of the one hundred aluminum boxes, it purchases the bulk of Fort Russell, as well as the Wool and Mohair building, a large warehouse in

106

Kunstlicht jrg. 31 2010 nr. 3/4 Beeldende kunst + architectuur

21 Shiff 2004, op.cit. (note 12), pp. 29-61 (50). 22 D. Judd, Jackson Pollock (1967), in: Judd 1975/2005, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 193-195 (195). 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. In this article Judd praised Pollock a.o. for having created the large scale, wholeness and simplicity that have become common to almost all good work. 25 D. Judd, Abstract Expressionism, in: Judd 1986, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 37-48 (46). 26 For an in-depth discussion of the early work of Judd, see T. Kellein, Donald Judd. Early Work 1955-1968, Kln 2002. 27 Judd 1965/1975, op.cit. (note 19), pp. 181-189 (182). He found it objectionable that anything spaced in a rectangle and on a plane suggests something in and on something else, something in its surround, which suggests an object or figure in its space, in which these are clearer instances of a similar world. 28 Idem, p. 182. 29 Idem, p. 181. 30 D. Judd, Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular, in: N. Serota (ed.), Donald Judd, London 2004, exh.cat. Tate Modern, London, pp. 145-159 (147). For a discussion of Judds conception of space in three-dimensional work and the alleged newness of his invention, see R. Shiff, A Space of One to One, in: R. Shiff, D. Judd (eds.), Donald Judd: 50 x 100 x 50, 100 x 100 x 50, New York 2002, exh.cat. Pace Wildenstein, New York, pp. 5-23. 31 Shiff 2004, op.cit. (note 12), pp. 29-61 (50). 32 They deliberately remained, as Nicholas Serota remarked at the time of the major 2004 retrospective in Tate Modern, discrete objects within it. N. Serota, Donald Judd: A Sense of Place, in: N. Serota (ed.), Donald Judd, London 2004, exh.cat. Tate Modern, London, pp. 99-110 (105). 33 R. Pincus-Witten, Fining it Down: Don Judd at Castelli, Artforum 8 (1970) 10, pp. 47-49 (48).

34 This might also explain why the Judd often got so upset by the presentations of his work by others in museums worldwide. A bad installation was simply detrimental to the work itself. No wonder the artist admitted in 1977 that the practice of installation had become equally important as the work itself. See D. Judd, In defense of my work, in: Judd 1986, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 9-10 (9): The space surrounding my work is crucial to it: as much thought has gone into the installations as into a piece itself. While he admits that initially the effort to preserve the work in appropriate spaces was a concern second only to the invention of [his] work, he then indicates that gradually the two concerns have joined and both tend toward architecture. In a late essay, Judd reaffirms this concern: Any work of art, old or new, is harmed or helped by where it is placed. This can almost be considered objectively, that is, spatially. Further, any work of art is harmed or helped, almost always harmed, by the meaning of the situation in which it is placed. There is no neutral space, since space is made, indifferently or intentionally, and since meaning is made, ignorantly or knowledgeably. This is the beginning of my concern for the surroundings of my work. These are the simplest circumstances which all art must confront. Even the smallest single works of mine are affected. See: D. Judd, 21 February 93, in: R. Fuchs, D. Judd (eds.), Donald Judd. Large-Scale Works, New York 1993, pp. 9-13 (9). 35 In contrast to many of his contemporaries, such as Richard Serra or Claes Oldenburg, Judd did not systematically proceed to make ever-larger work. Whereas some work might have taken up increasingly more space in galleries and museums and others were made for urban or natural sites, most of it was always based on a relatively small singular element, that is, on a base unit of somatic scale. 36 B. Rose, Blow Up - the Problem of Scale in Sculpture, Art in America 56 (1968) 4, pp. 80-91 (91).

37 Donald Judd during interview in the film Donald Judds Marfa, Texas (dir. Christopher Felver, 1998): It is individual work and could be somewhere else, but was made to go into those buildings and to always be there. In the essay on the installation of the one hundred aluminum boxes, Judd uses a plural term: The buildings, purchased in 79, and the works of art that they contain were planned together as much as possible. The size and nature of the building were given. This determined the size and the scale of the works. From: D. Judd, Artillery Sheds, in: Stockebrand 1989, op.cit. (note 6), pp. 72-74. See also B. Haskell, Donald Judd, New York 1988, p. 123. 38 Judd promoted respect for existing architecture and tried to preserve the acquired buildings as much as possible, even though, as the artist stated himself in an interview (Donald Judds Marfa, Texa, dir. Christopher Felver, 1998), many of the buildings that he acquired didnt have any interesting qualities at all. 39 While Judd notoriously disliked museums and often indicated that he did not want to imitate the institution, his building and installation endeavors are nevertheless often described in such terms. See for example: Fuchs 2003, op.cit. (note 5), pp. 85-89. 40 R. Smithson, The Crystal Land (1966), in: J.D. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley 1996, pp. 7-9 (7). 41 D. Judd, Art and Architecture (1983), in: Noever 2003, op.cit. (note 6), pp. 24-28 (27). 42 Descriptions of these respective building projects can be found in 101 Spring Street, Horti conclusi, Mansana de Chinati and Artillery Sheds, in: Stockebrand 1989, op.cit. (note 6), pp. 18-19, 40-41, 48-50, 72-74. See also P. Viladas, A sense of Proportion. A walled compound in West Texas embodies sculptor Donald Judd's ideas about design, Progressive Architecture 66 (1985) 4, pp. 102-109. 43 See T. Kellein, Donald Judd. Early Work 1955-1968, Kln 2002, pp. 98-99, 99-100, 101.

107

Wouter Davidts From Mr. Big of SoHo to The Man Who Bought Marfa

44 J. Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City, New Haven 2009, pp. 150-186. See also J. Flatley, Allegories of Boredom, in: A. Goldstein (ed.), A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2004, pp. 51-75 (63). 45 D. Raskin, Judd's Scale, in: M. Stockebrand, R. Shiff (eds.), The Writings of Donald Judd, Marfa 2009, pp. 26-41 (35). 46 Judd 1989, op.cit. (note 37), pp. 72-74 (73). 47 D. Judd, Abstract Expressionism, in: Judd 1986, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 37-48 (45). 48 Y.A. Bois, Specific Objections, Artforum 42 (2004) 10, pp. 196-203, 298 (198). 49 Judd 1983, op.cit. (note 41), pp. 24-28 (27). 50 D. Judd, Marfa, Texas (1985), in: Judd 1986, op.cit. (note 2), pp. 96-102 (100).