Donald JuddReviews
Author of Donald Judd: The Complete Writings 1959-1975
Reviews
Donald Judd Spaces: Judd Foundation New York & Texas by Donald Judd
This collection of interviews engages a diverse range of topics, from philosophy and politics to Judd’s insightful critiques of his own work and the work of others such as Mark di Suvero, Edward Hopper, Yayoi Kusama, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock. The opening discussion of the volume between Judd, Dan Flavin, and Frank Stella provides the foundation for many of the succeeding conversations, focusing on the nature and material conditions of the new art developing in the 1960s. The publication also gathers a substantial body of unpublished material across a range of mediums including extensive interviews with art historians Lucy R. Lippard and Barbara Rose.
Judd’s contributions in interviews, panels, and extemporaneous conversations are marked by his forthright manner and rigorous thinking, whether in dialogue with art critics, art historians, or his contemporaries. In one of the last interviews, he observed, “Generally expensive art is in expensive, chic circumstances; it’s a falsification. The society is basically not interested in art. And most people who are artists do that because they like the work; they like to do that [make art]. Art has an integrity of its own and a purpose of its own, and it’s not to serve the society. That’s been tried now, in the Soviet Union and lots of places, and it doesn’t work. The only role I can think of, in a very general way, for the artist is that they tend to shake up the society a little bit just by their existence, in which case it helps undermine the general political stagnation and, perhaps by providing a little freedom, supports science, which requires freedom. If the artist isn’t free, you won’t have any art.”
Donald Judd Interviews is co-published by Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books. The interviews expand upon the artist’s thinking present in Donald Judd Writings (Judd Foundation/David Zwirner Books, 2016).
Donald Judd: Writings, copublished by Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books, is the most comprehensive collection of the artist's writings assembled to date. This timely publication includes Judd’s best-known essays organized chronologically with little-known texts previously published in limited editions. This new collection also includes unpublished college essays and hundreds of never-before-seen handwritten notes, a critical but unknown part of Judd’s writing practice.
Judd’s earliest published writing, consisting largely of reviews for hire, defined the terms of art criticism in the 1960s, but his essays as a graduate student at Columbia, published here for the first time, contain the seeds of his later writing, and allow readers to trace the development of his critical style. The writings that followed Judd’s early reviews are no less significant art-historically, but have been relegated to smaller publications and have remained largely unavailable until now.
The largest addition of newly available material is Judd’s unpublished notes--transcribed from his handwritten accounts of and reactions to subjects ranging from the politics of his time, to the literary texts he admired most, from complaints about pluralism in art to his admiration for Giambattista Vico, and through him, Lucretius. In these intimate reflections we see Judd’s thinking at its least mediated--a mind continuing to grapple with questions of its moment, demonstrating the intensity of thought that continues to make Judd such a formidable presence in contemporary art.
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