Donald Judd is a product of the American Midwest, he grew up in Missouri, he spent his summers with his grandparents out on a farm that manifested itself later I think in his search for a space away from the metropolitan, he came out of military service immediately after the war and began in 1949 at the Arts Students League, he had been undecided as to whether he should be an artist or architect but in ‘49 decided he was going to become an artist but he also had a very strong interest in philosophy and at a very early moment he found himself enrolling in Columbia University and studying philosophy and so really through the ‘50s he saw himself both as a painter but also as a painter who had a very strong interest in logic, thought, ideas he was to some extent a loner, of course his work can be associated with artists of his own generation and he was certainly respected by them, and knew them and I think especially in the early years clearly his own thinking developed as a result of conversations with artists like Frank Stella and others but the fact is I think he’s singular figure, he remains a singular figure who found himself very frequently at odds with the world, he wrote extensively about the way in which museums mistreated art….he had a passion for both for the natural environment and to some extent for the urban environment and therefore he was very critical of the way in which cities had developed in the post war period, he wrote fairly extensively about architecture and that sense of wanting to manipulate space never really left him.
When you approach Judd, or indeed art of this kind, but I suppose especially Judd, you have a sense that you are being expected to understand the rational thought processes that have led to the adoption of a particular arithmetic progression or Fibonacci progression or a set of permutations of colour and you have a belief that there is a system here which you have to crack, my advice to anyone is to forget all that, simply come in and allow yourself to wander through the space and have your, body, head, eye, mind affected by the materials, the colour and then begin to recognise that what Judd has done to this is to explore and to reveal just a few of the many possibilities in the world, he hasn’t set out to teach us anything, he set out to present a number of propositions that you can draw from a range of ideas or thoughts for your own purpose so it was very very clear in what he didn’t want, he also left open a huge range of possibilities and to me in many ways he is the sculptural equivalent of Mondrian, the painter in the three dimensions, there you have a very very simple grid, very very apparently simple system gradually as you look at it becomes more and more complex, more and more rich, unexpected juxtapositions, unexpected collisions, whether it’s of material or colour and you are thrown back on yourself and you just have to let go.
