the blankness, the emptiness and vacuum of content is as easily construed as an occasion for spiritual contemplation as it is a nihilistic denial of the world.” 2 One cannot here examine this notion as it applies to other sculptors mentioned by Miss Rose, but at least in the case of Judd’s work, which both compels and gratifies immediate sensuous confrontation, the suggestion that his sculpture is the occasion for an experience which completely transcends the physical object, does not seem tenable. In a recent article dealing with the phenomenon of object-art, Barbara Rose emphatically recognized the positive qualities, as opposed to the apparent blankness and denial, of this art, and suggested that these could be located in a mystical experience: “. ” 1Īpproaching Judd’s latest work from within this frame of reference, one is totally unprepared for the extraordinary beauty of the sculptures themselves, a beauty and authority which is nowhere described or accounted for in the polemics of object art and which leads one to feel all the more acutely the in adequacy of the theoretical line, its failure to measure up (at least in Judd’s case) to the power of the sculptural statement.
With this presumptive reduction of art from the realm of illusion-and through illusionism, of meaning-to the sphere of transparently real objects, the art with which Judd is associated is characterized as intentionally blank and empty: “Obviously a negative art of denial and renunciation. It becomes an object in its own right.” Thus object-art would seem to proscribe both allusion and illusion: any reference to experiences or ideas beyond the work’s brute physical presence is excluded, as is my manipulation (through the prescribed observation of that presence) of apparent as opposed to literal space. The work asserts its own existence, form and power. Last year in praise of a fellow-sculptor’s work, Judd wrote: “Rather than inducing idealization and generalization and being allusive, it excludes. FOR SOME TIME DONALD JUDD has been a major spokesman for works of art which seek, as their highest attainment, total identity as objects.
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