TATE MODERN
Tate Modern invited Klaxons to walk around the gallery and find a work of art that would inspire them to write a track.
In the end, it was one of Donald Judd's Untitled 1980 which grabbed their attention. It's an imposing sculpture made from ten pieces of aluminium and perspex stacked above each other to form a giant column.
The Klaxons say that they are the result of an experiment to fuse Josef K and Baby D. The band members met at university, became friends and discussed the type of music they would like to make many times over. Their dream did not become reality until 2005 when Simon tracked James down in Madrid and convinced him that he had an 'amazing band of really pretty girls' that needed a front man.
They began by writing down all the names of the bands they didn't want to sound like on a piece of paper. By January 2006, they had a manager and a press officer, and magazines were celebrating them as ‘the new Happy Mondays’. Since then, they have released their debut single Gravity's Rainbow and the follow-up Atlantis To Interzone. NME and Radio One's Zane Lowe made both of these 'Singles of the Week'. Their third single is due to be released soon and their first album, Myths of the Near Future, will be out at the beginning of 2007.
The Klaxons are the fourth in a series of music artists to write an original
track about an artwork displayed at Tate Modern.
Donald Judd began to make 'stacks' in the 1960s. He made several throughout his career but this particular one was made in 1980.
Each unit in the 'stack' is made from a combination of steel, aluminium and perspex. There are ten units and they are all exactly the same size. They are also all ordered according to strict geometric principles. For example, the gap between each unit is equal to the height of each single unit.
This use of geometric precision and industrial materials was typical of Judd’s working methods. He believed that art should not show any traces of the artist’s hand or thought process and that an artwork should be something that existed entirely as an object in it’s own right.
You can view this work in the Tate Collection.
Donald Judd was born in Missouri, US in 1928. He studied art in New York but also later took degrees in philosophy and art history. He began as a painter but as time progressed his works became increasingly three-dimensional and developed into free-standing objects, which were more similar to sculptures. During the 1960s, he became known as a key figure of the Minimalist movement but he strongly rejected being categorised that way. His did share many of the principles of Minimalist art though. These being the use of industrial materials and the desire to reject traditional European methods of making art. Judd believed that art did not need to represent the outside world or the thoughts of the artist who created it. He wanted to remove any trace of the artist, so that the art could stand on its own and simply exist as a object.
In the 1970s, Judd bought a large section of the desert in Texas which included abandoned US army buildings. Judd used the buildings to display artworks by his contemporaries and these can still be seen today. He died in Manhattan in 1994.
You can learn more about Donald Judd in the Tate Collection.
