ISSN 1753-9854 AUTUMN 2004
Judd through Oldenburg
RICHARD SHIFF
Donald Judd and Claes Oldenburg had a good relationship – not only a personal friendship, which was strong, but also a relationship figured through Judd’s early critical writing. Virtually all of Judd’s reviews are worth pondering, even now, decades after his career as an art critic. They remain fresh, presenting a critical model to follow rather than a historical document to be analysed. Within this corpus I often consider that the commentaries on Oldenburg are the most stimulating and provocative. Yet every time I review my interpretation of Judd’s interpretation of Oldenburg, I wonder whether readers will grasp my sense of Judd’s insights.1 Do my paraphrases take a reader closer or farther from Judd’s own targets?
Judd was a quirky writer but I do not think the problem originates in his
style or rhetorical manner. His rhetoric was sophisticated and may well have
been adequate to his thinking and to Oldenburg’s. That may be the
problem. I suspect that Judd’s thinking about Oldenburg was operating at
the very limits of what words can convey coherently; accordingly, Judd had to
take his rhetoric to extremes. My insecurity as an interpreter lies in the
nature of Judd’s creative vision of Oldenberg and in what Oldenburg
himself accomplished, rather than in some failing of the expressive or
expository style of either of them. I am reminded of Clement Greenberg’s
complaint (in 1967) concerning the term formalism. Too many critics,
Greenberg argued, assume through their use of this term ‘that
“form” and “content” in art can be adequately
distinguished for the purposes of discourse. This implies in turn that
discursive thought has solved just those problems of art upon whose
imperviousness to discursive thinking the very possibility of art depends. ...
You know that a work has content because of its
effect.’2 Greenberg insisted
that the best understanding is experiential and should not be limited by the
interpreter’s own pre-existing discursive structures. Although this issue
is endlessly debatable in theory, there may little profit in the argument
whenever decisions have to be made regarding elements of practice. Oriented
toward what material practice could accomplish, Judd’s position was
similar to Greenberg’s. In 1993, he flatly stated what for him was
obvious: ‘There is a limit to how much an artist can learn in
advance.’3 The same would
apply to critics. They need to grasp the experience, not some concept that
either precedes, encompasses, or supercedes it.
Concerning his work of the 1960s, Oldenburg himself said: ‘I want the
object to have its own existence’ (a remark to which this essay must
return).4 As a critic of
others’ work, Judd was obligated to explain the effect an Oldenburg object
produced, as opposed to restating the state it sought (‘existence’).
His evaluations did not come easily and reflect candid feeling as much as
conceptual analysis. In 1964, he reviewed a group of objects that included a
version of Soft Switches, 1964, in vermilion vinyl (fig.1), commenting:
‘I think Oldenburg’s work is profound. I think it is very hard to
explain how.’5 After this bold
admission, Judd noted something crucial: in significant ways, Oldenburg’s
representations failed to resemble the familiar objects they called to mind;
they were not ‘descriptive, even abstractly’. This is more
hypothesis than fact, for who can say where the limits of descriptive
abstraction might lie? When is a circle the sun, and when is it just a circle?
Something about Oldenburg’s objects was causing Judd to remove them from
the category of sculpture and its mimeticism. We should not expect the logic to
be self-evident. Hypothetical conclusions like Judd’s tend to relate facts
of one kind to facts of a very different kind. They never appear inevitable but
are nevertheless convincing. Like good intuitions, they convince without
offering compelling sets of reasons.
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Fig.1 Claes Oldenburg, Soft Light Switches 1964 Vinyl filled with Dacron and canvas Courtesy Claes Oldenberg and Cossje van Bruggen © Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen/ Licensed by VAGA, New York |
Appropriately enough, Judd became a critic by happenstance without
compelling reasons. In 1959 he attended Meyer Schapiro’s art history
seminar at Columbia University where he encountered Thomas Hess as a guest
speaker. Hess announced that his journal Artnews was looking for new
writers for monthly reviews and asked whether any of the students were
interested. Needing a source of income, Judd volunteered. He wrote for three
issues of Artnews during the fall of 1959, but then moved to Arts
Magazine fearing that Hess was going to dismiss him. As Judd recalled a
decade later: ‘[Hess] did not like it. He wanted [my writing] to be more
poetic. He said I was not saying
anything.’6 Yet from the very
start, it seems that Judd had certain notions in mind, conditions of which he
approved, specific qualities that he was probably seeking in his own art at the
time, as it evolved from two dimensions into three.
Judd’s earliest reviews contain elements of appreciative analysis that
he would repeat in increasingly sophisticated form as he developed his thinking
as writer and artist. On one of his first assignments, October 1959, he reviewed
Yoyoi Kusama, characterising her work as ‘both complex and
simple.’7 Hess may have
thought that this type of statement was a hopelessly vague generalization, if
not a gratuitous contradiction; but it was actually a minor articulation of a
major insight on Judd’s part. In December 1959, reviewing Josef Albers,
Judd said the same kind of thing with more specificity. He contrasted what he
called the ‘rigidity’ of Albers’s geometry to the
‘ambiguity’ of ‘unbounded’ effects of his
colour.8 In Kusama’s case, art
became complex and simple; in Albers’s case, somewhat analogously, art
became ambiguous and precise.
A few months later, Judd embedded some remarks on Jackson
Pollock (see Number 19, 1951, fig.2) within a brief review
of Helen Frankenthaler, to Frankenthaler’s detriment: ‘Pollock
achieves generality by establishing an extreme polarity between the simple,
immediate perception of paint and canvas – a reduction to unexpandable
sensation – and the complexity and overtones of his imagery and
articulated structure.’9
He was claiming that Pollock attained a coherent, total image without
obscuring any of the disparate marks of paint. Nor did the parts combine
to create the whole. Rather, the parts and the whole existed as very different
entities – in fact, so dissimilar (as Judd would explain in later
statements on Pollock) that the appearance of the whole could not be predicted
on the basis of the parts. This is why he used the word ‘polarity’.
A polar differential is the widest possible gap. He also used the phrase
‘extension of extremes’ to the same purpose, as he moved toward
his conclusion: ‘The level of quality of a work can usually be established
by the extent of the polarity between its generality’ - the total
image - ‘and its particularity’ - the individual marks.10
 |
Fig.2 Jackson Pollock, Number 19 1951 Private collection © 2004 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York |
In 1963 and 1965, between the time of his earlier and later comments on
Pollock, Judd approached the same principle through a consideration of
the relief sculptures of Lee
Bontecou (see Untitled, 1960, fig.3): ‘Often power
lies in a polarization of elements and qualities, or at least in a combination
of dissimilar ones.’11
Some of his verbal playfulness appears as he elaborates on the features
of Bontecou’s reliefs, punning on whole and hole:
‘The image [of a volcano-like mound with a hole], all of the parts,
and the whole shape are coextensive. The parts are either part of the
hole or part of the mound which forms the hole. The hole and the mound
are only two things [that is, they constitute a single opposition], which,
after all, are the same thing [a polarized but integrated image].’12
From the character of her art, Judd inferred Bontecou’s political
personality as someone immune to the usual dogmas: ‘Bontecou is
obviously unimpressed ... by artistic generalizations. ... [Her] reliefs
are an assertion of herself, of what she feels and knows. Their primitive,
oppressive and unmitigated individuality excludes grand interpretations.’13
 |
Fig.3 Lee Bontecou, Untitled 1960 Collection of halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, New York © Lee Bontecou / courtesy Knoedler & Company, New York |
I think Judd wanted a certain lesson for life to emerge from his kind of
critical writing. He seems to have recognised that when an artist sets the main
aspects of a work in some kind of opposition, while also preventing the separate
parts from being subordinated to a generalised harmony or composition, then the
entirety of the work remains alive in the viewer’s perceptual experience
– every part, every sensory quality of it, and all the emotional and
intellectual qualities as well. Every element (including the totality) becomes
focused, as if art allowed its viewer to function on every level with equal
acuity, never sacrificing one area of human potential for another. To understand
the conditions of a life within a specific social and physical environment, Judd
implies, a person needs to concentrate on what can be known through the most
immediate forms of experience, resisting the generalisations of categories,
clichés, and logical inferences. Yes, try to grasp the big picture (the
‘whole’); but do not allow it to rule over the independent
significance of a detail (a ‘hole’) With this approach to life, Judd
admired Barnett Newman (see Primordial Light, 1954, fig.4) just as he
admired Bontecou: Newman’s art ‘does not claim more than anyone [any
one person] can know.’ Judd meant that every formal element in
Newman’s painting was no more than it appeared to be, and appearances were
there to be experienced as something entirely real: ‘The color, areas, and
stripes are not obscured or diluted by a hierarchy of composition and a range of
associations.’14 This was an
art that performed its own judgments, without referring to established belief
and the common, acculturated forms of experience that people rarely investigate
for themselves.
 |
Fig.4 Barnett Newman, Cathedra 1951 Collection Stedelijk Museum © 2004 Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York |
Newman’s
art ‘does not imply a social order’, Judd reasoned; it offered
no grounds for a generalised theory.15
Perhaps, then, Newman was risking incoherence, or the sense of nonsense
that might derive from simply setting one thing against another, pale
cerulean blue against deep black, with the two barely relating, if at
all. If such a thing were done for the sake of incoherence or nonsense
itself, and merely intended to be provocative, it would be a new Dadism,
rather than a critical skepticism. Newman, in fact, had denounced the
Dada artists for their implicit claim to know what art was and what it
was not.16 However nonsensical,
Dadaist actions were directed toward a conceptual goal; they reduced the
experience of art to a philosophical principle, a kind of intellectual
idealism. Such generalisation could not be true to conditions at hand.
On these matters, Newman and Judd were in complete agreement. So Judd
had a least two admired models to follow from the Abstract Expressionist
generation, Pollock and Newman (and he liked Mark
Rothko as well). Artists of the New York School who practised figuration,
such as Willem
de Kooning, brought about a different situation. Judd disliked the
fact that de Kooning subordinated the materiality of the painter’s
mark to emotions associated with the experience of the body, even if that
body were internalised as the artist’s own. According to Judd, de
Kooning displaced the specificity of sensation with emotional generalization:
as a referential response to bodies and objects, the ‘expressive
brushwork ... portrays immediate emotions. It does not involve immediate
sensations’.17 Here
I can not agree with Judd’s conclusion that de Kooning fails to
respond sufficiently to material circumstances, but his point is important
for what follows.
In 1966 Judd participated in a symposium at the Jewish Museum, moderated
by Barbara Rose. The transcript from the Rose archive differs from the
one in the museum archive, which is quite rough. Apparently, the Rose
version went through an editing process to restore its fluidity and also
expand its scope. Additional sentences were most likely inserted by Judd
to set the historical record straight. In these supplementary remarks,
he emphasises his affinity to Bontecou, John
Chamberlain, and Oldenburg, three artists about whom he had already
written in some detail. ‘One of the reasons I stopped painting,’
Judd tells Rose, ‘was that Oldenburg’s work was much stronger
than anything I could possibly make in a painting’.18
Why would Judd be so attracted to Oldenburg, who represented clothing,
foodstuffs, household appliances and furnishings? Why would this practice
not lead to de Kooning’s kind of compromised expressionism - part
figurational, part abstract - which Judd believed could only generate
the shallowest emotions?
In 1968, this enigma troubles Lucy Lippard, an unusually astute critic, as
she interviews Judd. Lippard was well aware that Judd had featured Oldenburg in
his notorious article ‘Specific Objects’, first composed in 1964.
Initially, she objects to the anthropomorphism of Oldenburg’s art, which
seems to conflict with Judd’s principles. Judd replies that Oldenburg is
not ‘anthropomorphic
quite’.”19 A lot hangs
on his appended word quite. Judd had already distinguished
Oldenburg’s anthropomorphism from the usual kind by calling his type
‘extreme’ and ‘blatant’ – so extreme that it did
not seem comparable to what people identified as
anthropomorphic.20 Yet there was
no other name for it. As a pragmatist, Judd knew that things tend to have more
or less of a quality, only rarely all or nothing. Whether a person regards
qualitative variance in a given characteristic as generating sameness or
difference becomes a matter of perceptual attitude (in turn, perhaps instilled
by temperament or emotional attitude). Judd preferred to use geometric forms in
his art, as opposed to Oldenburg’s organic forms; yet this distinction did
not always make a difference, nor did it prevent other abstract art from being
just as anthropomorphic as organic figuration. Abstract, constructed form
– not abstraction from or of something else – was
Judd’s personal way of trying to avoid artistic clichés. With his
dry humor, he imagined a condition potentially better for art than anyone had
yet been able to achieve, including himself: ‘A form that’s neither
geometric nor organic’, he wrote in 1967, ‘would be a great
discovery’.21 He also wanted
to escape the generalities known as ‘order’ and
‘disorder’.22 Any
concept that might categorise and contain his art, or even exclude it, was its
inadequate antithesis.
Proceeding with his defence of Oldenburg, Judd raises the example of David
Smith. He regards Smith’s sculpture as the more anthropomorphic
of the two, despite the fact that Smith was working in terms of abstraction,
whereas Oldenburg was making expressive representations of real things
in the human environment. One would think that Oldenburg already had two
strikes against him when it came to anthropomorphism, for he created objects
related to the human image as well as to human use. Judd understood that
Lippard needed some kind of explanation: ‘Smith ... is seeing it
[the anthropomorphic quality] out there and it is in the work, he’s
feeling it out there and it is in the work and it is beyond him.’
Like de Kooning, Smith seems to combine the anthropomorphism of his forms
with the anthropomorphism of things he might observe - as Judd says, ‘it
is in the work and it is beyond him.’ Although the example
is not Judd’s, perhaps we grasp his reservation about Smith through
a sculpture such as Stainless Window, 1951 (fig.5); it resembles
de Kooning’s ‘abstractions’ of the late 1940s (see Attic
Study, 1949, fig.6), though in shallow relief. The tensile organicism
of de Kooning’s and Smith’s imagery evokes human bodies and
the physicality of familiar objects – whether the artists’
forms are abstract or representational, whether set in a vertical or horizontal
format, whether created of paint or metal, and whether or not the tensile
factor might relate to those materials. With de Kooning and Smith, the
general anthropomorphism is not merely set in opposition to a more specific
material factor but (in Judd’s view) dominates it.
 |
Fig.5 David Smith, Stainless Window 1951 Courtesy The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas © Estate of David Smith / Licensed by VAGA, NY, NY |
 |
Fig.6 Willem de Kooning, Attic Study 1949 Courtesy The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas © 2004 Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York |
Continuing to
address Lippard, Judd elaborates on Oldenburg’s difference:
‘Oldenburg is so far over the hill that it is only Oldenburg, you see, in
which case it is sort of turned full circle and is not really anthropomorphic in
the old sense.’23
Oldenburg’s works are ‘not really about the objects ... [Instead,
they’re] what Oldenburg feels. ... It is Oldenburg’s interest
in these things. So there’s really nothing about the ice cream cone as an
ice cream cone’ (see Floor Cone, 1962 (fig. 7). Here Lippard must
object again, for Judd is seeing differences where there should be none:
‘I do not know how you really split that,’ she replies. ‘I can
vaguely sense what you’re talking about but I do not think that it makes
any sense’. I sympathize with Lippard; as close as she was to Judd’s
situation, she was having trouble comprehending his thinking. Judd was not
daunted and replied in turn: ‘Look, you feel something about a certain
object. It is obvious.’ But (I must comment) it is not obvious, because
Judd has already said, ‘[it is] not really about the objects.’
Perhaps ‘you feel something about [the] object,’ but when the
feeling is strong, the object ceases to matter. The art object related to it
becomes all feeling.
Judd reaches Lippard by distinguishing between attributed feelings and felt
feelings: ‘You look at all the things you look at or deal with and you
know you have feelings about them; it is pretty obvious. But the fact is that
they have no feeling or meaning or anything in themselves.’ Like a good
American pragmatist, Judd can extend this insight to almost anything: ‘All
of European art is really involved in reading things into things. You look out
there and somehow what you feel is supposed to be out there.’ Judd’s
problem with conventional art, including nearly all modern art, is that it
accepts a preconceived notion of what an object signifies – matching
feelings to things, and things to feelings. To the contrary, with Oldenburg (as
Judd says), ‘it is only Oldenburg.’ If a specific feeling appears in
the form of an Oldenburg art object, we feel it because the artist felt it, not
because of some general correlation that results in a rule (such as: all toggle
switches that come in pairs are breast-like). This is the same type of claim
Judd was making for Newman’s abstract paintings around the same time,
1964: Newman represents no more than his personal experience. Despite the
representational quality of Oldenburg’s work, Judd asserts that (like
Newman’s) it does not depend on outside objects. Oldenburg starts from an
object but develops that thing in a chosen material according to his feelings
for the material as much as for the form it assumes. The difference between what
Oldenburg does and what (in Judd’s opinion) de Kooning and Smith do may
seem to hinge on a very fine point, so fine that it can escape attention; yet,
to Judd it was critical. In the end, there is no ice cream cone, no generalized
cultural artifact, but something new that exists only because Oldenburg created
it – ‘new’ not in the sense of some radical originality, but
new because it is a specific object with defining properties best understood
through direct experience. To view an Oldenburg object is to acknowledge its
specificity, not its deviation from a cultural template.
In his writings,
Judd gave most of his attention to Oldenburg’s soft sculptures and
contrastingly hard Bedroom Ensemble, 1963 (fig.8). Consider first what
he says about objects such as Floor Cone (fig.7) and the various versions
of Soft Switches (fig.1): ‘The trees, figures, food or furniture in
a painting have a shape or contain shapes that are emotive. Oldenburg has taken
this anthropomorphism to an extreme and made the emotive form ... the same as
the shape of [his sculptural] object, and by blatancy [he has] subverted the
idea of the natural presence of human qualities in all things. ... Oldenburg
exaggerates the accepted or chosen form and turns it into one of his
own.’24 In sum, Oldenburg
divorces the conventional thematic form or image from its conventional emotional
content. This is why his objects become his own, and as his own, they also
become ‘objects as they’re felt, not as they are. ... They’re
exaggerated, as [personal] interest is, gross and overblown.’ Having
mentioned that Oldenburg makes hard objects as well as soft ones, Judd inserts a
sentence that may seem to come out of nowhere: ‘A girl said once that
sometimes the corners of things would seem to be points pointing at her.’
In fact, this serves as an example of a specific emotion detached from a general
image; the identity of the object does not matter as long as it has a corner. In
the girl’s eroticized emotional life, corners are exaggerated, blatant,
extreme. Eventually, Judd concludes: ‘The reference to objects [in
representational art] gives [the basic emotive forms -corners, for example,] a
way to occur. The reference and the basic form as one thing is Oldenburg’s
main idea’ - that is, the ‘main idea’ for his new
three-dimensional object.25
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Fig.7 Claes Oldenburg, Floor Cone 1962 (as installed at Green Gallery, New York, Fall 1962) Canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes, painted with synthetic polymer paint and latex Collection Museum of Modern Art, New York © Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen / Licensed by VAGA, New York |
 |
Fig.8 Claes Oldenburg, Bedroom Ensemble 1963 (1/3) (as installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1974) Wood, vinyl, metal, fake fur, muslin, Dacron, polyurethane foam, lacquer, etc. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa © Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen / Licensed by VAGA, New York |
If this still puzzles (and I believe it does), imagine that Oldenburg is
using organic representation to reach the point Judd might reach through
geometric structure. It seems that Judd identifies Oldenburg’s referential
image as conventional and general, distinguishing it from the form developed
through the artist’s personal interest; and then Judd claims that
Oldenburg’s art combines these two disparate qualities -- image and
feeling -- combines them as ‘one thing,’ his ‘main
idea’. This is the mysterious part, but we can see that it follows the
pattern of Judd’s appreciation of Pollock’s abstractions, which
oppose aggressively sensuous marks to a general, unified image that never
reduces to the sum of its sensuous elements. Nor do the parts become subordinate
to the whole.
Judd first addressed Oldenburg’s Soft Switches
in 1964, the year they were made. Here the generalized image was of functional
switches, while the sensuous element, analogous to a painter’s
constitutive marks, became erotic – erotic because of the soft or flaccid
nature of the canvas or vinyl as well as the structural allusion to nipples, and
further, because those nipples evoke breasts. But perhaps they do not ...
‘quite.’ As Judd states, ‘there are not two breasts, just two
nipples. The two switches are too distinct to be
breasts.’26 He means that
they retain their identity as switches, yet their form describes neither
switches nor breasts. Rhetorically, for what it may be worth, the dominant
figure in Judd’s writing is not metaphor. He does not relate toggle
switches to human nipples by sensuous, metaphoric resemblance. Instead, he
invokes the more troublesome figures of syllepsis and catachresis. With
syllepsis, we understand the meaning of a term in two opposing directions, one
of which usually appears more proper than the other. An example: Hope sank with
the ship. Because ships are solid objects, we know they can sink. But does hope
sink in the same sense, in the same direction? How do intangibles like hope and
other emotions move at all? Hope cannot sink metaphorically because it bears no
resemblance to a solid object, or even to heavy air. To describe it as moving
somewhere is to enlist a different rhetorical figure – catachresis –
an indication of cognitive desperation, a figure to be used when no other device
is available. With catachresis, we borrow a term that applies elsewhere, and we
extend it.
In rhetorical practice, both syllepsis and catachresis represent the kind
of ‘extension of extremes’ that Judd appreciated in art practice.
Rather than operating like refined poetic devices, bringing nuance to
existing images, these rhetorical figures force thought into unfamiliar
realms. Although Judd sometimes resorted to metaphors - and who does not?
- his writing is better characterized by catachresis and syllepsis. He
took pleasure in pointing out that
Jasper Johns’s Thermometer, 1959, as he wrote, ‘has
one’, that is, the painting with the title Thermometer
also has the actual object, a thermometer.27
This is an instance of syllepsis. Catachresis and syllepsis bring a strange
quality of literalness to Judd’s most figurative descriptions, as
Thomas Hess must have intuited right at the beginning. I believe Hess
knew that something disturbing was occurring in Judd’s writing but
could not characterise it. He just knew that he did not like it, as Judd
later recalled. To Hess, who packed his own writing with metaphors, Judd’s
reviews lacked style. One might expect this, because writers resort to
syllepsis and catachresis when faced with a situation in which words fail
them, when no more agreeable figure will work because the effect being
described lies outside the range of all standard metaphors. Catachresis
is the absence of style and stylistic eloquence. It strong-arms language.
Yet, with catachresis, a writer discusses what otherwise can not be discussed.
A critic relying on a concept of metaphor to guide the evaluation of
Oldenburg might well turn negative, having extinguished the specificity of the
art by generalising its features. Consider a statement by Max Kozloff, to which
Judd appears to have objected: ‘[Oldenburg] strives for a metaphor, not of
the motif itself [the object represented], but of particular attitudes towards
it. His pastries are wreathed in an aura of glutinous ecstasy. ... [He] does not
lift a thumb that is not satirical, and hence finally reportorial in intention.
Ultimately, his pieces are in danger of becoming what they are
parodying.’28 In
Judd’s view, parody and reportage were beside the point. If the emotion
was ecstasy, then the object was an ecstatic object, not one merely referring to
ecstasy: ‘Oldenburg, who has done something artistically new, as Max
Kozloff in Art International says he [has] not, makes his cakes and pies
and other foods and articles actual objects, which is different
epistemologically from
illustration.’29 Parody
illustrates.
This is why Judd will state of Oldenburg, ‘the switch does not suggest
this single, profound form [the archetype of a breast] but is it, or nearly
it.’ Metaphor suggests; it creates evocative analogies. But catachresis
says, no, this is no time for suggestion, no time for mere comparison and
approximation; the situation is this way, even though we find no word for
it. Metaphor generalizes; catachresis
specifies.30 Having committed
himself to a hypothesis specific to Oldenburg’s art, Judd could then
explain it in general terms: ‘Ordinarily the figures and objects depicted
in a painting or sculpture have a shape or contain shapes that are emotive.
Oldenburg makes one of those subordinate shapes the whole form.’ The
exaggerated form becomes distinct from the standard image of the object, because
the object has been transformed in accord with the artist’s interest.
Perhaps now we grasp what Judd means when he says: ‘The reference and the
basic form as one thing is Oldenburg’s main
idea.’31 We would not expect
the reference and the basic form to exist together in this way (as opposed to
forming a metaphoric comparison between them); but they are together, as
they are nowhere else, both polarised and integrated.
For his Bedroom Ensemble, Oldenburg took a perspective drawing of a
set of bedroom furniture, the kind of rendering found in newspaper
advertisements for clearance sales, where the typical geometry would include
trapeziums, rhomboids, rhombuses, and ellipsoids – rectangular and round
figures skewed by imaginary angles of
view.32 He then built his own set
of furniture in three dimensions, giving the pieces the forms they had as
two-dimensional drawing. In his description, Judd calls the quadrilateral forms
‘parallelogrammatic’; this may be a clever use of catachresis to
signify the appearance in art of forms as new and strange as Judd’s
own.33 Where a right angle in a
real three-dimensional bed might have translated into an acute angle in a
perspective drawing, there is an acute angle in the bed Oldenburg created, as if
he were following an interest in drawings as much as in bedrooms. The
Bedroom that he designed put the accidental angularity of things seen in
perspective on an equal footing with the rectilinear geometry of typical
objects, objects idealized in our minds as if never subject to the illusions of
perspective. For Judd and Oldenburg, idealization constitutes the fantasy, and
perspectival illusion is the reality of any actual situation. This is precisely
the kind of realization that comes through the rhetorical figure of catachresis,
which establishes an accident of appearance as the normal or standard view. For
example, we refer without hesitation to the legs, arms, and back of a chair, but
hardly ever notice that chairs usually lack a head, which ought to disarm the
metaphor – but it is not one. ‘Arm of a chair’ is a
textbook example of catachresis. Here the word is entirely specific to the
thing; the arm of a chair has no other name.
Oldenburg’s reflections on his work are consistent with Judd’s.
In notes of 1976, he emphasized the disjunction of the formal look of his
installation objects from the concepts associated with their identification:
‘Geometry, abstraction, rationality – these are the themes that are
expressed formally in Bedroom. The effect is intensified by choosing the
softest room in the house and the one least associated with conscious thought.
... Hard surfaces and sharp corners predominate. ... [The] subject matter is not
necessarily an obstacle to seeing “pure” form and
color.’34 Oldenburg
understood that he had created a ‘pure’ abstraction that was also
purely representational; and he had done this without resorting to a hybrid
expressionism as de Kooning or Smith did. Judd referred to Bedroom
Ensemble as ‘grossly geometric,’ indicating that here the
element of exaggeration was the geometry, the angularity, the rigidity of things
as they are felt, not merely
seen.35 Around 1963, while
Oldenburg with his Bedroom Ensemble was creating a hard version of a
‘soft’ space, he was also translating the soft effects of painting
into nominally ‘hard’ sculptural form – a form that became
soft not metaphorically but actually. In Oldenburg’s objects, the fluidity
of paint in two dimensions became the flaccidity of canvas or vinyl in three
dimensions. As he said, he realised ‘the tendency of a hard material
[sculptural form] actually to be soft, not look
soft.’36 This would
accentuate the emotional force of the created object, conveyed by its softness
or hardness, whatever its representational identity. The polarity between
emotional sensation and representational concept would exist in the hardness of
Bedroom Ensemble as well as in the softness of Floor Cone.
‘Obviously what you feel and what things are are not the same,’ Judd
wrote in 1967.37
For both Judd and Oldenburg, the harsh angularity of Bedroom Ensemble
– a formal element inspired by an interest in the feeling it generates
– distanced the emotional impact of the object from its conventional,
identifying image. Oldenburg noted that he had created a hard version of the
softest room of a house, soft by conventional association. He wanted to:
remove the object from context ... to individualize it ... to create an independent object which has its existence in a world outside of both the real world as we know it and the world of art. ... The object will slip out of whatever definition it may be given. ... My intention is to make an everyday object that eludes definition. ... I want the object to have its own existence.38
I am reminded of what Judd wrote in 1964, not as a reference to Oldenburg’s work, but at more or less the same moment that he may have been pondering it: ‘Things that exist exist, and everything is on their side ... Everything is equal, just existing.’39 Merely by existing, the things that exist, like the accentuated brushstrokes of Pollock or the exaggerated qualities of an Oldenburg object, have already beaten the odds against the chances that their particular configurations would ever be actualised. Art can be made from very little, so long as the little things acquire a forceful, ‘interesting’ existence.40 Thinking of Oldenburg’s Floor Burger, 1962 (fig.9]), Judd remarks: ‘Three fat layers with a small one on top are enough.’41
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Fig.9 Claes Oldenburg, Floor Burger 1962 Canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes, painted with latex and Liquitex Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto © Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen / Licensed by VAGA, New York |
Much more could be said concerning Judd’s way of linking a writing
style to an art style. Catachresis and syllepsis are not the ultimate keys to
the puzzle but provide a pragmatic way of dealing with it. There are many other
ways. I think Judd especially appreciated that Oldenburg’s Bedroom
Ensemble and a number of related works demonstrated the potential of
perspective to be at once the most specific of sensory phenomena and the most
generalizing of perceived concepts. This happens to be the way he thought of
proportion – that it could be at one and the same time the most particular
and the most general relationship that a work might exhibit. The ratios were
general, but what an artist did with them was specific. If, in Oldenburg’s
Floor Burger, it was enough to have three big things and a little thing,
Judd himself could work endlessly with the complexities of 1 to 1, or 1 to 2, or
1 to 3, maintaining a sense of generality that would lead right back to the
specificity of the particular work (see Untitled, 1987, fig.10). His
boxes, both early and late, demonstrate that whatever theory of proportion might
be considered and however simple it might be, actual practice brings surprises.
Judd’s art, like Oldenburg’s, faces the fact that we
acknowledge general conditions at hand (social, cultural, emotional, material)
while actively creating something specific from their situation. We need to keep
the two realms separate and equal, understanding that neither the totality nor
the detail eliminates its counterpart. We must resist becoming ideologues
(totalizers), yet we need to see the whole. Works of art are modes of
integration - integration without subordination of the parts.
 |
Fig.10 Donald Judd, Untitled 1987 (plywood with red Plexiglas) © Donald Judd Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York |
Early in
1993, just about a year before he died, Judd wrote of space in a way that
parallels his sense of emotion and perspective in Oldenburg: ‘There is no
neutral space, since space is made. ... My smallest, simplest work creates space
around it, since there is so much space within. ... Space is new in art and is
still not a concern of more than a few artists. ... There is no vocabulary for
[its] discussion.’42 When no
vocabulary exists, rhetoric resorts to syllepsis and catachresis, which create a
vocabulary outside the usual poetry as well as outside the usual logic.
Did Judd have a rhetoric of three-dimensional form? Sylleptically, he
combined what was given at hand with what he chose to do, making strangely
integrated structures that move beyond familiar logics of form. His large,
site-specific concrete ring of 1971 is a striking example (fig.11). While the
top edge of its inner surface remains level, the top edge of its outer surface
parallels the ground, maintaining a height of four feet above that given feature
of the land – an arbitrary measure, but calculated along with the
inner, constant edge to allow the interior space of the ring to be seen. All is
exposed. The ring itself is eighteen inches thick and requires a complex bevel
to accommodate the shifting difference between its inner and outer surfaces.
Here a single object set in the land creates different spaces of different
character, inside and outside its bounded surfaces. Given Judd’s
understanding of Oldenburg’s art, it may be that the outer surface was his
way of dealing with representational reference, for it blatantly mimics an
aspect of the land, whereas the inner surface is just as forcefully abstract in
its escape from reference. The most obvious feature of the ring is its existence
as a single unit. In his boxes, Judd called the effect of red and black a
‘two color monochrome.’43 I suppose
that by analogy – would he have objected to this one? – his
concrete ring could be called a bilateral unilateral. Its complexly canted
surface gestures toward the given land and toward Judd the willful artist,
accomplishing these very separate actions as one.
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Fig.11 Donald Judd, Untitled 1971 (outdoor concrete ring made for Philip Johnson) © Donald Judd Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York |
1 See Richard Shiff, ‘Donald Judd: Fast Thinking’, in Donald Judd: Late Work, New York, 2000, pp.4-23; ‘A Space of One to One’, in Donald Judd: 50 x 100 x 50, 100 x 100 x 50, PaceWildenstein, New York, 2002, pp5-23; ‘Donald Judd, Safe From Birds’, in Nicholas Serota (ed.), Donald Judd, Tate Publishing, London, 2004, pp28-61. In consultation with translator Jürgen Blasius, I slightly expanded my remarks on the Judd/Oldenburg issue for the German edition of ‘Donald Judd: Safe from Birds’.
2 Clement Greenberg, ‘Complaints of an Art Critic’ (1967), in John O’Brian (ed.), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1986-93, pp.4:269.
3 Judd, ‘Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular’ (1993), in Serota 2004, pp.151.
4 Claes Oldenburg, statement in Jan McDevitt, ‘The Object: Still Life’, Craft Horizons 25, September 1965, pp.31.
5 Judd, ‘In the Galleries: Claes Oldenburg’ (1964), Complete Writings 1959-1975, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, 1975, pp.133. (Hereafter CW.)
6 Donald Judd, interview by Lucy R. Lippard, New York, 10 April 1968, Lucy R. Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art.
7 Judd, ‘Reviews and Previews: Yoyoi Kusama’ (1959), CW, pp.2.
8 Judd, ‘In the Galleries: Josef Albers’ (1959), CW, pp.6.
9 Judd, ‘In the Galleries: Helen Frankenthaler’ (1960), CW, pp.13 (punctuation altered for clarity).
10 Judd, ‘Jackson Pollock’, CW, pp.195; Donald Judd, ‘Art and Architecture’ (1983), ‘Abstract Expressionism’ (1983), Complete Writings 1975-1986, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1987, pp.34, 45.
11 Judd, ‘In the Galleries: Lee Bontecou’ (1963), ‘Lee Bontecou’ (1965), CW, pp.65, 178.
12 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’ (1964-65), CW, .p.188 (punctuation altered for clarity). Judd associated Bontecou’s ‘constructions’ with ‘contoured volcanoes’ in ‘In the Galleries: Lee Bontecou’ (1960), CW, pp.27.
13 Judd, ‘Lee Bontecou’, CW, pp.179.
14 Judd, ‘Barnett Newman’ (1964-70), CW, pp.202.
15 Ibid.
16 Barnett Newman, ‘Remarks at the Fourth Annual Woodstock Art Conference’ (1952), in John O’Neill (ed.), Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interview, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992, pp.245.
17 Judd, ‘Jackson Pollock’, CW, p.195. See also Judd, ‘Abstract Expressionism’, Complete Writings 1975-1986, pp.40.
18 Donald Judd, edited transcript of ‘The New Sculpture: A Symposium on Primary Structures’, Jewish Museum, New York, 2 May 1966, Barbara Rose Papers, Archives of American Art.
19 Judd, interview by Lippard.
20 Judd, ‘In the Galleries: Claes Oldenburg’ (1964), ‘Claes Oldenburg’ (1966), CW, pp.133, 191.
21 Judd, ‘Statement’ (from ‘Homage to the Square’, 1967), CW, pp.193. As a further example of Judd’s imagining his way out of dichotomies, compare his reference to ‘another kind of painting, far from the easel, [and also] far from beyond the easel’ (Judd, ‘Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,’ in Serota 2004, p.157).
22 Judd, ‘Statement’ (from ‘Portfolio: 4 Sculptors’, 1968), CW, pp.196.
23 Judd, interview by Lippard.
24 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, CW, pp.189.
25 Judd, ‘Claes Oldenburg’, CW, pp.192.
26 Judd, ‘In the Galleries: Claes Oldenburg’, CW, pp.133.
27 Judd, ‘In the Galleries: Jasper Johns’ (1960), CW, pp.14.
28 Max Kozloff, ‘New York Letter’, Art International 6, 25 September 1962, pp.35.
29 Judd, ‘In the Galleries: Wayne Thiebaud’ (1962), CW, pp.60. Judd may have been replying to a comment by Kozloff that preceded the one I have quoted, for the two statements seem to have appeared during the same month, September 1962. Kozloff applied his metaphoric, comparative analysis – the type of critical observation Judd steadfastly resisted – to another of Judd’s favorites in March 1962, elaborating on ‘the great affinity [John] Chamberlain has with Bernini’ (Max Kozloff, ‘New York Letter’, Art International 6 [March 1962], pp.63).
30 In a recent statement on the evolution of his drawing and sculpture, Oldenburg alludes to a shift from metaphoric illustration to a kind of catachrestic literalness: ‘I began by trying to represent things accurately. Gradually I became interested in representing different states of mind and feelings; then gesture and material became independent’ (Claes Oldenburg, interview by Janie C. Lee, 29 May 2001, in Janie C. Lee, Claes Oldenburg Drawings, 1959-1977, Claes Oldenburg with Coosje van Bruggen Drawings, 1992-1998, in the Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002, pp.18).
31 Judd, ‘In the Galleries: Claes Oldenburg’, ‘Claes Oldenburg’, CW, pp.133, 192. Referring to the entire class of ‘three-dimensional work’ (as opposed to conventional sculpture), Judd states: ‘If there is a reference it is single and explicit. In any case the chief interests are obvious’ (‘Specific Objects’, CW, pp.188).
32 Oldenburg’s notebook pages from 1963-64 contain such advertising images; see Claes Oldenburg, Notes in Hand, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1971, plates 5, 6.
33 Judd, ‘In the Galleries: Claes Oldenburg’, CW, p.133; also ‘Claes Oldenburg’, CW, pp.193, where the word is ‘parallelogram’.
34 Claes Oldenburg, note on Bedroom, 1976, in Germano Celant (ed.), Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995, pp.204.
35 Judd, ‘Claes Oldenburg’, CW, pp.192.
36 Oldenburg, note of 1963 (edited in 1995), in Celant, pp.192.
37 Judd, ‘Jackson Pollock’, CW, pp.195.
38 Oldenburg, in McDevitt, pp.31.
39 Judd, ‘Black, White, and Gray’ (1964), CW, pp.117.
40 On ‘interest’, see David Raskin, ‘Judd’s Moral Art’, in Serota 2004, pp.82-5.
41 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, CW, pp.189.
42 Donald Judd, ‘21 February 93’, Donald Judd: Large-Scale Works, Pace Gallery, New York, 1993, pp.9, 13.
43 Judd, ‘Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,’ in Serota 2004, pp.158.
Acknowledgements
The present essay derives from my contribution
to a symposium on Donald Judd as a writer, held at Tate Modern, London, on 28
February 2004 in conjunction with the Donald Judd exhibition, and was
recently published in the Chinati Foundation Newsletter. I thank Marianne
Stockebrand, David Raskin, and James Lawrence for essential aid in researching
this topic.
Richard Shiff is the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art in the
Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin.
Tate Papers Autumn 2004 © Richard Shiff
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