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Literature: Sprengel Museum Hannover and Kunsthaus Bregenz, exh. cat., Donald Judd Colorist, 2000, p.63 (illustrated in color).
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Notes: "I wanted to use more and diverse bright colors than before I especially didn't want the combinations to be harmonious, an old and implicative idea, which is the easiest to avoid, or to be inharmonious in reaction, which is harder to avoid. I wanted all of the colors to be present at once. I didn't want them to combine. I wanted a multiplicity all at once that I had not known before. This was very difficult" (D. Judd, quoted in "Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular," N. Serota, ed., Donald Judd, London, 2004, p. 158).
As part of the 1984 exhibition, Sculpture in the 20th Century, at Merian Park outside Basel, Donald Judd created the first in what would ultimately develop into a series of painted aluminum works, all consisting of brightly-colored, open-faced modular units. The works in this series tend to divide into two groups: the first group consists of large-scale, rectangular floor pieces which are intended to rest directly on the ground, like the 1984 outdoor sculpture which Judd created for the Merian Park exhibition; works in the second group, by contrast, consist of one or two horizontal units -- each of which in turn contains two horizontal tiers -- and are intended instead to be displayed directly on the wall, like Judd's Untitled, 1987 (87-29 STUDER). Although Judd had always been a brilliant colorist, often favoring vivid hues such as cadmium red in his earliest works, and a truly kaleidoscopic array of colored Plexiglas throughout his career, the painted aluminum works evidence a profusion of color and, indeed, an almost Pop art playfulness, which is truly unique in this Minimalist sculptor's oeuvre. According to fellow artist Ashley Bickerton, "That's how [Judd] and other Minimalists would always refer to the paint, as the skin of the object. And it is seductive [like a] parade of monster trucks and dune-buggies and surfboards, sailboats, diners, and the lot, not to mention television graphics, that we all grew up with" (A. Bickerton, C. Lyon, ed., Contemporary Art in Context, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1990, pp. 56-57).
Reasonable minds -- and, no doubt, Judd would be one of them -- might disagree whether his brilliant colors are intended to invoke such heady associations with popular culture; nevertheless, the "RAL Color Chart," from which Judd chose the brilliantly variegated hues for his painted aluminum works, does feature such quintessentially Pop choices as strawberry red and Capri blue, traffic purple and signal orange. Interestingly, the present work, each of whose two units measures just under one foot high and deep, and almost twelve feet long, in addition to featuring RAL variations on what appears to be golden yellow and traffic orange, includes a number of unpainted modules, as well as others which have been painted black, white and gray. Unlike his Minimalist contemporary Robert Morris, for whom gray was the epitome of non-color and, as such, the perfect complement to his non-forms like simple columns or L-beams, Judd explains, "I consider everything to be color, including gray, so that business of gray not being a color that Morris talks about is nonsense" (D. Judd, quoted in J. Coplans, "An Interview with Don Judd," Artforum, vol. 9, no. 10, June 1971, p. 45).
The juxtaposition of painted gray modules with the intrinsic gray of unpainted aluminum ones deftly recalls his early explorations of anodized and galvanized metals, similarly, as vehicles for color in their own right, while his rigorous reduction of the work's chromatic palette to the primary color yellow (and the secondary color orange), quite specifically, set against the rhythmic beat of the work's geometric modules -- in particular, the black and white modules -- is likely to recall the classic grids of Piet Mondrian, an artist whom Judd has often singled out as having admired. "Mondrian's colors," he writes, "are one of the facts and wonders of the world" (D. Judd, quoted in Serota, p. 152). Judd's display format of his wall pieces is also reflected in Mondrian's display of his classic grids; famously, rather than traditionally framing these compositions, Mondrian would instead mount them both to bring them away from the wall, and to emphasize their material existence as a real object in real space, an idea which Judd further develops by not only layering his tray-like forms in height, but in depth as well, as a syncopated array of interlocking volumes and hollows, punctuated by intervening voids. "Three dimensions are real space," writes Judd; "That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors -- which is riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art (D. Judd, quoted in "Specific Objects," T. Kellein, ed., Donald Judd: Early Work 1955-1968, New York, 2002, p. 94). In this respect, the "Swiss Boxes" also evidence more than a passing resemblance to Judd's earlier "Progressions," whose horizontal format and mathematical cadences they share, as well as the structural idea of a wall piece as positing two radically distinct views: while the rhythmic play of alternating bands of narrower and wider segments is clearly visible from the front of the "Swiss Boxes," it is only obliquely, when seen from above, below or the side, that theirs multi-layered depth -- with their complex subordination of interlocking volumes and hollows, as well as intervening voids, to the sense of the object as an integral whole -- is fully manifest. In this sense, Untitled, 1987 (87-29 STUDER) is a preeminent example of what Judd has termed a "specific object," and defined as follows: "The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole," as he emphasizes, "is what is interesting" (D. Judd, quoted in "Specific Objects," p. 94). Indeed, fundamentally riven both from within (constituted of alternating narrower and wider modules, and set in two tiers) and from without (divided, in turn, into two distinct horizontal units), the present work would seem to multiply the fundamental challenge of Judd's earlier "Stacks," which are comparably divided into freestanding, horizontal units, yet ultimately unified in their overall effect as a "specific object."
With both his "Progressions" and "Stacks," Judd "Swiss Boxes" share the artist's career-long refusal of pedestal-bound sculpture, by instead displaying it as a fully three-dimensional object -- all the more so, of course, that the volume of the painted aluminum work so utterly defies any corresponding sense of mass: its visible screws reinforce its planar construction and gravity-insouciant lightness, while its display format, directly on the wall, contributes to its liminal position, like so many of Judd's best "specific objects," between the immateriality of painting and the materiality of sculpture.
24651424: Art studio, Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas. c Judd Foundation Flavin Judd.
24651417: Ayala de Chianti, Casa Perez, Presidio County, Texas.
24651400: Studio, Marfa, Texas. Photograph by Jasper Sharp.
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