NARRATOR:
The cool, geometric precision of works like this stack expresses the spirit of Minimalism, a quintessentially American kind of art. Donald Judd is one of the artists most strongly identified with this movement.
GARY GARRELS:
What’s essential to Minimalism is the nature of the material.
NARRATOR:
Gary Garrels, Curator at the Museum.
GARRELS:
Every material gives a different quality of experience, and the Minimalists were interested in looking at those materials in their purest form. Judd was interested in the most contemporary possibilities of technology– the kinds of finishes, the fineness of line that would not have been possible ten years before. His work developed at exactly the same time that the aerospace industry was developing.
NARRATOR:
Like many others of his generation, Judd was reacting to the self-absorbed emotional content of Abstract Expressionism.
GARRELS:
When I first saw Judd, I was really struck by how bold and how fresh the work was to me. It didn’t have literary overtones. It didn’t have this kind of obsessive, psychological absorption. It was just clear and clean, extremely elegant, bold and beautiful work.
When you see this kind of piece ascending up to the sky, there is a sense of a kind of rising of consciousness, a rising of the spirit, so it’s both the directness of the work– its rigor, its clarity, its formal precision– but also the possibility of metaphorical overlays: ideas of freedom, of openness, of the power of the human mind. That’s a very romantic notion, that there is a sense of the possibility of perfection.
