“Dealing with space, for him, meant dealing with any kind of space that he found interesting.” This made for a set of ideas and demands that were consistent across all of his projects. “Don’s practice was space,” says Flavin Judd, the artist’s son, who serves as copresident of the Judd Foundation with his sister, Rainer (both are from Judd’s marriage to dancer and choreographer Julie Finch). “Space is made by an artist or architect, it is not found or packaged,” Judd wrote in 1993, just months before his death at the age of 65. His brilliant scheme for reuniting the estranged couple was to make space his main concern, whether he was creating paintings, prints, sculptures, furniture or the buildings presented in the show, on view at the Center for Architecture through March 5. Attuned to the built environment from a young age, Judd had watched art and architecture gradually grow apart and finally divorce, as the latter practice was reduced to “merely building.” In response, he built more than arguments - and now, Judd’s architectural works are the focus of a new exhibition in New York, “ Obdurate Space,” the first dedicated to this part of his oeuvre.īeyond the towering, tax-abating corporate palaces that only exaggerated the “snaggletoothed” Manhattan skyline (Judd was an advocate of symmetry), he railed against the ersatz historical jazz of postmodernism and the architecture-as-sculpture stance of so many museum commissions. One of the most important artists of the 20th century, Judd was also an incisive philosopher-critic and found “plastic bureaucratic architecture” ripe for evisceration.
November 27, 2017The skyscrapers are the sour cream of a skim milk society,” Donald Judd wrote in 1984.
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