‘It’s just boxes,”I once overheard a viewer say to his companion about an installation of Donald Judd’s raw-plywood sculptures at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y. “I woke up in a box. I traveled here in a box. And now,” he continued, “I’m in another box looking at more boxes.” Although Judd (1928-1994) didn’t like being referred to as a sculptor, or his objects being called “sculptures” (he may have preferred the term “boxes”), it’s impossible, from our vantage point, not to see his groundbreaking work, which did away with the pedestal, as anything but sculptures.
It’s true that Judd, a pioneer of American Minimalism (another term he abhorred), worked with boxes: raw, painted, solid, closed, open, hollow, compartmentalized and transparent—in plywood, plexiglass, iron, acrylic, aluminum, copper, brass and stainless, painted and galvanized steel. And his bare-bones sculptures suggest architecture and building blocks, and sometimes push toward Minimalism’s mute extremes. But what matters in Judd is his exactitude, his rigorous attention to scale, amount, increment and interval; how he beautifully orchestrates the various qualities and properties of his materials—not just colored plexiglass and reflective metals, but light, shadow and empty space. How he compresses, pools, patterns and halos colored reflections; how he meticulously speeds up and slows down our movements among forms, around corners and across planes; how he transforms void into elastic, palpable volume.
These gifts are in full force in “Judd,” a retrospective of 70 sculptures, drawings and paintings (almost all are “Untitled”) at the Museum of Modern Art. Organized by Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, and former associate curator Yasmil Raymond, with curatorial assistant Tamar Margalit and research fellow Erica Cooke, “Judd”—his first U.S. survey in more than 30 years—is commandingly handsome.
This is the kind of chilly, upright exhibition that makes you tighten your coat and straighten your posture. Right angles; clean, crisp edges; and faceless, industrial materials abound. There is little here, beyond its many square yards of raw plywood, that is remotely personal or warm and fuzzy. But there is surprise, mystery. Judd’s most compelling works are powerfully impersonal and plainspoken feats of poetic engineering.