Artist on Artist Lecture - Amie Siegel on Donald Judd

hello everyone welcome I'm Kelly Kipling I'm associate curator here at DIA it's a pleasure to welcome you to tonight's artists and artists with Amy Segal on Donald Judd a few things I just want to say thanks to the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs for their generous support of this series long-standing actually and the Brooklyn Brewery of course for the complimentary beer and I'm thrilled to introduce Amy someone I've been able to get to know over the last few years it looks like many of you also know her as just I'll read a bit of biographical information before her talk begins she was born in Chicago in 1974 and received her MFA from the school of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999 she works in a variety of mediums including film installation photography and even performance and Seagal documents the mechanisms through which objects take on value examining issues of cultural ownership and image making inherent in these processes she often mimics the structure of the cinematic apparatus and her recent films employ reversals meereen negative and loops to expose not only the nature of the passage of things but often the power structures at work in the production of aesthetics be it objects places or even marble Siegel's recent solo exhibitions include the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York mock Vienna Temple Bar Dublin the Koontz Museum Stuttgart and the Museum villas Duke in Munich and her current exhibition the spear in the stone is on view currently at Simon pressing gallery through June 20th thank you again for coming and it's my pleasure to welcome Amy Segal [Applause] thank you everyone for being here um I want to thank dia for inviting me and in particular kelly Kivlin and francesca ligaw Blue Max tonari over here max where are you there you are I can't even see you and also a jasper lauderdale who helped so much with this talk and I particularly want to thank everyone I spoke with who are far too numerous to name here but I think some of you are here which is deeply intimidating but I'm really pleased to have you so and thank you again for your help [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] kisses just me [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] in the mid-eighties Hollywood filmmaker Adrienne line made nine and a half weeks an erotic drama set in Soho starring Kim Basinger as it as the director of the Spring Street gallery the location of the fictional gallery was Donald Judd's spring street loft the production used the first floor as exhibition space and built a mezzanine and stairs up to the administrative area of the gallery the fictional Spring Street gallery in contrast to the art usually in happening Judd space featured the work of Sarah charlesworth and George Segal the production also filmed in the basement where Kim Basinger character sits next to a slide projector and engages in an art inspired act of self pleasuring the pan down from this from spring streets vault lights or diamond glass lenses embedded in the sidewalk above to allow daylight into the space cast in foggy 80's cinematography in the shot reveals the basement location this masturbatory moment is the repetitive inward turning act of excessive self pleasure rife with contrapposto contortions happens in a chair one from which Basinger liberates herself while looking a kind of modern day Delphine Zurich cut from the baroque gardens and bedrooms of last year at Marienbad in 1992 Donald Judd was invited to install part of the permanent collection of the Museum for Ann Gavin - kunst the Museum of applied Arts in Vienna Judds invitation was part of a larger initiative by then Mac director Peter never to have contemporary artists interact with the objects in museums collection which resulted in Jenny Holt sirs betta Meyer room Barbara blooms parade of tone a chair silhouettes and hi Mo's / Nix V nur verge data display Judd rather incongruous Lee was invited to install the baroque and Rococo room the main element of the Baroque room was the porcelain cabinet from the dub suki palace in Brno an entire room transplanted to the museum along with selecting and placing the furniture and objects together with curator Christian bit during judge chose to repeat the white ceiling moulding pattern of the larger Mac exhibition space along the exterior of the dub ski room to create a relationship between the two spaces and prevent the structure from looking like a quote unquote german bunker judd also designed of a train the only one of its kind for a nine part white porcelain centrepiece while the mac vitrine was a singular object made late in Judds lifetime a unique object particular to the mak installation it was in fact not the artists first piece of furniture in 1958-59 Judd makes a low table to rest on concrete blocks in 1966 together with his father he makes bookcases meant to transport as well as store books Judds activities in the mid-60s include writing art criticism the movement away from painting into the production of objects his first solo show at Green Street Gallery in 63 and the publication in 65 of specific objects his best-known piece of writing where he takes account of contemporary practice and new three-dimensional objects that are neither painting nor sculpture argues against illusionistic and anthropomorphic forms pushes for a use of synthetic materials large-scale holes and see reality and effectively sets the stage for his own specific objects his artwork however in the mid-60s judge conceives of a piece of furniture supposedly at the bidding of a collector that he permits himself to articulate as such as furniture a coffee table with a recessed surface where one side slides under the other which he later refers to in several texts as his first attempt at furniture and he promptly rejects it however he revisits it again and again in his later writings here is Judd writing in 1993 in the middle 80s I wrote that in the middle 60s someone asked me to design a coffee table so Judd has returned to this several times now I thought that a work of mine which was essentially a rectangular volume with the upper surface recessed could be altered this debased the work and produced a bad table which I later threw away the configuration and the scale of art cannot be transposed into furniture and architecture the intent of art is different from that of the latter which must be functional if a chair or a building is not functional if it appears to be only art it is ridiculous the art of a chair is not its resemblance to art but is partly its reasonableness usefulness and scale as a chair due to the inability of art to become furniture I didn't try again for several years in a 1966 statement written for Klaus Oldenburg's exhibition at the Moderne musee in stockholm judd discusses Oldenburg's 1963 work bedroom Ensemble we're in Oldenburg's words the artist Ari realizes the softest room in the house and the one least associated with conscious thought as a space of entirely hard surfaces an exaggerated illusion of depth the shapes of the furniture are skewed as if rendered in a perspective drawing the illusion is furthered in commercial imitations of marbled fur and leather none of the furniture is real none of the accessories operate the entire work is an illusion of functionalism down to the small drip of paintings on the wall Jud having already cited Oldenburg in his essay specific objects as an exception among artists otherwise stuck in illusionistic representation expands on his appreciation of Oldenburg's remade objects as grossly anthropomorphic enlarging and thus subverting the tendency of anthropomorphism to evoke the appearance of human feelings in things that are inanimate or not human as if those feelings are the essential nature of the things described Oldenburg's objects judd wrote with admiration have nothing to do with the objects they are like the work is a thorough corruption of all its sources Oldenburg chooses not to include Judds text in the catalogue and it remains unpublished until 1975 in the late 60s Judd purchases the the Spring Street building and influenced by what he Intuit's as the prior openness of the building Judd dedicates each loft floor to one purpose working eating and sleeping for the fifth floor where he and his young family slept including his then-wife dancer Julie Finch and young son flavin Judd conceived of a large platform bed of black walnut made by Peter Valentine in 1970 Valentine later becomes the primary fabricator of Judds plywood artworks Julie Finch soon asked Judd if they might get a comfortable sofa to sit on to read to their son for example and Judd got this Italian settee which remains in the Spring Street loft to this day a few years later Judd made a pair of sinks at Spring Street and was careful to use a shape for the basin an ellipse that he had not used in art for the fourth floor at Spring Street Judd designed a large table with a bench like set of chairs to be made a folded 1/8 inch stainless steel brass or copper Bernstein brothers the metal company who created the sinks and whom Judd had been using since 1964 to fabricate his metal artworks created the prototypes of the folded chairs in Corten steel while metal fab in Odessa Texas created a painted set the prototype painted chairs were done in a red close to the cadmium red the color Judd used for the artworks featured in his 1963 Greene gallery show works later installed in Marfa Texas the table was never made as Judd thought the furniture would be too closed while the fourth floor with its unique two wood Plains of floor and ceiling was to remain open in 1975 while renting a house in Marfa makes a pine table which he fabricates himself then in 1977 he designs a bed for his two children with a dividing wall between them and a desk for each of them he also designs chairs fabricated by Sal Antonio Mariano in Marfa over the next several years Judd designs and has salad ownio and his brother Alfredo execute the fabrication of tables benches beds and chairs for his own use in Texas and New York around 1981 the soho based company Cooper Cato begins high-end fabrication of juds wood furniture designs with detailed craftsmanship and finish this is the first time Judds furniture becomes commercially available over that decade Cooper Cato produces Judd designs in varied woods Douglas fir maple cherry alder walnut the furniture is addition klaus Oldenburg with whom judd becomes friendly in the late 70s gets a library table and several other judd furniture pieces in 1984 judd starts making artworks an enamel painted aluminum working with Laney in Switzerland as fabricators Lainey was a furniture producer known in Europe for the Lainey bed a classic metal frame and support that same year Judd has Lainey fabricate a set of painted aluminum chairs stools and benches to join his wood furniture in a show at max pro tech gallery in New York this is the first exhibition of Judds furniture and the first judge architecture exhibition the focus of the maxpro tech gallery was blurring the boundary between art architecture and as Judd had done a show of Plexiglas and aluminum pieces at Protex original gallery in Washington DC however Judd did not allow his furniture and his art to be exhibited together the New York show was called simply Donald Judd furniture and architecture an article in studio international art camouflaged as furniture appeared coincident with the protec exhibition and discussed several artists including Judd and Scott Burton whose 1983 marble Shay's launch is pictured here with Judds red aluminum chair and whom protec also exhibited and represented protec said recently that he viewed Judds work in terms of Burton mentioning a competitive animosity between Judd and Burton protec related an anecdote where one night Burton lobbed a brick through the window of Judds studio out of anger for protec the chronology is Judd Wright's specific objects Burton is influenced by it but stakes his own claim to make functional objects that blur the boundary between art and furniture and thus art and function which then influences Judd to make functional objects Judd continued to make the metal furniture adding desks drawers and bookshelves in addition to the chairs and tables and 15 colors of painted aluminum as well as an anodized aluminum galvanized iron and copper Cooper Kato continue to create increasingly elaborate wood finishes until 1989 when Judd hands over fabrication of the wood furniture in an effort to simplify their execution and keep production in-house two recent studio assistants Jeff Jamison and also Rupert Dee's who still produce Judds wood furniture to this day the judd foundation makes distinctions between two kinds of judd furniture lifetime furniture anything made pre-1994 prior to Judds death and furniture made afterward judd furniture is for sale through the foundation website well one often sees judd furniture at art fairs used as seating for dealers and their clients one rarely sees Judd furniture at design fairs many design fairs deny booths who apply to participate with Judd furniture because the construction of value in the judge furniture market is quixotic and nebulous depending almost entirely on provenance Judds early metal furniture pieces are in editions of 10 as well as the Cooper kado wood furniture however within these editions of 10 you might have 10 to 15 designs each of which are available in 15 to 20 colors or wood finishes thus additions increase considerably the Lainey & y Anson fabricated metal pieces after a certain point were numbered but not addition though these numbers which are really authentic ocation numbers often posed in auction catalogues as edition numbers Judd was seemingly opposed to the auditioning of the furniture and after ending the Cooper Kato relationship the furniture was produced in an open Edition which continues to this day with the pieces numbered but not limited judd furniture is quite present at auctions and sells for varied amounts sometimes the furniture appears in the post-war and contemporary art sale such as it christie's here the desk fetching one hundred and thirty three thousand dollars other times it appears in design sales such as its Sotheby's where these copper chairs fetched forty three thousand dollars here is a chair from right being auctioned it right and here is a daybed at Philips to help sell a late Cooper Cato finished Judd desk set Simon de Pury himself posed seated at the furniture the desk went for two hundred and forty two thousand dollars you can also license the Getty image of Simon de Pury for five hundred and seventy five dollars Sotheby's has a copyright issue with some of the judge foundation images as Jud furniture images an absence of information which seems to speak to the curious presence of some of these items at auction here is a desk set being sold by Klaus Oldenburg here is a writing table commissioned from Judd by the krona sure Koons foreign and here is that coffee table that Judd supposedly destroyed which some people said was bought by a German collector and even was perhaps one of three that Judd made but the German collector perhaps resold it here there is also furniture for sale in the manner of Donald Judd or in the style of Judd in the mid-1990s Judd furniture became synonymous with the notion of a minimal aesthetic due in part to architect John Parsons singular deployment of Judds furniture along with his own furniture in his design of the Madison Avenue Calvin Klein store and Calvin Klein's launch of their home designs featuring objects and furniture that aped Judd spaces such as the platform bed photographer Todd a burly who Judds studio used to photograph Judd spaces and furniture for exhibition catalogs was hired to shoot the Calvin Klein home advertising campaign as well as images of the New York store Paulson's first wife Hester van Ryan was in the early 90s the European representative of Judds furniture liaison between clients and institutions and judge studio and fabricators Paulson whose spaces are sparse with few objects visible and are often described as austere a feeling confirmed when he designed a monastery in the Czech Republic has since become synonymous with general ideas of a minimal aesthetic even and often eclipsing Judd in that respect yet his work never seems to quite sever itself from the Judd referent and the referent is one he cultivates in the new york times in 2012 Paulson tells how his wife interior designer Katherine Paulson lobbied for a sofa for a decent place to sit in their homes sparse living room which then featured a stone bench and a single Danish chair Paulson finally gave in purchasing a single settee uncannily echoing the story about Judd and the fifth floor furniture the settee the Parsons aquire is one designed by pierre-jean array from the liqueur boozy a built city of Chandigarh India the Judd furniture is an accessible status symbol but it's not so much concerned with power with rarity as with sophistication it's a self-consciously academic choice because it reads as anti bourgeois as a design specialist said to me recently if you choose to punctuate a room with this moment you're saying I know better Judd himself was from the start an avid collector of things homes objects furniture tools artworks Judd was deeply acquisitive buying and trading for and accumulating not just objects and furniture over his lifetime as well as the work of artist friends he admired he came to own at least 20 properties in Marfa alone all with Judd furniture the block for his home in studio the bank building the Cobb and white houses the supermarket which eventually became his art studio the architecture office the ranch office the Print Studio the Chamberlin building a house in I Cole turn Switzerland and three Texas ranches over time Casa Morales Casa Perez and finally las Casas as well as of course Spring Street and it turns out an apartment and studio in a Cologne Judd also bought land quite a bit of it ensuring no further development adjacent to his ranches south of Marfa Judds grandfather restored furniture Judds daughter Rainer were called her grandmother bought old farm equipment at estate sales spades milking stools with cutout stars placed around her home and placed them around her home she remembers a collection of six brass scales and a wall hung with antique tools early on it's Spring Street Judd was already accumulating things of interest in this 1970s image of the fifth floor one can discern in addition to the platform bed on the left side is a glass Larry Bell work to Gerrit Rietveld chairs just passed the TV and fan a Swedish settee at the far end of the space a layering of textiles on the floor and a Chamberlain work on the opposite wall if we flip to the reverse shot what looks like a huge set of doors from an indigenous Pacific Northwest tribe is visible Judd traveled intensively in Mexico and the American Southwest during those years collecting baskets bowls and turquoise jewelry a 1980s image from Spring Street shows about 25 tonne a bent wood chairs around a jug table on the second floor and in the foreground an Ivory Coast senufo bed and chair an Ethiopian wood injera server a Kenyan stool a leather toric pillow and banna much act blanket from Mali and a striped blanket from Burkina Faso Judd collected things from Africa through Ford wheeler the owner of craft Caravan in Soho Ford would make trips several times a year to Africa and call up Judd to come over whenever the new shipments arrived Judd kept a tab at the store Rayner Judd hung out in the store as a teenager and eventually worked there when Judd moved his kids back to New York in 1983 for high school judd bought Stickley mission oak furniture placing them around the studio and living spaces in Marfa he placed them around his own works and furniture artist Tony Berlin supplied Judd with Native American rugs those now in the navajo room at the Block in Marfa along with Judds baskets turquoise jewelry bowls pottery knives ceramics the blankets procured from Berlant were done so in trade for some of Judds work Judd was a frequent consumer of the Manhattan's store Scottish products they carried kilts Tartans and bagpipes in the 80s he would pick up the kids after school and they would go around the stores in Soho to look at and buy things including at Evergreen the Swedish furniture and antiques store from which Judd purchased many items the proprietor Suzanne Siegel AB sent me some receipts and an old Polaroid of objects Judd had bought I was touched to open the email and see this image an accounting of purchases however I reopened the email a few days later and realized that there was more there was in fact much much more former studio assistants discuss how judd would buy things in new york and store them in the basement at spring street and then assistants would drive them down to Marfa in trucks judd acquired hundreds of objects when traveling in Mexico and abroad in Europe and elsewhere rainer judd recalls her father and brother walking around pointing in shop windows and talking about whether something was quote unquote good design when traveling the first thing judd would ask upon entering a store was do you ship and if they said yes judd would start shopping Judd didn't just buy one thing he would buy ten of each thing for each home Italian ceramic bowls Mexican pottery glassware tools knives pots canteens Paula Cooper who showed Judds furniture in her Wooster Street gallery in the 80s when she represented his work recounted how she was once with Judd for an exhibition of his in Spain they walked into a leather goods store in Barcelona and judge didn't buy one bag or two bags he bought five Italian space for juds concerns is the bank building in downtown Marfa which Judd established as an architecture studio filling it with furniture works and objects by architects and artists he admired the downstairs features a Mies van der Rohe a chair Spanish chests an alto end table a large Swedish table from evergreen a Mexican sideboard with a V nerver kieta pitcher and wash basin an Iranian bowl and Frank Lloyd Wright candlesticks there is also a demitasse set with designs by Judd there are two Gerrit Rietveld benches made of pine and painted steel that were designed as pews in 1963 for a church Rietveld did in the Netherlands which was later transformed into a library and the Rietveld pews were sold off Judd later acquired these in a trade from a Dutch and Finnish artist he heard had purchased them upstairs in the architecture studio room after room is filled with furniture by Alvar Aalto Mies van der Rohe ax Rietveld including early prototypes and surprising moments of beta Meyer furniture objects by El Lissitzky and Joseph Hoffman and of course furniture by Judd himself Peter Valentine recalls travelling in Finland with Judd and stopping in a showroom in Helsinki where Judd proceeds to buy about 25 to 30 alto pieces it made their day Valentine said sales reps the architecture studio also features actions by Rembrandt works by Te'o van doos Berg and and Josef Albers the Cobb house is a similar if more contemplative example of this associate ease of this associative placemaking in Marfa where Judd renovated and filled each building with objects and his early paintings Swedish furniture and his own furniture the standalone building at the back of the property is inhabited by furniture by Rudolph Schindler that jut collected just as Judd is invested in contextualizing his own artwork at janati with the work of his peers who he admired whose artwork is also installed there so here is Judd invested in placing into context his designs his furniture and his architecture with those architects of the past that he admired as mentioned earlier Judd never allowed for his furniture to be exhibited together with his artwork yet that is exactly what Marfa became over his lifetime and how he specified it should remain after his death the person we know as the champion of stripped-down form a pared down aesthetic the person we associate with minimalism is in fact a maximalist he collected extensively excessively even promiscuously but to study use and learn from objects over time it is in fact the ultimate anthropomorphize anthropomorphizing of objects his works installed in the spaces take on everything around them the object histories aesthetic lineages ideas of good design and those objects in turn down to the ceramic Mexican bowls in the ranch houses take on him during Judds lifetime institutional exhibitions of his furniture occurred at the Mac Vienna in 1991 in an exhibition called Donald Judd architecture here are the early prototype chairs gathered around the absence of the steel table that was never made a full furniture retrospective was held at the Museum bunions van boy negan in Rotterdam part of which travelled to the museum village stuck in Munich where juds furniture was installed in urn Sponge Docks former Atelier and historic rooms Klauss Oldenburg's 1963 work bedroom ensemble is important because Oldenburg and Scott Burton are perhaps two opposite sides of the spectrum with Judd in the non-declarative middle both Oldenburg and Burton are playing with surrogates with a kind of once removed anthropomorphism that in its alienation from or in the case of Burton confusion with being a direct referent opens up a space for art in the forms of furniture Judd hates art that imitates movement he hates direct anthropomorphism though he admires the exaggerated version of Oldenburg's work he rejects most all reference to the body and subjective feeling when it comes to three-dimensional forms he loves news van der Rohe and Alto and Reid felt for their clean lines they're playing out of form Judd hates what he perceives as the anthropomorphism of liqueur booze yay the most core Blake thing Judd makes is that pair of metal sinks an oval volume or ellipses he himself self-consciously avoids in his artwork and thus felt free to deploy in this early attempt at furniture but his interest in form in see reality wins out and the furniture in many cases runs in parallel with the artwork at the end of his life Judd makes steel and slate furniture which gives background to the singular vitrine he has made for the Mac Vienna Baroque room in that vitrine he has done something completely contrary to museum logic he has taken what is usually a continuous piece of glass and broken it into separate but still connected volumes it is a viewing cabinet rather like the interior dub ski room inside the room but it is also in parts the breaking up of the expectation of continuity underlines the excessive length and temporal unfolding of the object it contains the white porcelain centerpiece Judd has created a space for display for exhibition with the vitrine which holds in stillness it's still object the vitrines long cereal monochromatic volumes of glass seemed to harken back to a space which might be considered Judds first space of exhibition and display blurring physical boundaries and contextualizing art with functional objects Spring Street the building with its oversized glass windows breaking up the continuous floor volumes its objects and furniture maintained in place cast in amber functions rather like of a train a Judd vitrine showing off its earlier structural form as well as the things it contains always in relation spring streets windows never curtain'd provide an invitation to look in to be looked at as much as to look out from the glass even extends to the basement glass ceiling vaults where Kim Basinger is filmed in nine and a half weeks we understand that seen as so contrary to Judds aesthetic yet it is about desire a singular desire aroused by things by images objects and art and Judd is someone who desired things and even desired them excessively thank you it's extraordinary I'm sure there's lots of questions percolating I hope we're gonna take a few if you want to take a moment to gather your thoughts thank you Amy quite quite the dedication and ambition and I mean I can't even begin but hopefully others can start to maybe distill a bit of what was presented dare you yes a great paper very nice work for my question is simple everyone knows Judd is quite amazing and I just wonder maybe you and people in the room can tell me how much did judge sleep at night just curious because of the productivity level I really don't know but um I I'm it's funny I I say it's funny because of what you first said which was he said something about clearly what did you say we love Judd or Judd is well when I was invited to do an artist's on artist talk here first of all I was super jazzed because this is my favorite talk series in New York and I've been going to them for a while so that set the bar kind of high for me but I actually decided in the end to talk about somebody for whom I didn't have much love that he wouldn't be the first person I would feel anesthetic let's say affinity with in the collection I decided to move away from people that I felt closer to and choose someone not that I was super Judd adverse but to be able to talk about somebody about whom I had questions and felt like this would be an opportunity to really dig in and learn more but I became much more interested in Judd in in sort of expanding what was a specific object for Judd in these sort of boundaries that he seemed to always be interested in blurring but constantly partitioning you know the way that people talk about Spring Street is the super flowing building but in fact for me what's interesting is that each floor had a purpose and judge seemed over his lifetime at least it seems to me now to be somebody who was constantly trying to both collapse things and do all kinds of things but to maintain separations like the architecture studio in the architecture office and the print Studios over there and you know he just keeps playing out these separations but doing everything and not sleeping clearly and then his his like his final ranch was really interesting because it also las casas because it separates functions like in that sort of bunkhouse cooking house like he really gets to to separate in there as well anybody else yeah um you mean of receipts and things like that that information wasn't available to me and so while I looked into it and there is a full-time conservator for the judge Foundation who's wonderful who works most of the time in Marfa I actually went kind of in a different direction and decided to ring up people I'd heard about from the family rather than kind of go through the official like what was officially known but I looked myself in the archives and didn't come across much but that doesn't mean it's not there my focus was really particular so that's John Parsons yeah chandi car piece um so the still the image that I showed is still actually from my own work provenance and I met possum when I filmed in his home for that piece and I knew about the possum Judd connection for a while and it's been certainly well documented and written about much more extensively than I could talk about in the space of this talk this evening thank you so much for that talk it's the first interesting talk I've heard on Judd in a very long time but what I think one of the things you're really revealing is what a contradictory figure Judd and Judds practice were and one could go all the way back to Smithson and Krause's essays on Judd and 65 and 66 where they talk about these boxes with their gleaming surfaces as being very illusionistic you know we think of jawed as anti illusionistic artists and just giving you the shape and the materiality and there's nothing else there this minimalist cliche of Stella's remark what you see is what you see and what they revealed is what a contradictory thing a Judd box is and if you sort of take that idea of Judd as being an artist of contradiction the whole kind of opposition of his art and his furniture is a very interesting one and his furniture tends to get pushed aside it's not taken seriously and you have taken Judds furniture seriously and that has allowed us to see how contradictory Judd is which is very I mean certain to Riya Beale what an interesting artist Judd is that it's beyond the specific object 1965 Judd that we all think about and one of the interesting things you teased out in his early criticism he's talking a lot about European art that European art is over and done with in all its implications and how increasingly he becomes very interested in dis tale in European modernism in different media the different Studios right the specific object was about getting rid of medium distinction but he reassert smedium distinction with these different Studios he gets interested in European modernism in his later and his it's as if his furniture takes him there it gives him the permission to think about European modernism which he had repressed in his early criticism so you're speaking you're showing us what a contradictory figure he is but also how there's kind of a difference between early Judd the high minimalist Judd and what happens to judge as early as 68 when he buys I actually think nine and a half weeks is a weirdly apropos example and not that Judd in nine 1/2 weeks have really anything to do with one another in some way but um there is a scene that I didn't include where they end up at Mickey Rourke's apartment and he has all this kind of postmodern furniture by architects and it's the early 80s and you know Judd was so kind of opposed so what you're saying about modernism and how he becomes you know more and more interested in it in fact is also set out against post-modernism for him and you know there's that sort of talk that he gives it at Yale around I think it's the late 80s I can't remember maybe it's even 84 85 yeah and he speaks about about his but it's the first time he really talks about his own architecture and his own interest and those things but also sets himself out against post-modernism and I find that really curious I mean as far as contradiction I would say that doing the talk I kind of sailed into an extremely unexpected empathy with him and really kind of embraced and identified with those feelings of contradiction that I saw rather than the Judd that I had known prior who was so kind of closed off to me the way the early work was maybe in a way oh there's something that I recognized yeah that's really interesting um I don't want to I feel ill-equipped to psychoanalyze Joe as far as the primal scene goes but um I mean I of course my mind goes to those anecdotes about the parents and the grandparents having tools and things that they put on the wall I found that really fascinating um [Music] it's strange I almost feel like it has to do with sea reality which is which is kind of a silly response but seeing the same thing played out in different contexts like having the same bowl and then putting it in ten different houses or four different houses feels like some interest in how form is same and different and how it can be played out in this you know through sameness and difference simultaneously something like that and I think also there was a tremendous anxiety I mean thinking about I didn't talk about his books or his library I you know I ditched it's like 600 images in favor of like 160 I saw so but the books in the library are a huge part of that and his he he duplicated you know numerous books throughout the houses so he would have the same book from house to house and I can't remember I think it was I think this was a secondhand anecdote that one of the kids told one of his children told someone that I spoke to though I also spoke with them about oh no it's in it's in a great interview with them that's in apartamento where I think Rayner talks about a giant book that flavin gave him and he was into reading it but he was moving around so much that he he took the book apart and put it into like six parts or something like that and then he would take each part with him and for him to just you know to kind of destroy a book which things that he treasured was it was a big thing but I just thought like I just thought of all his work I just thought of the seriality and I thought he was somehow playing this out unconsciously but now I am psychoanalyzing so maybe one or two more questions he didn't want to build anything as far as I understand he didn't want to build anything new he didn't want new construction he only wanted to adapt what was there but he had many projects and he ran a whole architecture office and he designed also projects for public spaces later in his life there's one in Gare Lincoln outside of Stuttgart there's one there's a fountain somewhere in the East Coast I can't remember or maybe maybe it's no and say he did he also did public spaces but he's important I think the important thing is that he didn't want to build from scratch he wanted to adapt structures and make them Judd basically you know because they all become this kind of Judd thing but Architects that I spoke with interestingly about his work sort of say well one in particular said to me I don't think of him as an architect I think he's an artist because his concerns are always so inward looking and so much to do with his own sort of aesthetic preoccupations they don't have to do with addressing a community or other people and I thought that was also an interesting way to look at it maybe one more [Music] did everyone hear that I like that it keeps being said as a paper because I never wrote it I just collected images and ideas and I think I actually only sat down to write it fairly recently or to put it down in some coherent way but actually that's exactly how I work in my own work is that I just I gather a tremendous amount of things knowing that they're somehow intuitively knowing that they're connected and then kind of sit down and find find and refine find and refine the connections and layers between them so at a certain point I got really uncomfortable because doing this talk started to feel like a work and then I started to wonder about that and then I got into a whole thing about that and then I started to decided to just get more sleep and you know finished the talk that's a great place to end I think thank you everyone thank you [Applause]

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Length: 58min 42sec (3522 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020