(bagpipe music) - Judd's a philosophy student, he's also in a postwar situation
in the '50s in America. He would be against metaphor, because he would understand
instantly I think that metaphor could
not in any way be a vehicle of meaning
after the Holocaust and the dropping
of the atom bombs, that metaphor had been called into serious question
and serious doubt, and that he had to
find a way to make art that could exist
on its own terms without the support of
metaphor, one might say. Without the scaffolding
of metaphor. He's identified with a group
of artists, the minimalists, because all of them
are questioning what's
possible in art, and they're not simply
getting rid of something, they're literally trying to
find out what can be done. How can you make art
in this situation? He's trying to do something
that's physical and visual on a simultaneous level, and I think he moves into, because he wants to
make American art, he brings in American materials, galvanized steel
in the beginning, plywood, copper, and plexiglass. I think all these materials, he found intrinsic beauty in, and he showed us that beauty by the way he
presented it to us. That's really one of
the things about Judd that just distinguishes
him from everybody else, even from the other minimalists. Maybe Donald Judd actually is the first truly
American artist. - Originally, I just wanted
a place in the southwest, in the summertime, and I became interested
in having some art, and that made it impossible to do anything in
Baja California, which I'd gone to
several summers, 'cause I figured the
Americans wouldn't let me out, the Mexicans wouldn't let it in, the Americans wouldn't let
it back in again, and so on. Nor me either. So once there started
to be some art there, it was uncertain. So when I first came here, I came here with a
truckload of art. But it was originally just
a place for the summertime, and it just developed. The possibly of
buying the buildings, I gave up on, forgot this idea of just a place for summer
after a couple of years, and after acquiring
the large warehouses, I started to make
permanent installations, and of course, brought more
and more work down here. It wasn't something
that occurred all at one time as an idea, and it's come and gone with a
lot of different circumstances and of course with money. I'm very interested in not
destroying the buildings if they have any
good qualities at all as they were built originally. Usually, the buildings have
been drastically damaged. Also, sometimes the buildings aren't really very interesting, or I have particular purposes be part of the building, and in some cases,
very different things have been done
inside the buildings, but again, sort of parallel to the attitude toward science. I don't think anything should
be done in the buildings that goes against
what they were, or their original nature, so I think there should
be a greater respect for the past of the
buildings and of all things than there generally is. Those two buildings
were artillery sheds, which means they were for
trucks and half tracks and probably a little
cannon for the army, and they were in very bad shape. The sides that are now
glass had garage doors that worked like an ordinary
suburban garage door, and those were all broken, and broken fusing
on the ceiling. We tore all those out and
I designed the new windows. At the time of designing
the new windows, I also figured out the works that would go in there. It is individual work, it
could be somewhere else, but it was made to
go in those buildings and made to always be there. The aluminum pieces,
there's 100 of them. They were figured out in
a relatively short time. The idea with the
concrete pieces was to do them one by one, and think about them from
one to the second one and the third one and so on, but the construction
was very difficult, and it made more
sense to do them, we did the first ones by itself, but then after that, it
was two or three at a time, and then the situation
with the Dia Foundation was very disagreeable, and that interfered a lot. So basically, they
were done in groups like the other one in pieces, but I wanted to do
them in a more slow and experimental way. They're laid out on a
level part of the land. It's land that was
already torn up and used. We've been trying to
allow it to grow back for more than 10 years, and as you know, they're
stretching one kilometer on the only part of the
field really that's level, and they're directly
north and south. I think it's rather obvious
that the work should, I don't call it
sculpture, incidentally, that the work should sit on
the floor or sit on the ground, and that any other arrangement is the same as putting
the picture in a frame, so to me, it was logical to put the work
directly on the floor in contrast to all previous
three dimensional work, or sculptures so called,
which have been on pedestals, which really comes
back to putting the
figure on a pedestal. So just as the picture
in a frame is obsolete, the figure on the
pedestal is obsolete. I wouldn't be able to
run around the world having exhibitions in
very strange spaces, if I didn't have a situation
that was permanent, where the work looked
normal and right to me, so this is my trade off. I lose a lot of pieces because they have to be sold, and it's very important to
me to maintain a balance between what I can keep
and what I have to sell, and if you sell it, it always ends up in
bad circumstances, and so it's important
to have some of it in proper circumstances, which can only be here and in
the building in New York, too. It's a building from 1870, an
actually cast iron building. It has that quality, and
what I've done to the inside I think doesn't violate
the nature of the building. (bagpipe music) - [John] So Judd is one
of the first artists to move into Soho, he's an art writer, he's
writing for Arts Magazine. He's a central figure, you know, an important figure in
the New York art world. He buys a cast iron building, he changes the interior but
he preserves the exterior. I think the whole notion
of interior and exterior which is essential to his work is something that he played
out through his whole life, that he had a kind of respect for basic American
craftsmanship. (bagpipe music) When the art world
becomes accelerated and Soho becomes a
place for art galleries, for people to shop,
for people to live, he moves out. (bagpipe music) - I think that the
art that's done now should be installed
more or less as the artist wants, or in what I consider
normal circumstances, which could be
abnormal for the public but normal for the artist, and should remain that way. Then the things should not
be constantly moved around, and made into some sort
of entertainment business. (train horn honking) - In 1978, he's convinced
the Dia Foundation to buy Fort Russell, an army base that's
no longer in use, and starts the
Chinati Foundation, and really what he wants to do is establish a kind
of utopian community among other things where
artists can go and work, artists can be in residence, scholars can go and do research. He has a library set up,
print facilities set up, but he also wants, and I
think this is very important, he wants to give art dignity. I think that he felt museums deprived art of their dignity. Donald Judd would think of a
museum as a display window, that art's up for the right
season then it's gone, on to the next artist, and
on to the next and the next. Judd wanted to
change the situation so that art could be experienced under a different notion
of time, a slower time. He wanted art to
be contemplated, to be looked at, to
be thought about, not to be passed in front of. He's saying, "Well, I'll put
this art in this amazing place, "if you really love it,
you'll come and look at it." (birds singing) - Well, I don't think
art is show business, and it's not commerce. When it's produced, generally when it's
around someone's studio, it's in a very
different situation than when it's in a
museum or a gallery, and the attitude
and the architecture of museums and galleries is very different from the
original attitude of the work and in a way, it's a
falsification of the work. If you put paintings by Pollack
or Rothko or Barnum-Newman into the Museum of Modern Art, which is a relatively
moderne fascist building, you put them in a
fascist context, and that's bound to change
people's attitude toward the art and make it look different. Generally, expensive art is in expensive,
chic circumstances. It's a falsification. The society is basically
not interested in art, and most people who are artists do that because
they like the work, they like to do that. The art has an
integrity of its own, and a purpose of its own, and it's not to
serve the society. That's been tried
now in Soviet Union and lots of places
and it doesn't work. The only role I can think of in a very general
way for the artist is it tends to
shake up the society a little bit just
by its existence, in which case, it
helps undermine the general
political stagnation, and perhaps by providing
a little freedom, supports science,
which requires freedom. If the artist isn't free,
you won't have any art. If Jessie Holmes runs it, you're
not going to have any art. There's no such
thing as public art, because if you're
making public art, you're making a monument for
George Bush or something. Art at this time is
done by individuals, it's not done by institutions
or for institutions, therefore the same art, whether it occurs in
private or in public, is the same art
done by one artist, and it's a big mistake
to make two categories, and I think it's
been very destructive to make those two categories. You have to make new
art all the time, because it has to be the
individual's own art, there's no way to
revive old forms or to rework old forms, because the artist is never
going to understand them well enough to do
first grade work, and so if you wanna
rework Matisse, you'll just be a bad
Matisse, that's all. There's nothing to
be gained by that. So in order to do
work comparable to
Matisse, for example, you have to invent as
much as Matisse did. Architecture and art
are not the same thing. Naturally, it's very
important in the architecture that there is a function, where to violate the function is simply to be ridiculous, and it's one of the
reasons why architects are so fond of museums, because they don't think
there's a function, and the art isn't
anything to them, so therefore they can
make very strange shapes and be the artists themselves, and this produces the very
awful Disneyland situation. To see a form that does
nothing whatsoever, like Peter Eisenman's
stairs going up and ending in midair, or columns that
don't do anything, or spaces that don't work
or don't do anything, or strange shapes,
is simply ridiculous. I think good architecture, and in fact, almost the
definition of architecture, is that there has
to be both an inside and outside to a
building, to a space, and if the inside
is not evident, you can't have a
really good building. If you were really
strict about it, perhaps you couldn't even
call it architecture, and I've written
before that, say, the skyscrapers in
Dallas or Houston are not really buildings and they're not
really architecture. They're basically just
large toys in the landscape. - Judd is interested in volume, which is both a
sculptural concern and an architectural one. It's perhaps why he's worked with box-like structures
throughout his career. For him, the issue is how to join the
interior to the exterior without altering the
shape's basic structure, whether it's a building
he's renovating or a sculpture he's making, he wants to preserve the
integrity of the shape, which is largely
constructed out of planes joined together at right angles. In order to underscore
his interest in volume, he focuses on light, on how to get the light to pass from the exterior world into the interior
of his buildings, or into the semi-enclosed
spaces of his sculpture. He wants the light to fill
the interiors of his rooms, and in doing so,
he brings the room in closer contact with
the exterior world. - It has to work visually first, spatial. What I originally
did pretty much turns out to be simple
proportions in the long run. All the first things
were trial and error. They turn out to be
very close to one to two or two to three, three to four, but I wouldn't, if you'd
have told me to start from the beginning with one
to two, three to four, so on, I would have been
very suspicious and skeptical of that, so it's only the other way
around that it seems valid. I tended to be skeptical
of the great emphasis placed upon proportion in
traditional architecture, but it turns out to
be valid, I think, contrast to, say,
the complicated
proportions of Palladio. The proportions that I use and the proportions I
think you can understand are relatively
simple proportions, and basically, it's
being able to understand something that defines space, whether it's a building or whether it's a
three-dimensional work of art. We understand symmetry easiest, and the general tendency is
to look at things that way, and especially if
it's architecture, to be able to comprehend
it pretty quickly, just so you don't get
lost in it, for example. Symmetry, of course, can be, can seem a
restriction to people, and it's very nice to
have some good reasons for not doing it, and as
far as architecture goes, the landscape or
existing buildings which have to be dealt with are a good reason for
breaking the symmetry. The art has had
certain flexibility, and while it can be
very symmetrical, you have to have
possibilities for it not to be symmetrical. I'm against the, absolutely
against the division of thought and feeling, or mind and body, or
any of that whole big, form and content in art, that whole big area, therefore, rationalists
and irrational are not sensible
positions to me. I think it's a false
division in philosophy and it's fairly destructive. It's a division somebody's made a few thousand years ago
which still is around, and it's one of the major
ways to talk about art, and it causes a lot of trouble and provides no information, and should simply be forgotten. Both three-dimensional
art and painting is a somewhat
ambiguous situation, and architecture makes space. You could say they define space, but that assumes a space existed prior to the definition, which is even debatable. By making lines or points
or planes in space, you actually make the space, and the thing that
the person likes most about three-dimensional
art or architecture is the created space, that's the main
given aspect of it. Basically, it's
that and the color. The furniture is furniture. The color is not so
particular to the furniture as it is to the art, and the fact is that there's
some horrible colors, but mainly, most artificial
colors are just fine, and there's a whole
European RAL book of colors, and all of them are fine, they come in, you spray them on. There's a couple of ugly ones, but even that, you
should question. In regard to both the
color and the material, these are things that I
consider primarily given, they already exist in the world, and I'm interested in
using them as they are and in their nature as they are. Philosophically, it's
probably very dangerous to say that time and
space don't exist, but you'd have to really
read a lot I think, and work on that. There is no space in
itself as a something that continues
throughout everywhere, and that there is no time
that goes on and on and on, and is something all by itself, that neither one
of those are things that are all by
themselves, like ether. They're made by something
happening in them, in the case of time, or by something
insisting in them, in the case of space, so those are the things that
continue or do something, but the time and
space in themselves are just a way we feel about it, the whole situation. We have a sense of time
because we live a certain time, length of time, and then, you know,
it's functional, just like you don't trip
over the chair either, but that doesn't mean
it's true scientifically. Hope the foundation
won't be destroyed, I think everything's against the existence of the foundation. I basically take
the institutions as enemies of the
existence of art, and doing anything in
a normal, natural way. The problem is the foundation not be seized by the museums, or by some public institution, and the foundation
will have more and more works of art by other people. Also, I'd like to point out that the foundation and
I are not the same thing. The foundation is a public
institution, unfortunately, and at this point, the
foundation's a lot smaller than my own private
activities and buildings. Eventually, there would be
two foundations side by side, the Chinati Foundation,
and one using my name, all of which needs to
remain and be permanent. (birds singing) (bagpipe music) - [John] Judd wanted
to make something that was just what it was, and in and of itself,
conveyed, possessed, embodied a kind of beauty, and that beauty was not derived from notions of the beautiful
in the typical sense, you know, the classic
figure in sculpture. He wanted the beauty to arrive from its own
intrinsic properties. - [Interviewer]
If you had a wish on any subject on this day, what would it be? - I'd like a few million
dollars to do what I wanna do. - [Interviewer] And
what would you do? - Same thing I'm
doing right now, and have been doing. Should I specify how
many millions maybe, just to be safe? (laughter) (bagpipe music)
