Perfect Unlikeness

IN APRIL 1966, the Jewish Museum in New York presented what turned out to be the major show of that year. It was called "Primary Structures," which was yet another term for "minimalism." Donald Judd, whose work was in the show, was appalled by the title, and was allowed to publish his disclaimer in the catalogue. Here are a few quotations from his remarks:

I object to several popular ideas. I don't think anyone's work is reductive. The most the term can mean is that new work doesn't have what the old work had. ...New work is just as complex and developed as old work. Its color and structure and its quality aren't more simple than before; the work isn't narrow or somehow meaningful only as form. . . . "Minimal" and "ABC" are recent reductions of "reductive."

A year earlier, in his fundamental essay "Specific Objects," Judd also tried to explain that what he called "the new work" was in no way minimal, reductive, "anti-art," "ABC art," or any of the other words and phrases (e.g., "Primary Structures") invented to suggest extreme simplicity: [1]

Simple form and one or two colors are considered less by old standards. If changes in art are compared backwards, there always seems to be a reduction, since only old attributes are counted and these are always fewer. But obviously new things are more, such as Oldenburg's techniques and materials. Oldenburg needs three dimensions in order to simulate and enlarge a real object and to equate it and an emotive form. If a hamburger were painted it would retain something of the traditional anthropomorphism. [2]

But if it was not the quality of reductiveness that distinguished the new work, what did? Judd listed in several places the qualities he thought were characteristic. What they included were: a non-European look; three dimensions; unmodulated color; new materials; "singleness"; and-a typical Judd locution- "the best work is unlike in appearance." When we examine what each of these criteria meant to Judd, we discover that his critical position has often been seriously misconstrued.

NON-EUROPEAN LOOK

Here is Judd, in 1963, reviewing work by Hyde Solomon and Angelo Ippolito, two pretty typical "10th Street" painters of the time:

Angelo Ippolito's Abstract Expressionist paintings are decidedly toned down by a ... sense of art acquired from the European past. The color is beautiful and harmonious and the brushwork sensitive. Solomon's deficiencies are much the same.

Like every other serious artist of his generation (and the one preceding), Judd consistently argued the problem of whether there could, or should, be a distinctively "American" art, but, as his love for Malevich, Klee, Klein, and other European artists makes clear, he was not simply an American chauvinist. Most of the time, it appears that his use of the expression "European look" is shorthand for exhausted, transparent, unusable, corny. But above all, I believe that for Judd "European art" meant an objectionable implied philosophical order. In praising Barnett Newman, Judd wrote that his work

is concomitant with chance and one person's knowledge; the work doesn't suggest a great scheme of knowledge; it doesn't claim more than anyone can know; it doesn't imply a social order.

Perhaps the fullest explication of Judd's objections to "European art" appears at the beginning of his essay on Oldenburg, written in 1966 on the occasion of that artist's exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm:

The real sense [of anthropomorphism] is one of the main aspects of old European art. Any of the remnants of this are a liability. . . . The real or usual anthropomorphism is the appearance of human feelings in things that are inanimate or nor human, usually as if those feelings are the essential nature of the thing described. Oldenburg's pieces have nothing to do with the objects they're like. . . . The pieces have only the emotion read into objects. . . . Anyone particularly interested in objects in the past, Chardin, Cezanne or later Morandi, believed that the things themselves had a reality that could be understood and shown. This belief came from rationalistic philosophy and through that from religion.

A small amount and the best abstract painting--it shouldn't be called abstract--isn't anthropomorphic in any way. It has none of the attitudes and characteristics of traditional European art. Some three-dimensional work isn't anthropomorphic or abstract. Oldenburg's work is, then, some of the little that is very good and free of unbelievable interpretation.

Judd's examples are, as always, carefully chosen. In all of them, the objects--bottles in Morandi--are wrapped in mystery, hidden meanings, suggestive philosophical depths, and often do, in fact, seem human in their pathos. They seem sad, lonely, tragic, sometimes look like families, couples, even lovers, all things that bottles, fruit, and landscapes are not and humans are--in short, anthropomorphic, and Judd simply hated it. His hostility to "European" art made him, I believe, especially receptive to many of the "Pop" artists (he disliked the term, feeling its artists had much less in common than the term implied). His favorite of these was Oldenburg, because not only did Oldenburg combine a distinctively non-European subject matter with non-European materials, but his art also exemplified an ideal of non-European scale and non-European color. He also, surprisingly, thought very highly of Lichtenstein. (Indeed, it is my impression even today that it is not clear to many people interested in the period that among, for example, Morris, Rothko, Lichtenstein, and Sam Francis, the artist Judd preferred by far was Lichtenstein.) Oddly enough, Judd's earliest reviews stressed, of all things, Lichtenstein's composition (something I still don't understand), and also applauded his appropriation of mechanical techniques: