Hasta La Ideas

In this series, Matthew Sullivan (AQQ Design) highlights some designers that you should know, but might not. Previously, he looked at the work of François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne.

Donald Judd: Born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, 1928. Died in New York City, 1994.

Donald Judd had three main yields: sculpture, writing and furniture. Of course, it is well known that he delved a bit into architecture and was a formidable collector of all manner of things (books, real estate, tartan plaids, etc.), but it is his own texts, designs and dimensional forms that received the full brunt of his passion. It is very hard to simultaneously describe these three aspects, for though each sprang from the same ideological fount, each combination (particular medium with fundamental idea) created quite different results. If we were talking about the sculpture only or the writing only, I don’t think it would be imperative to say much about the remaining two, but the understanding of Judd’s furniture is a more contingent affair; it occupies an almost uncomfortable position between the dogmatic, untenable propositions of his writing and the absolutely transcendent, mind-bending power of his sculpture.

Between the three, the sculptures are most able to bear the load of Judd’s heavy inquiries. They work incredibly well at displaying his fascination with the nature of perception. They’re almost autonomous tools—sculptures independent of the artist, where Judd has set the stage for a deep viewing but left the circuit open, so that it is the viewer and the cosmos that complete it. His writing is a wholly different situation—a primarily closed circuit. The essays are fanatically assertive, all maxim and no poetry; one either gets on board or is quickly ejected. In a very real sense, the furniture is the sculpture with the art removed; it is made of the same materials and employs the same techniques of fabrication, but instead of being finely tuned to challenge the confidence of our senses, a Judd chair is engaged in the physical activity of seated positions. Even though the furniture is actively involved in these physical and practical activities, it has an assertive allegiance to the “right angle” that pushes it a touch closer to the bold tenets of the essays, as both seem to fetishize extremely defined silhouettes—something that the sculptures play with but simultaneously destroy.

Inside Judd’s loft on Spring Street in New York City

Above: an adodized-aluminum desk and chair (left) and bookshelf. Top image: Judd’s high-walled bed

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