Donald Judd: Crisis of the Aesthetic
In his writings on cultural objects, Adorno self-consciously employed a prismatic and monadological method. The idea was to approach each cultural object as a monad, as a self-contained entity that, if viewed properly, could prismatically illuminate the character of the social totality. This essay seeks to apply a similar method to a work by Donald Judd: Untitled (1967). Judd’s work is an exemplary model of how the very effort to maintain the ambitions of modernist painting results in the abandonment of modernist painting. In the context of the contemporary moment in which painting seems to be flourishing, Judd’s critique of painting raises questions about its very meaning. This essay is motivated by the claim that the endeavor of painting in the present can’t proceed by simply ignoring the crisis of painting objectified by Judd. By framing this crisis as an expression of a crisis of society, the goal is to articulate how the problems posed by Judd reflect a social-historical condition no form of aesthetic production stands outside of. The attempt will be to show how, in Judd’s efforts at aesthetic innovation, a historical crisis of aesthetic subjectivity is expressed. In his project of transforming aesthetic convention, the stakes of the meaning of aesthetic experience itself are raised. Judd’s work casts light, like a prism, on a general crisis of subjectivity in society. To grasp his significance requires addressing this crisis.
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1956. Oil on canvas,
31 7/8 × 31 3/4 × 3/4 in. Judd Foundation.
Untitled (1967) consists of twelve identical box-like forms that jut out from the wall they are attached to. The boxes are arranged vertically on the wall, each hanging either exactly above or below another box. The space between each box remains the same throughout the vertical arrangement, each being one box-size above or below another. What first strikes one about the artwork is that the logic of the arrangement appears self-evident. The composition seems to be determined not by the intuitive aesthetic judgments of the artist, but by a logic involving the repetition of the same distance between each box. It somehow seems wrong to talk about composition at all, which would assume decisions made based on subjective judgment. Rather, the viewer is presented with a self-evident ordering determined by a logic that one simply accepts as obeying an objective rationality. It is as if one is inclined not to aesthetically judge Judd’s work at all, but to merely passively take it in as a presentation of an objective logic. Judd’s own thinking corroborates these reflections. In his desire to move beyond part-to-part relationships and toward asserting the unity of a work, Judd self-consciously tried to depart from composition. He was critical of composition methods that relied on establishing tension by playing with the relationships between parts, emphasizing certain parts in relation to others, and trying to balance the different parts. This struck Judd, who identified these concerns with European as opposed to American painting, as an academic convention that had become theatrical and mannered. He wanted to escape the conventions of composing with parts and to assert the power of the unity of the form, to escape individual judgements on composition for the sake of asserting a form whose logic of unity was self-evident. Composition as such seemed to stand in the way of this unity. Yet in Judd’s rejection of composition, in his attempt to transform aesthetic convention, he abandons the very basis of aesthetic subjective judgment. What composition meant in the history of modernist painting, and to which Judd understood himself to be responding, was that pictorial space was actively transformed and shaped by a subjective aesthetic imagination, rather than merely presented as an objective fact. The viewer could recognize their subjective freedom through the aesthetic objectification which produced a work of art. They could recognize the way in which subjective imagination participated in the very constitution of objectivity. Judd was reacting to a subjective aesthetic imagination that to him was becoming stale and academic. But in his response to this situation, by his rejecting composition, he rejects the moment of subjective aesthetic judgment altogether and replaces it with a logic whose aesthetic appeal is based precisely on the absence of that subjectivity which is constitutive of the aesthetic.
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1967. Galvanized iron with green lacquer, 12 units, each 9 × 40 × 31 in. Judd Foundation.
If the goal of modernist painting was to transform and shape pictorial space through compositional decisions based on aesthetic intuition — thus transcending the empirical fact of the flat surface of the painting — Judd’s work, in its rejection of composition, no longer shapes and transforms pictorial space aesthetically, but merely presents it literally and empirically. Judd’s work is not an objectification of the subject’s ability to play with and transform pictorial space, but it reduces the aesthetic experience of the work to one of a presentation of the objective facticity of empirical space, determined by a rationality divorced from subjective judgment. The point is not that Judd is straightforwardly “anti-aesthetic.” Rather, it is that the basis of his aesthetic project involves a liquidation of what the aesthetic once meant: free play of subjective imagination. One’s aesthetic experience of Judd’s work is an experience in which subjectivity has been tossed aside for the sake of an objective logic. Judd expresses the disintegration of the aesthetic subject, and it is precisely on the basis of this fact that his aesthetic appeal resides. His aesthetic innovations express a condition in which the viewing subject finds aesthetic satisfaction in the liquidation of subjective imagination. If the aesthetic is understood as the sympathetic resonance between subject and object, Judd’s work raises questions about what kind of subject finds sympathetic resonance with an object that has shed all traces of subjectivity.
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1962. Oil and wax on canvas, 69 × 101 3/4 × 2 1/8 in. Judd Foundation.
In Georg Lukács’s essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” from his 1923 book History and Class Consciousness, Lukács addresses reification, or “thingification”, as a symptom of capitalism: a social process subjects are participating in confronts these same subjects as an alien reality, possessing a “phantom-like objectivity” that appears to have a logic of its own, in which subjects can no longer recognize their own participation in the objectivity of the social process. Social reality appears to subjects alienated from it as reified, “thingified”, out of reach of these subjects and possessing an independent and unchangeable logic and existence. In Judd’s work, reification is aesthetically objectified. The viewer can no longer recognize subjective imagination and play as constitutive of the artwork. Rather, they are confronted with an ordering that seems wholly objective and alien to any subjective intentions. The appeal of such an aesthetic phenomenon is that it illuminates the character of social reality to the viewer. Social reality, too, confronts the subject as ordered according to an alienated, objective rationality that the subject has no relation to. In a social reality in which subjectivity appears as something impotent and irrelevant to an estranged objectivity, a work that confronts the viewer with an objective logic devoid of subjective judgment speaks to them precisely because it aesthetically embodies the way reality itself appears to the subject. In a work that shows no traces of subjective imagination, the viewer recognizes with familiarity the insignificance of their own subjectivity.
In Judd’s aesthetic project, the abandonment of subjective imagination for the sake of an objective logic gives form to capitalist reification. Judd must be taken seriously as the necessary aesthetic expression of the crisis of the subject in capitalism, a social-historical situation in which the subject is unable to recognize themselves in the objective social process they are participating in, and thus the subject disintegrates. Judd’s formal solutions express this disintegrated subject. Behind his rejection of composition is a rejection of subjectivity, a rejection of the shaping of pictorial space through subjective play for the sake of a unity that is achieved through rationalistically subordinating each part to an objective logic. In Judd’s treatment of the totality of the artwork, a reified social totality is given expression in which each part of the totality is subordinated to the logic of the whole, in which the individual is reduced to merely conforming to the logic of the totality. Thus, though Judd’s work appears distant from the human, it might also be close, since the subjects recognize themselves in the work as reduced to being nothing but parts serving the whole, powerless to transform its objective logic. And yet the logic of the whole seems to exist for no other purpose than to insist on its objectivity. In Judd’s work, space itself is reified, its mere empirical existence and facticity being presented with an insistent neutrality that seems to make sure that not the slightest mark of subjective intervention is to be detected. Hegel claimed, in his “Lectures on Aesthetics,” that art stands higher than nature. Judd reduces art to nature, to being mere empirical space, mere factual existence, absent of a subjectivity that could transform it. It is no coincidence that the objects at Marfa become part of the landscape. In the experience of Judd’s work, viewers find aesthetic pleasure in the liquidation of the subject. This aesthetic pleasure should not be treated as somehow misguided, but rather one must grasp the problem it presents. In a reality in which we actually experience the liquidation of the subject, an artwork that gives form to this condition could play a critical role in the project of overcoming it through provoking recognition. Judd’s significance is that he attempts to uphold the aesthetic project of modernism in the context of a social-historical condition that seems to be producing a crisis around the very possibility of aesthetic subjectivity. In a social reality in which subjects no longer recognize themselves in the objective social process, subjectivity itself seems to wither, with consequences for the aesthetic. Judd’s work is a high expression of this crisis.
Donald Judd, 15 untitled works in concrete, 1980-1984. Concrete, 15 units each 2.5 × 2.5 × 5 meters. Chinati Foundation.