Untitled

Donald Judd, 1968 · Gallery 413 · Floor 4

Alright, so we've got five green boxes on the floor. Open ones. You can see straight through them. Dark green steel. Four feet tall, filling a ten-foot square. No pedestal. No title. Donald Judd made this in 1968. Or, depending on who you asked, he didn't. Two years earlier, the sculptor Mark di Suvero said that to his face, in public. Judd couldn't qualify as an artist, he said. Because Judd didn't do the work himself. Judd's answer was basically: why should welding count as art more than deciding exactly what gets welded? His metal pieces were being fabricated at Bernstein Brothers, a sheet-metal shop a few blocks from his loft. They did the cutting, bending, and welding. Judd made the decisions. And apparently, this was great for the studio. Before the fabricators, Judd said, it was full of tools, junk, and work getting in the way. Afterward, it got much neater. The metalwork went out. The cactuses moved in. Judd said he mostly sat around making sketches. Before people knew him for boxes, he had been an art critic. More than six hundred reviews and essays. So this was not a man short on opinions. He also started out as a painter. Then he quit. In 1965, he wrote that actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface. Meaning a real thing in a real room beats a picture of one. So. Stand at the end of the row. The near rectangle is huge. The far one is small. The edges stack up and run away from you. That's Depth. A picture. The thing he quit painting to get away from. And he got all of that out of four identical gaps. Five inches each. Then back to the cactuses.

▶ Listen on Listen to Frank

Also in Gallery 413