The Beating Pulse of Donald Judd⁠↗

Bringing my toddler to the Donald Judd retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art when it opened last winter forced me to recognize the ways Judd’s objects resemble playground equipment: the diagonal ladder of red-painted wood with its single purple rod, or the red-enameled iron tube that slyly evoked (at least to my toddler-adjacent eyes) an empty kiddie pool. When we visited shortly after the show opened in February, my daughter wanted to climb on all the objects—or up them, or through them, or over them. The objects. I had trained myself not to call them sculptures, because Judd himself hadn’t thought of them that way. And neither did my toddler! She wanted to crawl through the silver aluminum boxes lined with blue Plexiglas, to bang her tiny fists against a green-lacquered galvanized-iron slab. The one thing she didn’t want to do was stay in her stroller.

I cringed at the thought of her splintering one of his plywood boxes with her tiny blue Velcro-fastened sneakers. Yet something about Judd’s art also made me want to see its perfect lines dented, its stillness disrupted, its self-possession rattled; his work often made me feel inadequate and uncomprehending, vaguely excluded.

Judd himself always rejected the term minimalist, which seemed like another form of minimalism: His art was so minimalist that even the label was excess weight. If you clung to that category, you had already missed the point.

I couldn’t look at these plywood boxes without feeling reprimanded by the hypothetical specter of a more sophisticated eye than mine—a viewer who could appreciate Judd’s art better, who didn’t crave the entry point of narrative or figurative representation. The people satisfied by Judd’s spare boxes were probably also people who might eat a single peach for dessert while listening to obscure electronica; I’m someone who wants to inhale an entire carton of ice cream while being flooded by the swelling riffs of a cheesy pop song. I’ve always felt tainted by this desire for excess in all forms, for naked sentiment and surging sugar and the aesthetic comfort food of legible stories. Which is all to say: I was convinced that I had failed Judd’s work by looking at it and feeling nothing, or by assuming that feeling something was the only way to have a meaningful experience with art.

I also understood that my daughter was teaching me something about Judd’s objects. She was training me to see the shimmer of their energy, the rough or polished or bolt-studded texture of their surfaces, the ways their stark lines vibrated against the white gallery walls.

Judd’s insistence on noticing—as a way of being in the world, and a daily practice—was also part of what it meant to grow up with him as a father. Flavin told me that “Don” (as both his children call him) was constantly urging them to pay closer attention to the world. It’s precisely what Judd’s art asks of us.

Flavin believes that for his father, making art, navigating daily life, and raising his kids were all informed by what he calls the same “philosophical stance”: a commitment to stripping away everything but the proximate—all the obfuscating myths and stories and abstractions—and a desire to pay attention to the world and to cultivate that attention in others. In Judd’s creative practice, this meant he wanted to dispense with much of the Western art tradition; in raising his kids—one named after an artist, the other after a dancer—this meant he took them not to church, but out into the desert, to look at the rocks and the stars.

In Marfa, they spent many weekends at the Ayala de Chinati ranch, where, Rainer recalled, “we’d sit by the fire and talk. It developed in me a wondering type of thinking, free to ask questions. Some parents take their kids hunting or to Disneyland. Driving to the land, making fires, and talking was his gift.”

These aluminum boxes weren’t just boxes. They held the weather itself: clouds swollen with rain, or a horizon painted by the burlesque of sunset. They were cubes made of sky; their faces carved the light into radiant squares. At the time, I was reading a biography of the writer Jean Rhys that described how she hated the “parceled up” landscape of England—the soggy countryside scored by walls, the ocean itself segmented by jutting wooden piers. Judd’s installations revealed ways of carving up the world that could hold its infinitude rather than stifling it. That’s what these boxes felt like, slices of infinitude, as if light were a creature, and this was one of its natural habitats.

Their sublimity lay on the other side of all my attempts to summon them with language—these habitats of light, cubes of sky, sustained by quiet, metallic respiration. “To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees,” the poet Paul Valéry once said, and those boxes made me forget their names. They brought my sight to life. They asked me to see absence in terms of presence.

Amid Judd’s aluminum boxes, I started to entertain the possibility that the meaning of his art wasn’t something that resided just beyond my grasp, but something that lay in the grasping itself. Perhaps the sense of yearning I felt whenever I looked at Judd’s art wasn’t a sign that I was failing to encounter it. Instead of expressing Judd’s “particular feeling at the time,” these boxes made room for another kind of feeling instead—the energizing vertigo of figuring out how to approach beauty without the comfortable framework of a story line, of allowing it to speak to me subcutaneously, beneath the figurative skins of sense and symbolism.

Judd’s work ended up feeling strangely suited to the constrictions of quarantine, which—among other things—heightened my awareness of my immediate surroundings. If Judd’s work was a lesson in finding plenitude in what I’d mistaken for scarcity, then quarantine was another version of this lesson: finding more richness than I’d believed possible in this stripped-down life.

I found myself drawn to an installation (Untitled, 1976–1977) composed of 21 stainless-steel units, all shallow boxes of the same dimensions but detailed slightly differently. Some were open, others closed; some had thinner or thicker rims. This series of boxes started to remind me of our days: all the same in their contours and their constituent materials, but varying a bit in their particulars. During quarantine, robbed of any narrative arc, I considered with deepened urgency the possibilities of variation as a different form of scaffolding, another source of momentum. Our days had no story line anymore, only a series of subtle changes.

In quarantine, I had to give up on the ideal of a pristine experience of Judd and settle into this partial, child-mediated engagement instead. This surrendering felt like another version of admitting to myself that what I’d always understood as an “ideal” creative practice—the artist as someone liberated from the drudgeries of daily living, someone who didn’t spend her days being served wooden cups of make-believe tea—was actually an impossible, unforgiving, and ultimately inaccurate vision.

In a joint interview with Rainer and the filmmaker Joshua Homnick that Judd sat for in 1993, the year before he died, he kept dismissing things that didn’t matter—success, money, society—until Rainer asked him, “What do you think there should be a belief in? Don’t you think there should be a belief in something?” Judd insisted, “I’m afraid it’s a here-and-now situation. Or afraid and not afraid. It’s pretty clear that nothing at all lasts forever. So why should people be upset about it?” Judd wasn’t upset about it. He found grandeur in the concrete facts that others embellished with myth: “Do you know we are all second-hand anyway, as an astronomical fact? … We are all made of other suns, long gone. So think about that.”

For Judd, the knowledge that we are made of suns was enough. The existence of a box was enough. His art came from this belief in the sufficiency of the abundance already surrounding us—an abundance that deserves our attention, and to which we will all inevitably return. When Homnick asked him, “What [do] you believe metaphysically will happen to you personally when you die?,” Judd replied simply, “Bones on the land. Bones and rocks.”