Untitled

One of the chief protagonists of Minimalism (though he rejected the term), Donald Judd was active as a critic in the 1960s. He published the seminal essay “Specific Objects” in 1965, identifying in contemporary art a turn toward three-dimensional works that challenged the traditions of both painting and sculpture; he named a number of eclectic examples, ranging from Dan Flavin’s light installations to Claes Oldenburg’s exaggerated hamburgers and ice cream cones. In his own work, Judd began to use exclusively geometric forms made of Plexiglas, wood, and metal, arranged serially on the wall or on the floor. He called vertical works “stacks,” and horizontal works like this one “progressions.” The number of units was arbitrary, but gave the impression that they could continue on, ad infinitum. The one-after-another quality of Judd’s objects mirrored the reality of industrial production and played up the fact that, after a few early attempts at fabricating the objects himself, he had handed over creation of the works to a professional studio, where the boxes could be executed with absolute precision.