Page 57 - Studio International - April 1966

and scribbled messages sprawl ingenuously on the page, critic casts some doubt, mainly because Judd has de-
heightened now and then with a few crayoned tints. Yet signed them and had them fabricated. The absence of
beneath the airy, agreeable lightness there is a sombre the hand seems to worry the Times.
hint now and then of potential violence and eruption. But it doesn't seem to me that the absence of the sculp-
The Lorca pages, for instance, are carefully designed, tor's hand is a legitimate concern—there are enough
economically phrased so that there is no mistaking the precedents to contradict the dogma. What is more
specificity of Twombly's choice. worrying is the absence of the artist's flexibility. A series
Concurrent with the Twombly drawings is an exhibi- of identical galvanized steel boxes affixed to the wall in
tion of Donald Judd's constructed, emphatically anti- equal intervals is a rather rigid manifesto, as is the huge
romantic sculptures. If some of America's artists have casket of steel dominating the centre of the room. The
`lost their cool', Donald Judd has held on to his. Not only inevitability of the preconceived design is depressing.
has he held on to it, he positively enshrines it in a group There is no opportunity in such a highly stylized, totally
of austere constructions which made the New York Times conceptual art for the sensuous and imaginative responses
critic open his review with a rhetorical question: What traditionally associated with visual art.
is a work of art? Of course, this is just Judd's point—his and a host of
Indeed, the question arises in this atmosphere of steely others who have determinedly denied tradition. Theirs
intellectuality which Judd emphasizes by the use of glinty is an aesthetic based on a horror of ambiguity, accident,
metals and plexiglas. Are these studies in cubic problems, and wayward emotion. Their weakness is that they pro-
so sternly posed, strictly speaking works of art ? The Times grammatically avoid anything that has associations with
previous canons, and, in their quarrel with romanticism,
Cy Twombly tend to give conditioned responses. The expressionists
Untitled 1965
Pencil and crayon say warm, we say cool; they say soft, we say hard; they
26+ x 34 in. say asymmetry, we say symmetry. The predictability in
Leo Castelli Gallery Judd and others travelling this road is a drawback.
Quite the opposite is the work of Mark di Suvero at the
new PARK PLACE GALLERY. Di Suvero emerges from the
improvisational tradition established by the abstract
expressionists. His sculptures are generally composed of
disparate materials—wood, steel, leather, chain—and
have the informal quality of improvisational techniques.
Di Suvero is also concerned with flouting tradition, but
his means are less stringent than Judd's. His sculptural
purpose is to transcend the boundaries usually imposed
on sculpture. In order to fill the space from floor to
ceiling and side to side, he devises huge constructions
which are often referred to an initial floor plan. In this

Donald Judd
View of exhibition
February 1966 at the
Leo Castelli Gallery