On Seeing Donald Judd in Chelsea on a Hot Summer's Day

By Daniel Solecki

There is a certain air on a hot summer’s day in far Chelsea beyond 10^th Avenue. It feels dry and open, raw and industrial, desert-like. There are clouds of construction site dust picked up from new duplexes and auto-shops by the West Side Highway. It is an interesting place to find the minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd.

The David Zwirner gallery, having just bought the acclaimed artist’s estate, is now showing off its new acquisition. The show runs until June 25^th. Cloistered within this whitewashed, air-conditioned oasis, the late American sculptor’s work appears on a post-apocalyptically hot summer’s day like a gathering of sacred springs from a cooler planet. Judd’s nine sculptures in the exhibition are variations on the same theme—square-based, open-topped, metal-brushed aluminum boxes, divided in different sections by panels at the quarter and half marks. The panels and the bases of sculptures are brightly colored Plexiglas. Seen from above, the boxes look like the paintings of Barnett Newman, the colored panels becoming like Newman’s characteristic zips. From the side, the perfected metallic finish on the interior of the boxes radiates the colors of the panels—warm oranges or cool blues. The Plexiglass makes the matte aluminum flush with rich color. With the natural sunlight, one box comes to resemble a pool of glowing embers; another becomes a silent, abstracted fountain. Their edges are so perfectly edged that they reveal the imperfections in Zwirner’s floor. At certain angles, they seem to be levitating by a quarter-centimeter or more.

In his manifesto “Specific Objects,” written in Arts Yearbook in 1965, Judd proclaims the importance of spatial reckoning in works of art—that the work of art should not be a window to another world, but should actively engage its environment. It may seem trite to consider art in a commercial gallery context, but this is exactly what Judd’s work does—it forces makes the viewer consider the spatial dimensions of the work, no matter the conditions. On a dusty summer’s day in far west Chelsea, seeing Donald Judd’s mathematically precise and quasi-religious sculptures feels all the more like taking a step into a more perfect world, dimensions away from the auto-repair shop across 19^th Street. When I left the gallery to bike my way home, I found myself desperately wanting to go back to Judd’s world, and not just because of its wonderful air-conditioning.