C OM P LA I N T S: PA RT I I haven’t written anything in quite a while; I have a lot of

19 6 9 complaints. Most of these are about attempts to close

the fairly open situation of contemporary art. There are a lot
of arguments for closure: a whole aesthetic or style, a half
aesthetic or movement, a way of working, history or develop-
ment, seniority, juniority, money and galleries, sociology,
politics, nationalism. Most discussion of these aspects is
absolute; something is the only true art and something else has
got to go. Usually little is said about particular works and
artists and nothing about the actual differences and similarities
between artists. I’ve read very little about the present kind
of large scale and it is common to almost everyone. It’s very
definite and will some day be an obvious aspect of the time.
That’s true of color also, and of wholeness, which has been
discussed some.
Everything on the list should be considered but almost
never should any argument result in the destructive conclusion
that is the usual ending, or apparent ending, since often it’s the
premise. Obviously everyone is going to prefer kinds of art.
I prefer art that isn’t associated with anything and am tired of
the various kinds of Dada, and don’t think, for example, that
the work of Johns and Rauschenberg is so momentous. But
it’s good and I’m not at all inclined to rank them below every
last abstract artist. And I know that their work has connections
to so-called abstract work. (I don’t like the word “abstract.”)
Or, I think American art is far better than that anywhere else
but I don’t think that situation is desirable. Actually it’s inter-
national art in America and the best thing that could happen
would be equal international art elsewhere.
In 1964 I wrote an article on the difference between the
years just before and after 1960. Most of the artists, the follow-
ers by definition of a majority, and the galleries were fixed
upon Abstract Expressionism. It was a style and the only legiti-
mate one. Every little debaser was praised as a great artist
by Irving Sandler and Max Kozloff and painted a painting in
ARTnews. But Reinhardt and Rauschenberg, for example, December 1964. Di Suvero first showed his somewhat similar
were irrelevant flukes. It was an unpleasant situation and some- but far better sculpture in October 1960; by 1964 di Suvero
what like the extremely warped one that existed in the had a tiresome number of followers and Caro’s work looked
United States before the late 1940s. By 1960 it became evident like that of just another of them. “Anthony Caro is a major
that the best work wasn’t among the so-called Abstract artist – the best sculptor to come up since David Smith” –
Expressionists, except for some of the original ones, Rothko, Clement Greenberg. That’s only misjudgment, though. I expect
Newman, and Still, and one later one, Frankenthaler. There that; I don’t expect the little league fascism.
were Reinhardt and Rauschenberg, Louis, Noland, Johns and Barbara Reise’s article on Greenberg was good serious
then Chamberlain, di Suvero, Bontecou, Stella, Oldenburg, opposition. It’s surprising that it wasn’t done until now.
Rosenquist, and Lichtenstein. Greenberg’s and Michael Fried’s articles and the absence of
In the last three years or so I’ve thought that Clement opposition make one of the numerous instances of the incom-
Greenberg and his followers have been trying to form a petence of art criticism. Barbara Rose did rise up in a recent
similar closed situation. I’ve expected a lot of stupid things to article in Artforum, but she concedes Greenberg a separate his-
reoccur – movements, labels – but I didn’t think there would tory as against that of everyone else. I’m harder on Greenberg
be another attempt to impose a universal style. It’s naive and than Barbara Reise is and don’t take him so seriously. By now
it’s directly opposed to the nature of contemporary art, includ- he’s ignorant and hysterical. One instance is a laughable article
ing that of the artists they support. Their opinions are the same in Vogue last May, ostensibly on Anne Truitt but mainly on
as those of the critics and followers of the late 1950s: there the failings of “Minimal Art,” including me. This is the nadir
is only one way of working – one kind of form, one medium; of the failures:
everything else is irrelevant and trivial; history is on our side;
preserve the true art; preserve the true criticism. This means And with the help of monochrome the artist would have
that Grace Hartigan and Michael Goldberg were better been able to dissemble her feminine sensibility behind a
than Reinhardt and Rauschenberg and that Jack Bush and more aggressively far-out, non-art look, as so many mascu-
Edward Avedisian are better than Oldenburg and Flavin. Both line Minimalists have their rather feminine sensibilities.
groups, by these attitudes, slowly destroy the work they’re (Greenberg’s italics.)
protecting. The followers of the Abstract Expressionists and
some of the leaders went backward toward representational Greenberg made a garbled attempt to give the invention of
painterliness. The Greenbergers, except Noland, steadily be- “Minimal Art,” though it was not worth inventing, to Anne Truitt:
came either atmospheric or cubistic. I think Noland is the only
first-rate artist involved – Louis is dead – and I like Noland’s But if any one artist started or anticipated Minimal Art, it
circles better than I like anything of his since. Caro is a con- was she, in the fence-like and then box-like objects of
ventional, competent second-generation artist. I don’t wood or aluminum she began making, the former in 1961
understand the link between Noland and Caro, since whole- and the latter in 1962. . . .
ness is basic to Noland’s work and cubist fragmentation is Truitt’s first New York show, at the André Emmerich
basic to Caro’s. I think Caro had his first show in New York in Gallery in February 1963, met incomprehension (from,
 among others, Donald Judd, today a Minimalist leader, Noland, Louis, and Caro. (I consider Olitski’s work chroni-
who reviewed the show for Arts). . . . cally unresolved and beyond thought.) I didn’t think about
Had they been monochrome, the “objects” in Truitt’s Greenberg much in the early 1960s and he didn’t write much.
1963 show would have qualified as first examples of I suppose Fried and Philip Leider, the editor of Artforum, kept
orthodox Minimal Art. him going. When Artforum moved to New York it revived the
roster of New York hacks.
The last sentence is in the category of “if the queen I gave up on Michael Fried when I heard him say during
had balls, she would be king.” An opening sentence is: a symposium that he couldn’t see how anyone who liked
Noland and Olitski or Stella could also like Oldenburg and
It is hardly two years since Minimal Art first appeared Rauschenberg or Lichtenstein, whichever. He was very pas-
as a coherent movement, and it is already more the rage sionate about it. (Apparently Fried likes Stella but Greenberg
among artists than Pop or Op ever was. doesn’t.) I’ve never liked Kozloff ’s ornate platitudes but
during this symposium he actually gave a theory for always
That chronology is either intentional falsification or writing about things three or four years too late. Fried’s
ignorance. The statement about my derogatory review of opinions narrowed a few years ago. I remember enthusiasm for
Truitt’s show is also shady. Regardless of work never shown, Chamberlain’s work; I’ve heard this disappeared because of
Flavin, Morris, and I were in a group show at Green in Greenberg’s disapproval. Fried’s article “Art and Objecthood”
January 1963 and later that year. One of Greenberg’s worst in the 1967 summer issue of Artforum was stupid. He cross-
statements, attributing everything to money, was in Studio referenced Bob Morris, Tony Smith, and myself and argued
International in January 1968: against the mess. Smith’s statements and his work are contra-
dictory to my own. Bob Morris’s Dada interests are very
The last such phase, Minimal Art, has swept the museums alien to me and there’s a lot in his dogmatic articles that I don’t
and the magazines and the art buffs, but it doesn’t sell like. I was especially irked by Fried’s ignorant misinterpreta-
commensurately because it’s too hard to install. And with tion of my use of the word “interesting.” I obviously use it
Novelty Art sales decide things; Pop, Op, Assemblage, in a particular way but Fried reduces it to the cliché “merely
Erotic, Neo-Figurative, and the rest don’t persist in the interesting”:
face of economic adversity – just as second-generation
Abstract Expressionism didn’t. . . . Judd himself has as much as acknowledged the
problematic character of the literalist enterprise by his
It’s surprising and despicable. claim, “A work needs only to be interesting.”
Greenberg was right of course in supporting Pollock
and the others but mainly his writing then was only approval Fried is not careful and informed. His pedantic pseudo­
and disapproval. He didn’t write much about Pollock and philosophical analysis is equivalent of ARTnews’s purple
didn’t add anything to the thinking about his work. He did poetic prose of the late 1950s.
little for David Smith. He did less for everyone else, including
 That prose was only emotional recreation and Fried’s For whom ? For the people who won’t think now
thinking is just formal analysis and both methods used exclu- about particular things like scale? A good example of baloney
sively are shit. and of silly futurism is this:
Artforum, since it came to New York, has seemed like
ARTnews in the late 1950s. There’s serious high art and then The shifting psychology of sculpture invention closely
there’s everybody else, all equally low. Flavin plays Reinhardt, parallels the inversion taking place between technics and
entertaining but not worth an article on his work; Bell and man: as the craftsman slowly withdraws his personal feelings
Irwin hardly exist; Greenbergers such as Krauss review all the from the constructed object, the object gradually gains its indepen-
shows; Darby Bannard paints a picture, Hélion relived; and dence from its human maker; in time it seeks a life of its own
articles come steadily out of the Fogg. I once complained to through self-reproduction. (Burnham’s italics.)
Leider that the magazine was dominated by Michael Fried and
the third string and he said that he didn’t think it was biased, I dislike very much this sort of sloppy correlation of such
that he published Robert Smithson too. That’s balanced highly different activities as science and art, the careless
mediocrity. Artforum is probably the best art magazine still and general history, and the mystical projection of the future:
but it’s depressing that it’s gotten so bad and so close to the
others. I don’t know much about Studio International. Artforum’s Sculpture can choose one of two courses: it can be
failure to evaluate artists and to think about their work is fashioned as a reaction against technology or as an exten-
characteristic of the whole situation of current art. Art gets sion of technical methodology.
quite a bit of attention but the quality of that is depressing.
Greenberg and Fried are of course wrong about That’s the choice? That’s Max Kozloff ’s or Hilton Kramer’s
mainstream history or development. It’s too simple and, as choice.
Barbara Reise said, it’s nineteenth-century philosophy. Originally I agreed to write this to keep Studio International
Most ideas of history are simplistic, archaic, and destructive. from calling me a minimalist. Very few artists receive attention
One of Artforum’s numerous vague mediocre articles was by without publicity as a new group. It’s another case of the
Jack Wesley Burnham, maybe kin to the preacher but not to simplicity of criticism and of the public. It seems as if maga-
the painter. Burnham wrote a book, Beyond Modern Sculpture: zines are unwilling to give new artists space by themselves.
The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Artforum has had some discussion of single new artists, mostly
Century. Never mind the present. It’s a pastiche of art survey by John Coplans. One person’s work isn’t considered suffi-
information and misinformation. His idea of history, such ciently important historically to be discussed alone. But most
as it is, is deterministic. Everyone has his hindsighted place of the so-called movements are only one person or maybe two
and history rolls on. One cliché: remotely related. That’s obvious by the work, by the initial
development, by the fact that in two or three years the follow-
It is the peculiarly blind quality of historical change that ers follow elsewhere. I hated the Primary Structures show at
we only grasp the nature of a political or cultural era after it the Jewish Museum in 1966, both itself and its title – “primary”
has reached and passed its apogee of influence. sounds Platonic. The show started out a year earlier with
Flavin, Morris, myself, maybe Andre and Bell, and maybe a
couple of others. Forty-odd artists, I think, were in the show
and a lot of them, most of Park Place, had become geometric
during that year. Barbara Rose’s ABC article was just publicity.
Theme shows and movements are still produced. Discussion,
such as Greenberg’s in the Truitt article, is still by groups.
A few months ago Artforum ran another manifesto by Bob
Morris entitled “Anti Form.” It was illustrated with photo-
graphs of work by several very diverse new artists, suggesting
by the layout that they were a group and that they were
following Morris’s work in felt, begun a year and a half ago.
Leider recently wrote an article in The New York Times entitled,
I think, “In the Shadow of Bob Morris.” This was about a
show by several of these artists – Saret, Hesse, Serra, Sonnier,
Nauman, and others – organized by Morris. The show was all
right but the suggestion of similarity is bad and the impression
that they’re fathered by Morris is terrible. Nauman’s floppy
pieces actually precede Morris’s by a couple of years. He and
Hesse were in a group show at Fischbach around two years ago.
It’s not likely that anyone as good as Serra developed his work
from someone else’s in a year and a half. The suggestion is
like Greenberg’s that Morris and I picked up on Truitt’s work.
It’s impossible chronologically. Neither do good artists develop
substantially from other artists’ work.
See part II. I’ve had enough of this.

Donald Judd Text © Judd Foundation