One of the things that has become apparent to me of late is that when I’m instinctively drawn to the work of another artist the odds are, if I dig a little deeper there will be significant links to my work and practice. This morning I revisited the Donald Judd Tate 2004 exhibition catalogue. I was looking for a section I thought I recalled about colour and architecture but found something else entirely.
As my new work will both exist within and be made in response to the city it is interesting to me that David Batchelor’s text reflects on Judd’s use of Modern materials and colours as incidentally reflecting our experience of modernity, the feel and ‘colour’s of the modern city ‘.
It is true that our experience of colours and in extension surface, within the city is often intense but also ephemeral. As an artist I spend much of my time trying to order these experiences with my camera and sketch book.
As a painter working with sculptural forms I do believe that Judd, although claiming to turn his back on painting continued to address painterly concerns, i.e. colour, structure, composition and support. Instead of leaving these problems behind he simply started began using an exciting new language to address them.
Supports where set free from the wall and became compositional elements within a site. Liquid colour pallets traditionally favored by painters where replaced by commercially applied paint or work built with materials for there intrinsic colour. Although new and modern, even the highly reflective, coloured and transparent materials could be said to explore painterly concerns. For century painters have strove to capture light and built up layers of transparency.
It’s interesting to me that much of Judd’s work is untitled and yet the descriptions of materials are specific and descriptive, emphasizing the materiality of the work and rooting them in the real rather than the contrived art world. ‘They are as Steinberg has said about Rauschenberg, not windows into a world but objects in the world…They refer not by picturing but by presenting, not by evoking but by embodying that colours and surfaces of the city.’
See David Batchelor ‘Everything a Colour’, Donald Judd, Exh. cat., Tate 2004, pp.64-75
