"They certainly aren't connected with the old geometric art. My work isn't geometric in that sense"
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Judd is swatting away a lazy label with the flat certainty of someone who’s spent years watching critics reach for the nearest art-historical hook. Minimalism gets lumped into “geometry” because it’s full of boxes, stacks, and right angles, but Judd’s point is that resemblance isn’t lineage. He’s not inheriting Euclid; he’s refusing the whole old game where geometry stands for ideal, transcendent order and painting pretends to open onto a perfected space. His shapes aren’t symbols of a rational cosmos. They’re objects: stubbornly literal, industrially made, occupying the same room as your body.
The subtext is a rebuke to connoisseurship that treats form as a code to be deciphered. “Geometric art,” in the traditional sense, implies composition, harmony, and a kind of mathematical grace. Judd’s practice is anti-compositional and anti-illusionistic: no internal hierarchy, no figure-ground theatrics, no virtuoso touch that flatters the artist’s hand. The geometry is a consequence of clear decisions and fabrication, not a metaphysical program.
Context matters: mid-century American art had been dominated by Abstract Expressionism’s emotional brushwork and mythic seriousness. Judd’s cool refusal reads like an ethics statement as much as an aesthetic one. By insisting his work “isn’t geometric in that sense,” he’s protecting its radical claim: that meaning can emerge from real space, serial repetition, and material fact, without being dressed up as timeless “form.” It’s less about geometry than about stripping art of inherited alibis.
The subtext is a rebuke to connoisseurship that treats form as a code to be deciphered. “Geometric art,” in the traditional sense, implies composition, harmony, and a kind of mathematical grace. Judd’s practice is anti-compositional and anti-illusionistic: no internal hierarchy, no figure-ground theatrics, no virtuoso touch that flatters the artist’s hand. The geometry is a consequence of clear decisions and fabrication, not a metaphysical program.
Context matters: mid-century American art had been dominated by Abstract Expressionism’s emotional brushwork and mythic seriousness. Judd’s cool refusal reads like an ethics statement as much as an aesthetic one. By insisting his work “isn’t geometric in that sense,” he’s protecting its radical claim: that meaning can emerge from real space, serial repetition, and material fact, without being dressed up as timeless “form.” It’s less about geometry than about stripping art of inherited alibis.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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