"Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new"
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Judd isn’t dismissing brushwork so much as declaring it culturally exhausted. By the time he’s speaking, “expression” has been claimed, branded, and monetized by Abstract Expressionism: the heroic canvas, the visible hand, the aura of private feeling made public through paint. His “It’s all right” is the tell - a shrug that doubles as a verdict. Brush strokes aren’t wrong; they’re just a language whose surprises have been used up.
The provocation is how cleanly he reframes originality. Newness, for Judd, isn’t a fresher style within the same medium; it’s a different set of problems. If gesture is already coded as authenticity, then refusing it becomes a moral and aesthetic move: less confession, more construction. That’s the hinge into what he and others would call “specific objects” - works that don’t pretend to be windows (painting) or bodies (traditional sculpture), but literal things in real space, often fabricated, often modular, often industrial. The subtext is anti-romantic and quietly anti-heroic: stop fetishizing the artist’s touch and start paying attention to structure, material, scale, and the viewer’s physical encounter.
Context matters because Judd’s minimalism lands in a postwar America saturated with manufacturing and design. His desire “to do something new” reads like an artist absorbing the logic of factories and architecture, then turning it into critique. The line is less about novelty-for-novelty’s sake than about escaping a cultural script where sincerity equals visible labor. Judd wants art that doesn’t perform emotion; it asserts presence.
The provocation is how cleanly he reframes originality. Newness, for Judd, isn’t a fresher style within the same medium; it’s a different set of problems. If gesture is already coded as authenticity, then refusing it becomes a moral and aesthetic move: less confession, more construction. That’s the hinge into what he and others would call “specific objects” - works that don’t pretend to be windows (painting) or bodies (traditional sculpture), but literal things in real space, often fabricated, often modular, often industrial. The subtext is anti-romantic and quietly anti-heroic: stop fetishizing the artist’s touch and start paying attention to structure, material, scale, and the viewer’s physical encounter.
Context matters because Judd’s minimalism lands in a postwar America saturated with manufacturing and design. His desire “to do something new” reads like an artist absorbing the logic of factories and architecture, then turning it into critique. The line is less about novelty-for-novelty’s sake than about escaping a cultural script where sincerity equals visible labor. Judd wants art that doesn’t perform emotion; it asserts presence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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