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The Shiny Illusionism of Krauss and JuddDavid RaskinPublished online: 03 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: David Raskin (2006) The Shiny Illusionism of Krauss and Judd, Art Journal, 65:1, 6-21

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Donald Judd, Untitled, 1989, enameled alu­minum, 59 in. x 24 ft. 7lilin. x 65 in. (150 x 750x 165 em), installation view, Museum ofModern Art, New York (artwork © JuddFoundationllicensed byVAGA, NewYork, NY;image © Museum of Modern Art, NewYorkllicensed by Scala/Art Resource, NewYork)

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If you stand right fronting and face toface with a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its

surfaces, asif it were a cimeter, and you will feel its sweet edge dividing you through your heart and

marrow.-Henry DavidThoreau, 1854

Heroes or Ghosts

The Shiny Illusionismof Krauss and Judd

David Raskin

Belief that our perception and conception of the world require a representational

interface is one of the tenacious antirealist legacies of seventeenth-centurymetaphysics and epistemology, which held that some sort of mediator bridges

the gap between the immaterial mind or soul and the material body or world.During the past several centuries, from Rene Descartes through Maurice Merleau­Ponty, various names for this go-between have included "impressions," "sensa­tions," "experiences," "sense-data," "phenomena," "stimuli," and "qualia.'

In dualist accounts, these intermediaries are disembodied mind processes; inmonist versions, the electrical or veridical activity of a brain."

The problem of the relationship among perception, conception, and artdominated one kind of polemics in the United States during the 1960s and early1970s, an era of heated social skepticism and passionate action. How could any­one know if anything were true? Critics and artists immersed in this turmoil

unwittingly invoked one form or another of interface thinking in making judg­ments of art's ethical values. Greenberg's concise formulation is probably the

Features

The Same Ground

In 1973 and 1977 Rosalind Krauss contemplated the paradoxi­cal concept of the alter ego, "the way in which the picture ofthe self as a contained whole ... crumbles before the act of

connecting with other selves-with other minds." I Both times she stopped short

of reflecting on who her own alter ego might be. Had someone pressed her,she would surely have named another unruly child of Clement

Greenberg, Michael Fried." But because she has struggled with

Donald Judd in fourteen publications from 1966 to 2004, neveronce giving this third sibling his due, it is certain that it is he who is

that other self, that other mind she has wrestled with her entire life.3

From the very start, Krauss has insisted that Judd misunder­

stands and misrepresents his own art, reading it ever further away

from his own convictions. I cannot think of any other case where a

critic has so endlessly asserted that an artist is wrong-dead wrong about whathis art does, wildly wrong about what it means, and dangerously wrong aboutthe world it instantiates.

Why not simply dismiss him and move on? Judd himself mentioned Krauss

just once in his more than 160 published reviews, statements, interviews, letters,lectures, and essays, belittling her in 1969 without any apparent irony as a

"Greenberger<This single comment must have stung, for she repeated it in her

position paper of 1972 and again for posterity decades later.! Inverted by theirdividing empiricism, Krauss could not rid herself ofJudd and has brooded onhis art, as did he, to see "what the world's like.:"

For jRC, LYR, and DOX.

Iwouid like to thank jodi Cressman, jim Elkins,David Getsy, Raja Halwani, Adrian Kohn, RichardShiff, Tom Sloan, and two anonymous readers. Mydean, Carol Becker, and my chair, Margaret Olin,have kindly helped defray expenses.

The epigraph is from Walden, or Ufein the Woods(New York: Library of America, 1989). 400.

I. Rosalind Krauss, "Sense and Sensibility:Reflection on Post '60s Sculpture," Artforum 12,no. 3 (November 1973): 49. See also Rosalind E.Krauss, Passages inModern Sculpture (1977;Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 28 and 267.2. Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum1972-1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2000),220-28.3. The fourteen: Rosalind E. Krauss, "Allusion andIllusion in Donald judd," Artforum 4, no. 9 (May1966): 24; Rosalind Krauss, "A View ofModernism," Artforum I I, no. I (September1972): 49: Rosalind Krauss, "Problems ofCriticism, X: Pictorial Space and the Question ofDocumentary," Artforum 10, no. 3 (November1971): 70-71; Krauss, "Sense and Sensibility,"49-50; Rosalind Krauss, "Objecthood," in CriticalPerspectives inAmerican Art (Amherst, MA: FineArts Center Gallery, University of Massachusetts,1976): 26; Krauss, Passages, 258; Rosalind Krauss,"Theories of Art after Minimalismand Pop," inDiscussions in Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal Foster(Seattle: Bay Press, 1987): 63; Rosalind Krauss,"Overcoming the Limits of Matter: On RevisingMinimalism," in American Art of the I960s, Studiesin Modern Art, vol. I (New York: Museum ofModern Art, 1991), 136; Rosalind Krauss, inround-table discussion, "The Reception of the

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Sixties." October 69 (Summer 1994): 9; RosalindKrauss. "The Mind/Body Problem: Robert Morrisin Series." in Robert Morris:TheMind/Body Problem(New York: Guggenheim Museum. 1994). I I;Rosalind E.Krauss. "The Material Uncanny," inDonald Judd: Early Fabricated Work (New York:PaceWildenstein. 1998), 12; Rosalind Krauss. '11.Voyage on the North Sea": Artinthe Ageof thePost-Medium Condition (New York: Thames andHudson. 1999). 10; Rosalind E. Krauss. "'Specific'Objects," Res46 (Autumn 2004): 221; RosalindKrauss, "1965." in Artsince 1900: Modernism,Antimodernism, Postmodernism. ed. Hal Foster etal. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 493.A fifteenth. entitled "Reading Judd," neverappeared. but was listed as "forthcoming" on theback cover of October 3 (Spring 1977). A six­teenth might be considered, Rosalind Krauss."The Cultural Logicof the Late CapitalistMuseum," October 54 (Autumn 1990): 3-17. sinceit is exemplary of the usual sweeping misreadingof Minimalism as an art with "phenomenologicalambitions" that "participat[ed] in a culture of seri­ality ... that is. of commodity production."Krauss. "The Cultural Logic," 8.4. Donald Judd. "Complaints: part I" (1969). inComplete Writings 1959-1975: Gallery Reviews,Book Reviews, Articles, Letters to the Editor. Reports,Statements, Complaints (Halifax: Press of the NovaScotia College of Design. and New York: NewYork University Press. 1975). 198.5. Krauss wrote. "In that article [judd] spoke dis­paragingly of Michael Fried and myself. Referringto the intellectual debt which we. among manyother writers. continually acknowledged toClement Greenberg, he called us 'Greenbergers.'Beyond its wit. Judd's remark implied the dangerof self-objectification inherent in our position.mine and others'. in espousing a doctrine. thedoctrine to which we were committed which was'modernism."· Krauss. "A View of Modernism,"49; Krauss. in Challenging Art.78. See alsoRosalind Krauss. "We Lost It at the Movies," in''The Subject in/of Art History," ArtBulletin 76.no. 4 (December 1994): 579.6. The phrase isJudd 's, which Krauss repeats.Krauss. Passages, 245 and 266. and "TheMind/Body Problem." I I. Donald Judd. quoted inBruce Glaser. "Questions to Stella and Judd"(1964 broadcast; '966 publication), in MinimalArt: A Critical Anthology. ed. Gregory Battcock(New York: Dutton. 1968), 151. For how phe­nomenology. despite its rejection of twentieth­century positivism. has substantial ties to turn-of­the-century empiricism. see Herbert Spiegelberg.The Phenomenological Movement. 3rd ed. (TheHague: Nijhoff. 1984). 114-16.7. Hilary Putnam. "Sense. Nonsense. and theSenses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the HumanMind.Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9 (September1994): 453. 488. and 490.8. Clement Greenberg. "Complaints of an ArtCritic" (1967). in Clement Greenberg: The CollectedEssays and Criticism. vol. 4. Modernism withaVengeance. 1957-1969. ed.John O'Brian(Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1993).269.9. For how "nothing short of conviction . . . mat­ters at all," see Fried. "Art and Objecthood,' in

best-known instance: "Quality is 'content."" But for his "quality," we could

easily substitute (as a matter of principle if not precisely doctrine) Fried's "con­viction," Krauss's "point of view," or Judd's "interest."?

Notice, too, how this puzzle drew in a diversity of vanguard artists. RobertMorris turned toward the perceptual psychologist Anton Ehrenzweig in 1969,

and Robert Smithson repeatedly relied on Roland Barthes's ideas about represen­

tation between 1966 and 1968.10 Mel Bochner and Joseph Kosuth found the logi­

cal positivism ofA.]. Ayer-"Empirical questions are one and all hypotheses,which may be confirmed or discredited in actual sense-experience"-a helpful

anchor for their Conceptual art in 1967 and 1969, respectively. II Richard Serra in

1970 thought his Skullcracker Stacking Series related to a statement by A. N.Whitehead,the coauthor of the Principia Mathematica: "We experience more than we can ana­lyze." I2 [o Baer used her paintings to probe the problem of"distinguish[ing]

between properties of the observer and properties of the thing observed," fol­lowing the German physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. 13

Despite the complicated differences among these heterogeneous artists, each

in certain respects tacitly held a mediation model for meaning, believing that itis art itself that intercedes between the world and our knowledge of it, that givesus what Fried staked to be "life itself." 14 As elsewhere in the American social

fabric, battles burned over the nature of our world, over "the nature of truthand reality," which was how Barbara Rose characterized art's wager in 1969.15

Year afterYear

One way the art world tackled truth and reality was in its arguments over thevalue, nature, and definition of pictorial illusionism. Judd even claimed in 1965

that art like his"gets rid of the problem of illusionism ... which is riddance of

one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art." 16 But since

Greenberg was caught up in this affair and caught up over Minimalism, illusion­ism has remained a particularly contentious topic in Judd studies, where manyof Greenberg's ideas play out. 17

Just this past year Hal Foster took the opportunity to reverse his earlier posi­

tion on the matter. As Foster explained, in writing his famous 1987 essay, "TheCrux of Minimalism,' he had been under Judd's spell, agreeing with him that

specific objects were truly against illusionism. But now he had come to suspectthat "the Minimalist break from pictorial virtuality into actual space was onlypartial and temporary, a historical ruse ..." 18Claims like this one, that Judd's art

has a discrepancy--or even a falsification-at its heart, have by now long beencentral and were first decisively expressed in an accusation in Krauss's review of1966, "Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd." 19The young critic's enduring thesiswas that while Judd "proscribe]d] ... allusion and illusion," his work had both. 20

Krauss drew her conclusion by analyzing a twenty-one-foot-wide progres­sion that from the front seemed to consist of ten purple-lacquered aluminumbars hanging from one of brushed aluminum. She observed that her impressionwas incompatible with the work's actuality, since the lower purple elements donot truly hang from the upper brushed-aluminum form: they turn out to beL-shaped and cradle it, details she discovered only by walking to the side.Yet sherealized that the side view made it difficult to deduce the mathematical formula

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Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965, aluminum,814 x 253 x 814 in. (21 x 624.6 x 21 em),Whitney Museum of American Art, NewYork, purchase, with funds from theHoward and Jean Lipman Foundation (art­work © Donald Judd FoundationllieensedbyVAGA, NewYork, NY; photograph byJerry Thompson)

Art and Objecthaad: Essays and Reviews (1967;Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 165.For Judd's statement "A work needs only beinteresting" in context, see Judd, "SpecificObjects," 184, and the section entitled"Interesting Objects" in my "Judd's Moral Art," inDanaldJudd, ed. Nicholas Serota (London: Tate,2004), 81-92. For Krauss on point of view, see"A View of Modernism," 5 I, discussed below.10. Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture, Part 4:Beyond Objects" (1969), in Continuous ProjectAltered Daily: TheWritings of Robert Morris(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 57 and 62.Robert Smithson, "Entropy and the NewMonuments" (1966), "Toward the Developmentof an Air Terminal Site" (1967), "Ultramodern"(1967), "A Museum of Language in the VicinityofArt" (1968), and "A Thing Is a Hole in a Thing It IsNot" (1968), in Robert Smithson: TheCollectedWritings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

that structures the widths of the purple forms and the intervening gaps. She

resolved this disparity between visual observation and physical fact only bymoving around, which made Judd's thing remind her of "the colonnaded nave

of Filippo Brunelleschi's 'San Lorenzo,"" an insight that demanded recourse to

a priori experience and one that she explained didactically; while she felt swept

up in the experience oflooking, the displacement she saw in Judd's art betweenappearance and fact revealed that life was what Merleau-Ponty called "lived per­

spective," since reality in his thinking consists of the "insurpassable plenitude ...[of] the infinite sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views ..."21

In presenting this idea-one she called "lived illusion" to distinguish itfrom nonmodernist pictorial illusionism-she held that Judd's art served as "an

irritant," teaching viewers that the world is only a function of active cognition,since they must move in order to make sense of his art. Krauss thought thatmeaning in Judd's work resides in evoking just this self-reflection, because shebelieved it was interaction with objects in the world that enlivens them, thatimbues them with significance. 22

Implicitly replying to Krauss, Judd offered an important clarification, claim­ing that the art material, its properties, and their perceptual effects are oneand the same; "They don't seem illusionistic in that sense to me .... In a sense[reflection] is an illusion just in the technical meaning of the term. I distinguishbetween that and illusion which I think is a perfectly matter-of-fact illusion andhas no connection to the other kind." 23 Judd's protege Fred Sandback was the

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Fred Sandback, Untitled (Triangle), 1988,black acrylic yarn, 13 ft. 6 in. x 43 ft. 7 in. x7 in. (411.5 x 1,328.4 x 17.8 em), installa­tion view, Sioux City Art Center, SiouxCity, Iowa (artwork © Estate of FredSandback; photograph provided by theSioux City Art Center)

University of California Press, 1996), I 1,58,63,83, and 96,I I, joseph Kosuth, "Art after Philosophy" (1969),in Art afterPhilosophy andAfter: Collected Writings,1966-1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991),22, For one of Bochner's citations of Ayer, seeMel Bochner, "Serial Art, Systems,Solipsism"(1967), in Battcock, 92.12. Richard Serra, "Play It Again Sam" (1970),in Writings/Interviews (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1994), 8.13. jo Baer, "Art & Vision: Mach Bands," AspenMagazine 8 (Fall-Winter 1970-71), n.p.14. Michael Fried, "Three American Painters:Kenneth Noland, jules Olitski, Frank Stella"(1965), in Art and Objecthood, 219.15. Barbara Rose, "The Politics of Art, Part II,"Artforum 7, no. 5 (January 1969): 48.16. judd, "Specific Objects" (1965), in CompleteWritings 1959-1975, 184.17. SeeGreenberg, "Modernist Painting" (1960),in Clement Greenberg, 90, and "After AbstractExpressionism" (1962), in Clement Greenberg, 123.18. Hal Foster, "Six Paragraphson Dan Flavin,"Artforum 43, no. 6 (February 2005): 160.19. Krauss was loose in her terminology, rejectingthe possibility that illusions do not refer andemploying "illusiveness" and "illusionism" as syn­onyms. An abbreviated version of the followingdiscussion of Krauss's essaysof 1966, 1971, and1973 appears as the introduction to my "judd'sMoral Art," in Donald judd,79-80.20. Krauss, "Allusion and Illusion," 24. Compareto her comments some thirty-two years later:"The persistence of an oddly unsettling kind ofillusionism in work that has been declared againand againto be 'about' rigor ..." Rosalind E.Krauss, "The Material Uncanny," I I, emphasisdeleted.21. Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Krauss, "Allusionand Illusion," 25-26.22. Krauss, "Allusion and Illusion," 26. Compareto Fried, "Art and Objecthood" (1967), inBattcock, 140. Krauss repeated her argumenttwenty-four years later in "The Cultural Logic," 9.23. Donald judd, quoted in "Is Easel PaintingDead?" (symposium transcript, November 1966,Barbara Rose Papers,Archives of American Art,Smithsonian Institution), 33.24. Fred Sandback, "Notes," 1973, in 74 FrontStreet: The Fred Sandback Museum (Winchendon,MA: Sandback Museum, 1982), 4. Richard Shiffcharacterized the distinction in these terms:"Illusion is the way things are. Illusionism is theway things aren't." Richard Shiff, "Donald judd:FastThinking," in Donald judd:Late Work (NewYork: PaceWildenstein, 2000), 9.25. Krauss, "Allusion and Illusion," 26.

clearest on this matter, clarifying the difference between illusionism and illusion in1973 when he wrote, "Illusionistic art refers you away from its factual existencetoward something else. My work is full of illusions, but they don't refer to any­thing. Fact and illusion are equivalents. Trying to weed one out in favor of theother is dealing with an incomplete situation.T" But reasonable explanations suchas these have gone nowhere in resolving this partisan issue, as few today havepatience with any kind of positivism toward truth, reality, world, self, or art.

Krauss's 1966 effort also stands out not just for her drift from visual effectsto antihumanist pronouncements or for the seeds of her impending break withGreenberg and Fried, but for her need to advance a second conclusion, Instead ofletting the meaning of Judd's art rest in lived experience, she also insisted upon ahistoricist level of significance in relation to David Smith's late sculptures. 25 Andbecause in 1971 she had tied Judd to Smith through the problems of illusionism,

a slightly earlier comment from 1969 also seems pertinent: "For Smith the task

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David Smith, Cub; VII, 1963, stainless steel,installation view, North Garden, ArtInstitute of Chicago (artwork © Estate ofDavid Smith, licensed byVAGA, New YOrk,NY;photograph ©TheArt Institute ofChicago)

26. Rosalind Krauss, "The Essential David Smith,Part I," ArtfollJm 7, no. 6 (February 1969): 48.For Judd, Smith, and illusionism, see Rosalind E.Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: TheSculpture of DavidSmith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971),175-78, 18S.27. Krauss, "Problems of Criticism," 68. For"sense data," see 70. She used the terms "data"and "sense-impressions" in Krauss, "Sense andSensibility,"46.28. Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture, Part 4,"67.29. Krauss, "Problems of Criticism," 70. Krauss'scharge is in marked contrast to Judd's direct repu­diation of idealism. Judd, in Glaser, I5 I.

of sculpture had nothing to do with knowledge of the object, but with self­knowledge."26 And though Judd was committed to knowing his objects, it is

nonetheless on this mining of self that the illusionism-versus-illusion debateturns. Once found, Judd's self would be one Krauss would not abide.

By 1971 Krauss decided that she had misinterpreted the illusionism shehad earlier seen and that her prior privileging of sense-data had also been mis­guided." Having argued in 1966 for the value of what she maintained was Judd'sputative phenomenalism-a belief system to which Judd did not subscribe butwhich construes the material world as its sensible qualities-she would nowexpress her impatience with this specific ontology for reasons similar to thoseof Morris's rejection of Minimalism two years earlier. 28

Krauss now argued that any deferral to sense-data hypostatizes the very sub­ject it seeks to confirm-an ego that legislates meaning, a core self that some­how arises out of yet also gives significance to our perceptions of the world. 29

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30. Judd, unpublished interview by Paul Cabon(after 1989, France; Archives of Judd Foundation,Marfa, TX), 10. For Judd and physics, see RainerCrone, "Symmetry and Order: Formal Logic inthe Sculptures of Donald Judd," in Dona/djudd(Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1987),71-74.31. Judd once even said, "lltke very much DavidHume." Donald Judd, interview by Barbara Rose(December 18, 1967, conducted for Rose's pro­ject "The American Artist Speaks," transcriptof tape recording, Barbara Rose Papers, GettyCenter for the History of Art and the Humanities,Los Angeles, CAl, 12.32. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature(1739--40; Oxford: Ciaredon Press, 1978), I.iv.6.33. Ibid.34. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning HumanUnderstanding (1748; La Salle, IL:Open Court,1988),Xll.ii.3S. Judd's behaviorism is the topic of my essay"Judd's Moral Art."36. Krauss, "Problems of Criticism," 70. In 1972Krauss rejected a tie between behaviorism andWittgenstein, writing, "Anyone reading the lateWittgenstein must realize that his work taken as awhole offers an impassioned and profound attackon behaviorism, along with idealism." Krauss, "AView of Modernism," 49.37. Krauss, "Problems of Criticism," 71.38. Donald Judd, quoted in Lucy R. Lippard,"Tape-Recording of an Interview with DonaldJudd" (April 10, 1968; Lucy R. Lippard Papers,Archives of American Art, SmithsonianInstitution), 54. Judd, "Art and Architecture"(1983), in Complete Writings 1975-/986(Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1987),32.

Her new perspective on Judd's old failure was that his art postulated a circular

idealist stance, one that devolves into solipsism since it assumes the very ego that

proves itself, which was actually a trap Judd carefully avoided, using physics ashis anchor; "I am very interested in the materials as materials, for themselves, forthe quality they have, and retaining that quality, not losing it ..."30

Here Krauss nonetheless expressed a limit of empiricism most famously

stated by David Hume, who was one of Iudd's authorities." In a reductio ad absur­dum, Hume wrote;

[W]hen I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on

some particular perception or other.... I can never catch myself at any timewithout a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

When my perceptions are remov'd for any time, as by sound sleep; so longam I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.32

Since sense-data cannot confirm an uninterrupted self and by the samechimerical reasoning an invariable world, "we feign [their] continu'd existence ...

a fiction ... to satisfy ourselves ..."33 Hume's point is not that self or world donot exist, but that they cannot be established by perception alone. He showed

that private experience is unverifiable, since it provides no means to distinguish

between knowing and believing and no true foundation for knowledge, whichhe contended comes instead through "action, and employment, and the occupa­tions of common life." 34

Krauss saw classical empiricism's private metaphysics pictured in Judd's art

without <l:ny acknowledgement of its absurdity, and while Hume was an impor­

tant touchstone for Judd, his actual position was closer to twentieth-centurybehaviorist principles with their transparency to public verification (which prof­fers a solution to Hume's reduction).« As her counter to the empiricist lacuna,

she used Ludwig Wittgenstein's critique of private languages, asking, when phys­ically objective material dissolves"on the grounds of illusionism" to point ofview, where are "the grounds for certainty?"> Quoting Wittgenstein to this

effect-"Doesn't testing come to an end?"-she flipped her analytical methodol­

ogy from its inward focus on sense experience toward an outward viewpointthat examines "the conditions of a given social structure ... ," the "facts [that]

are located in real space [even] [i]f our [sensory] access to them is limited." 37

Since she now believed that both empirical data about the real world and the selfthat can acquire it are fictions, she concluded that Judd's art trafficked in deceit­

ful values.The antirealist position that meaning is conception is antithetical to Judd's

own realist restraint. In 1968, he said that art and knowledge are distinct pursuits.Limiting justified beliefs to the purview of science, he asserted that"art isn't afactual matter really, anyway." 38 In the same part of this interview with LucyLippard, Judd also explained his early views of the scientific limits to knowledge;"It's important that the extent of knowledge is made clear so that it doesn't getmuddled. They know so much about geology. They know so much about physics... And since that constitutes knowledge and is reasonably factual ... that's whatshould be taken seriously or believed." He further elaborated nearly twenty yearslater; "Art, in its resemblance to us, is general and science is particular." Hethought art took life in its messiness, writing, "Art involves all of the concerns

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Vito Acconci, still from Pryings, 1971,liveperformance with black-and-white videodocumentation, 20 min., sound, camera byBernadette Mayer (artwork ©VitoAcconci)

39. Donald Judd. "A long discussion not aboutmaster-pieces but why there are so few of them.Part II" (1984). in Complete Writings /975-/986.70-71.40. See Judd. quoted in Glaser. 151.41. Krauss. "Sense and Sensibility." 50. The essay'smain focus is "the need of certain artists toexplore the externality of ianguage and thereforeof meaning." Krauss. 49. On her dismissal ofreflectionist views of reality. see Rosalind Krauss,"The Motivation of the Sign." in Picasso andBraque: A Symposium. ed. William Rubin and LynnZelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art,1992). 285. as cited in Patricia Leighten, "CubistAnachronisms: Ahistoricity, Cryptoformalism. andBusiness-as-Usual in New York," Oxford ArtJournal 17.no. 2 (1994): 92.42. Krauss. "Sense and Sensibility." 49.

of philosophy, even all of living," 39 This antiformalist project is one he shared

with Barnett Newman, Claes Oldenburg, Dan Graham, Chris Burden, Walter de

Maria, and Dan Flavin, among others including Vito Acconci, whose rule-based

actions evoke biopsychological reactions.

In 1973, Krauss changed her mind again. This time she no longer saw the

idealism that she and Judd both despised.4° She now (correctly) praised his

"involve[ment] in discrediting the persistence of Cartesianism," but (incorrectly)

added that he "posit]ed] meaning itself as a function of external space," an add­

on that followed her new post-Greenberg antireflectionist view of meaning."

Judd's project, she now believed, was "the discovery of the body as a complete

externalization of the Self," a "revelation [that] leads away from any notion of

consciousness as unified within itself For the self is understood as completed only

after it has surfaced into the world ..."42 She held that his art staked everything

on the belief that there could never be direct sensory access to reality, which

needed to be probed by other analytical means. This breakthrough was not his

alone, she wrote, but was a triumph shared by Morris, Flavin, Frank Stella, Carl

Andre, [ean-Luc Godard, Bochner, Dorothea Rockburne, Sol LeWitt, Richard

Tuttle, Robert Barry, Kosuth, Douglas Huebler, Richard Serra, and On Kawara.

Like Merleau-Pontv's, her phenomenology had expanded to focus on cognition's

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On Kawara, Oct. 3/, /978 (Today Series"Tuesday"), 1978, Liquitex on canvas,includes newspaper and painting, 61 x 89in.(154.9 x 226 cm),Art Institute ofChicago (artwork © On Kawara;photo­graph ©TheArt Institute of Chicago)

43. Ibid., 47, emphasis in original. On Merleau­Ponty's turn toward structural preconditions, seeSpiegelberg, 574--78.44. Krauss, "Problems of Criticism," 71.45. Judd, quoted in Angeli Janhsen, "Discussionwith Donald Judd," in DonaldJudd(St. Gallen,Switzerland: Kunstverein St. Gallen, 1990), 54.

structural preconditions, since she now believed "meaning ... is unintelligibleapart from ... the (semiological) conventions of a public space."43 This interro­

gation of cultural strata has been the project of the second phase of her career.Tothis end, she had somewhat earlier made a point of championing Smithson's artover Judd's, claiming that Judd's objects privileged experience while Smithson'spieces were instead documentation, a format that insists on a remove betweenreality and its grasp, questioning "the nature of the evidence the world providesus with."H

Krauss's structured thinking directly opposed Judd's view that the world isever-emerging, an integration of objective and subjective, external and internal,mind and body: "That's the division between thought and feeling.You have todo it all at once. You have to look and understand, both. In looking you under­stand; it's more than you can describe. You look and think, and look and think,until it makes sense, becomes interesting."45 For while Judd's empiricismremained grounded in phenomena, he understood that these phenomena werenever bracketed off: "Materialism fails on the side of incompleteness," Judd

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Robert Smithson, Chalk-Mirror Displace­ment, 1969, sixteen one-sided mirrorsplaced back to back to form eight sections,chalk, each mirror lOx 59\4 x ~ in. (25.4 x151.8 x .3 cm), installation view, ArtInstitute of Chicago (artwork © Estate ofRobert Smithsonllicensed byVAGA, NewYork,NY;photograph ©The Art Instituteof Chicago)

46. Judd, "A long discussion not about master­pieces ... part II," 86.47. For Judd's "fast thinking," which is "a form offeeling, a sensory and emotional experience," seeShiff,8.48. Judd, "Dutch Interview," (1993, unpublished,Archives of Judd Foundation, Marfa, TX), as quotedin MissyGaido Allen, "Donald Judd and the MarfaObjective" (PhD dissertation, University of Iowa,2005), I. Judd's sloppy word choice, a rarity, showshow confused this debate has been in the literature.49. Krauss, Passages, 23, comma removed.

wrote. "Idealism always presents a systematic totality. but it must always have

some vagueness and thus lead to error.... But if materialism without idealism

is blind. idealism without materialism is void."46 Looking was for Judd an issue

of conviction, of thought and feeling bound together as one.v Late in his life.

the once-hard-nosed artist even revealed. "I avoid illusion[ism], things are what

they are. But all forms are spiritual ... I see it as an awareness which stems fromreality-a kind of''betng...·48

In 1977'S Passages in Modern Sculpture. Krauss refined her earlier studies (with

their counterfiguration of Iudd), essentially completing her rejection of

Greenbergian modernism in spite of the book's historicist argument. She begins

with the figures ofAuguste Rodin's seemingly crude relief. The Gates ofHell(1880-'9'7). In each she observed Rodin's repeated failure "to relate the out­

ward appearance of the body to its inner structure."49 This pervasive disconnec­

tion between the observed exterior and the imagined core was not proof of

Rodin's expressivity, she argued. but rather evidence against the rationalist doc­

trine of cause and effect. which provides a phony inner depth that she believed

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Auguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell, conceived1880-1917, cast 1928 by Alexis Rudier,Paris, bronze, 20 ft. 1O~ in. x 13 ft. 2 in. x33% in. (636.9 x 401.3 x 84.8 cm), RodinMuseum/Philadelphia Museum of Art (art­work in the public domain; photographprovided by Art Resource, NY)

50. Ibid., 27, 29.51. For the key points on each artist, see Krauss,Passages, 51, 88, 114, 148, 203,258,279, and282.52. Krauss, Passages, 258.53. Judd, "Barnett Newman" (1970), in CompleteWritings 1959-1975,202. Judd was affirmingNewman's essay "The Sublime Is Now."

authored the humanist narrative of the self With meaning instead configured

as positionality, there was no reason for Rodin not to splay identical figures acrossthe surface of the gates, since conceptions are a function of perspectives. In thisparticular instance, these positions cohere only during a transition, effectinga standoff between outside forces (process and placement) and inside ones(anatomy and figurattonj.v'The ratio changed as Krauss found external forcesmaking successive gains in Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti,and Smith, but not, she argued, until Morris, Serra, and Smithson-artists of herown era-did the three-dimensional subject reveal its identity to be a mirage."

Krauss cast Judd's reflections into her erasing river, insisting that he too hadrepudiated"a notion of the individual self that supposes personality, emotion,and meaning as elements existing within each of us separately'<' No single con­

tention could have more strongly contrasted with the egocentrism Judd prizedabove all else: he had even once claimed about the project he shared withNewman, "We are making [art] out of ourselves." 53 This is the best way to

understand Judd's serial practice, not in relation to capitalism or as a metaphor

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Robert Morris, Untitled (Three L-8eams);1965, and Untitled (Comer Piece), 1964,installation view, Museum of Contem­porary Art, Los Angeles, 2004 (artwork@Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society(ARS), NewYork;photograph by BrianForrest)

54. Krauss. Passages, 267. See Martin Engler,"SpecificObjects-The Illusionof Factuality," inDonaldJuddColorist, ed. Dietmar Elger (Bonn:Hatje Cantz, 2000), 73.55. Krauss, Passages, 28 and 267.56. Judd's demand for rich sensations in a focusedformat relates to beliefs held by Hume and a cen­tury later by Peirce and James that the sensoryworld is a chaos that must be sorted. If art is tobe part of the world and not a mere representa­tion, it must similarlyfurnish complex sensations.Judd objected when "reductive" was used to char­acterize his own art. In this respect, Morris'sreductive objects from the mid-1960s are abstrac­tions and not the actuality that Judd demanded.57. Krauss, Passages, 287.

for the elimination of inner subjectivity, but as self-expression proved throughquantifiable individualism. In pursuing fine variations within a restricted format,

he created a public and verifiable set of rules for his private practice; Judd's indi­vidualism was that of the citizen and not the solipsist.

In stripping Judd of himself in Passages, Krauss had Morris's cognitively

identical yet allegedly experientially dissimilar plywood Ls in mind, and shediscussed them immediately following her remarks on Judd. Morris, she says,

staged perceptual variation as meaning itself, a transience that metaphoricallysuggested that the articulation of the self is entirely dependent on a preexistent

"space of experience." 54 As she explained, he presented the self as an alter ego

and completed the process started with Rodin, showing (again) that "the pictureof the self as a contained whole ... crumbles before the act of connecting withother selves and other minds.">sWhile Morris built bland forms that deliberatelyhindered aesthetic contemplation by appearing wholly reflective of externality,

Judd made his rich sensations quantifiable, seeking to deny the possibility ofsignification and to prevent his art's engagement with a symbolic order. 56

Judd's refusal to refer is precisely what Krauss has been unable to negotiate,since from the start she has identified art as "modes of cognitlon/'v Insistences

like hers that the meaning of art must exist within an order of linked denotationshas become an axiom of current art history's linguistic face and antirealisttemper. In contrast, Judd's aesthetic demand for perception without conceptionclarifies how he could champion Lee Bontecou's sexual and violent reliefs,

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Chamberlain Building interior, architec­tural adaptation by Donald judd, withvarious works in painted and chromiumsteel by john Chamberlain, the ChinatiFoundation, Marfa,Texas (artworks © johnChamberlain/Artists Rights Society (ARS),NewYork;photograph © 200 I FlorianHolzherr)

58.Judd's statement on aesthetic singleness is that"the thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, iswhat is interesting. The main things are alone andare more intense, clear and powerful." judd,"Specific Objects" (1965), in Complete Writings/959-1975,187.59. judd, quoted in "Discussion with Donaldjudd," 53.60. Krauss, Passages, 258. She had presented aversion of this theme in 1972: "Perspective is thevisual correlate of causality that one thing followsthe next in space according to rule." Krauss, "AView of Modernism," 50.61. Krauss, in "The Reception of the Sixties," 9.See also Krauss, "The Mind/Body Problem," 4.62. Krauss, "Allusionand Illusion,"24. Judd,unpublished note (November 18, 1990, Archivesof the judd Foundation, Marfa, TX).

Oldenburg's farfetched reproductions, and John Chamberlain's crushed cars.,8

Like everyone, Judd could find references in any work of art, but for him theimmediate sensual effects of the best objects resisted quick translation. "Com­munication," he said, "is a totally alien aspect of visual art, I think."'9

It was in Passages that illusionism's final stakes were clearly declared: "[I]llu­

sionism [is] a metaphor for that privileged (because private) psychologicalmoment.t'w Though nearly thirty years have passed since Krauss wrote these

words, the claim is the dystopian sort for which she is best known today, sincemany writers for the journal October share in her denial of "authenticity, origin­

ality, expressiveness"-the so-called myths of modernism that enliven each ofUS. 61But no mindset could have been further from Judd's radical brand ofempiricism. Illusion, a matter of fact, is there for everybody to see.

Though Krauss and Judd originally approached art from a shared position,their divergence could not now have been stronger. She needed "to get at mean­ing," while he was content to leave life's boundaries unfenced, saying, "It's evi­dent that what is to be known can't even be described, much less the immediateway of knowing, and so there can be no further analysis of perception. We sitand look out and see ... and know, but cannot analyze doing it."62 By the mid­1970s, Krauss began to insist on a type of methodological rigor that would leadher to structuralism and poststructuralism, semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, andother models of meaning-with their differing strategies of self-specificallydesigned to solve the limitations of sensory empiricism demonstrated by Hume."The emphasis on interpretation, on reception," she wrote in 1994, "moved theaccount from questions of truth (the empiricist's obsession) to questions of

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63. Krauss, "We Lost It at the Movies," 580,emphasis removed.64. Judd, "A long discussion not about master­pieces ... part II," 75. In applying this principle tohis art, Judd said, "There's a big gap betweenthinking about [the art] and figuring it all out andfinallyseeing it. And usually I'm surprised." Judd,in Contemporary Artists At Work: Sculptors, Vol. II,interview by Daniel De Wilde (1979, transcript offilmed interview, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Films,Archives of the Judd Foundation, Marfa, TX), 2.65. Dominic Rahtz, "Literality and Absence of Selfin the Work of Carl Andre," OxfordArtJournol27,no. I (2004): 61-78.66. Krauss, "A View of Modernism," 51. Krauss'sconcern is positionality, not viewing or beholdingper se. Compare to David Carrier, Rosalind KraussandAmerican Philosophical Art Criticism (Westport,CT: Praeger, 2002), xii.67. Compare to William James, "Does'Consciousness' Exist?" inJames, Essays in RadicalEmpiricism (1912; Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1996), 37. Judd wrote, "Most people needmore coherence than they have, some desperate­ly .. .' Judd, "Art and Architecture" (1983), 32.68. Judd, quoted in "Discussion with DonaldJudd," 56.69. For Judd and abduction, see Shiff, 7-8. ForKrauss and abduction, see Rosalind E.Krauss, TheOptical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1993),252.70. Judd, "Barnett Newman" (1970), in CompleteWritings 1959-1975,202.71. Judd, "Some Aspects of Color in General andRed and Blackin Particuiar" (1993 lecture),Artforum, 32, no. 10 (Summer 1994): 77.

what linguists call the performative: to know how an action ... has the power

to keep acting in a variety of changing contexts, and how those contexts have

the power to act ... on the action."63Judd solved this problem differently. He

believed that truth and reality are not set once and for all in any deterministic or

absolute sense, but are instead hypotheses built with empirical strategies and

open to falsification: "It's possible to accept uncertainty, which is nearly every­

thing qUietly."64 His is a position that acknowledges there can be no escaping

point-of-view without making metaphysics a function of "culture," which is the

name we give to the signifying system by which we handle the evidence.

Lost Souls

In reviewing Krauss's positions on Judd from 1966 to 20°4, it is clear that the

illusionism she saw became the visual confirmation of the dear principle that the

selfis a fiction written in contingency, a lack.v Krauss's views of]udd, all anti­

thetical to his assertions, were born in an era when modernist principles of artis­

tic practice and positivist philosophies of knowledge were increasingly under

assault by antimodernist revisionism and postmodernist developments, and now

appear dead. With life externalized in terms of various ideas, she found fleeting

selves that are no longer the anchor of an otherwise fragmented existence but a

symptom of our own peripheral status, which is a type of perspectivism: "I must

acknowledge not some idea of the world's perspective but Simply my own point

of view."66 Here is her harsh truth.

In examining Judd's remarks about himself between 1964 and 1994, the

year of his death, it is evident that the illusions he sees produce self-awareness

at each and every turn, a kind of realism that gives individual experience the

concreteness it needs in face of skeptical assaults like Krauss's on its viability.67

"People don't pay enough attention to what is there," he asserted in one inter­

view, "I don't know what happened to the pragmatic, empirical attitude of'pay­

ing attention to what is here and now; it's basic to science. It should be basic to

art toO."68 In reconciling the self with the abductive, Judd's specific objects are

things in places, percepts that verify concepts and not the other way around.

They engage us in a world of transition (and not one of context), structuring

being as a function of acting through the conjunctions and junctions of the

material and the intuitive. 69 This superabundance seems appropriate for his era,

one still celebrating the individualism of Newman and Jackson Pollock, their

assertions of what they believed, valued, and knew. Concerning the former, Judd

wrote: "The openness of Newman's work is concomitant with chance and one

person's knowledge; the work doesn't suggest a great scheme of knowledge; it

doesn't claim more than anyone can know; it doesn't imply a social order.

Newman is asserting his concerns and knowledge."> Judd's art offers public

facts as checks and balances to private speculations, which is how the practical

consequences of the experiences his art affords reach to ethics and politics:

"Allowing for everything human being subjective, this is absolutely objective."?'This is his soft-hearted truth.

The world Krauss shaped cannot be the one Judd thought he made. Their

shared empiricism diverged over the nature of knowledge: Krauss ended with a

weak sense of the empirical and wanted to understand life's order, while Judd's

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Donald Judd, Sadam Es Ma/olBush Es Pear,1991, poster for show at GaleriaThea­spacio, Madrid, 17 x 25 in. (43.2 x 63.5 cm)(artwork © Donald Judd Foundationllicensed byVAGA, NewYork, NY)

72. Rose, "The Politics of Art, Part II," 47.73. The term "institutional facts" and the firstthree examples are-in John R. Searle, TheConstruction of Sociol Reality (New York: FreePress, 1995), 1-2. Krauss cited Searle's unrelated"no-sense theory of proper names" in "In theName of Picasso," in Rosalind E. Krauss, TheOriginality of the Avant-Garde andOtherModernistMyths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 26.74. Searle, 8. Judd rejected the divisionism of phi­losophy into disciplines, but the distinctionbetween ontology and epistemology is helpful inclarifyingthis specific case.

enduringly strong empiricism allowed him to experience life's uncertainty. Giventhe stakes involved in Krauss's arguments for our external determination, it is

small wonder that Judd steadfastly rebutted the slur of illusionism: as Rose sawlong ago, "Judd's rejection of illusionism is rooted in the pragmatic tenet that

truth to facts is an ethical value."72 The vector of Krauss's and Judd's construc­

tionist aesthetics-from art to self to world-helps explain much of the passionbehind the 1960s art polemics, which linger with us today as one of the failuresof 1968.When works of art carry both reality and truth, aesthetics and critique,viewer beware.

Illusionism versus illusion is a debate over life in that the question boresinto the relationship between objective facts and social facts, or what can be con­sidered subjective truth by human consent-that is, institutional facts such asmoney, marriage, government, art, and so forth.v Since much of our approach to

the world depends on these judgments, it is important to understand howKrauss and Judd made them, clarifying the nature of their break. Objective andsubjective have a number of implications, two of which are pertinent to this dis­cussion, an ontological meaning and an epistemic one. 74 The debate itself, in itsvery structure, points out that Krauss holds a subjective ontology, while Judd's isobjective, since the dispute arises precisely over whether it is the comprehensionof matter or its brute facts-illusionism or illusion-that should be emphasized.In epistemic terms, Krauss and Judd switch positions; she has an objective epis-

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75. Judd, quoted in "Is Easel Painting Dead?" 32.76. Donald Judd, "Lee Bontecou" (1963), inComplete Writings /959-1975,65.77. Compare to James, "Does 'Consciousness'Exist?" 36-37, and Richard Shiff, "Breath ofModernism (Metonymic Drift)," in In Visible Touch:Modernism and Masculinity, ed. Terry Smith(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997),185.78. Searle, 6.

temology while his is subjective. In his art, depending on her theoretical model,

she variously found evidence for either the Self or self, proof of the body, sculp­

ture's structural parameters, and the psyche's hole. Judd instead found his art's

nonmaterial aspects largely ineffable: "Your belief in [art] and its qualities are ina way two different things." 75While Krauss thought art a vehicle for information

that came disguised as appearance, Judd believed that life's facts are fused to feel­

ings, even as his objects adhered to a physicalist rhetoric.It now makes sense that this debate has thrived since 1966, for, as both

Krauss and Judd surely recognized, our conceptions help make social reality by

partly constructing those facts or aspects of existence that stand as the productsof the process of trying to form a consensus. Consequently, the way in which

people comprehend raw perceptions of art and of all things creates the social

dimensions of self and world. Krauss tried to shape ours one way,Judd another.Her antirealist topography of modernism, antimodernism, and post- figures self

and world as a product of each and every conditional context, where values aredefined in terms of coherences that are forever fleeting. His realist commitment

was instead to the belief that the best work is "experienced as an object," a surematerial ground for culture.:" Judd's art shows how the self and world corre­

spond and cohere, experience breathing each alive.'? To put these issues in differ­ent terms, since we build our metaphysics from physics, foundations matter."

David Raskin is associate professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the Schooi of the Art Institute ofChicago. He will spend 2006-07 as an NEH Fellow completing a manuscript tentatively entitled CitizenJudd: Donald Judd'sArt, Principles, and Activism. draskin@artic.edu.

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