Judd: Before and After

In early March 2020 I went to previews of MoMA’s major retrospective exhibit of Donald Judd’s works. The rigid severity of the sculpture pieces left me cold — there was room after room of soulless Minimalist objects. 

They were just boxes built from aluminum sheeting, and looked like ventilation ducts from a construction site. 

Judd had worked very hard to eliminate any touch of humanity from his industrial materials. 

So I hurried through the harsh geometric wasteland. This was not art that could nourish anyone.

Days later, the Covid virus hit New York City, shutting museums and everything else. 

The next few months were very hard, a long gray fog punctuated only by ambulance sirens. 

I was one of the few people who ventured to my offices in midtown Manhattan during those months, and the streets were dreary and abandoned. The whole city was a mausoleum.

Months passed. 

Finally, the pandemic ebbed and in November MoMA was the first museum to reopen. Glad to have anywhere to go after months of confinement, I went back to that same Judd exhibit. And yet everything was utterly changed. 

I took the escalators up to the top floor to walk in Judd's strange indoor garden. 

Judd’s creations are not beautiful, or functional, or even sculpture — they are “power objects” that when arrayed together activate an invisible psychic field. 

I walked, entranced, through the various rooms of colorful industrial jewelry. 

A handful of other visitors were there, all of us masked, and exhilarated, as if we were guests on an alien spacecraft. 

The metal boxes, ugly as they were, in their garish primary colors brought me a deep sense of comfort. 

Very carefully, so that no one else noticed, I danced softly and subtly around the magnetic items in each room. On my headphones I played electronic trance music for a soundtrack.

Judd’s almost inhuman purity was welcome to me now, as though his crisp clean objects were guaranteed to survive the virus and the mortality of our frail species.

After the misery of the virus lockdown, his grotesque constructions gave me genuine solace. 

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All artworks shown are copyrighted by the estate of Donald Judd.