Donald Judd Quotations

I recognize very much in Hopper that it does look like the United States; it looks like the 30's and my first impressions of everything, all of which I have to deal with and which gets mixed up in my work and probably gets mixed up in everybody else's work too.

Usually when someone says a thing is too simple, they're saying that certain familiar things aren't there, and they're seeing a couple maybe that are left, which they count as a couple, that's all.

Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved away.

I don't think geometric art is... I don't like to call it that. I don't think it's any more pure than pop art or anything else. It doesn't have anything to do with purity.

I haven't sufficient interest in objects or anything I can see around me to do what Oldenburg does.

After all, the work isn't the point; the piece is.

Tolstoy may not be showing that much of Russia at that time even. It's hard to tell. You tend to associate the quality of the period with what's lasted - what's still good. And that quality becomes the whole period.

But I think you have to - whatever the environment looks like, it does enter into people's art work one way or another; it's very remote or it isn't. It's remote in my work but it has to have a certain degree of ordinariness.

I pay a lot of attention to how things are done and the whole activity of building something is interesting.

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.

Well, its very exasperating when you can't get it right.

Well, in any art there are a lot of technical things that you can get to like.

Building is just skilled labor, I suppose. It's a lot of work. I don't mind other people building them, but the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot.

I think some of the things I deal with Hopper probably has dealt with also, since it's somewhat the same environment and I have pretty strong reactions to what this country looks like. It looks pretty dull and spare, and you like this and dislike it and it's very complicated.

I think most of the art now is involved with a denial of any kind of absolute morality, or general morality.

Well, I don't think anyone now would say that they're painting the state of the culture of America. I think that's too grand and pompous a thing for anybody to claim.

And that Newman wasn't, and yet to me Pollock is just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman.

I think most of the best new work is intended to have much more impact at once.

There's probably more in the American tradition than people give the place credit for.

They certainly aren't connected with the old geometric art. My work isn't geometric in that sense.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

The attitude and capacity of the factory, the old metal table and the new ideas of the wooden furniture quickly and naturally suggested the possibility of metal furniture.

You're only dealing with whatever you know, which is a very small part of it and later on it'll look like it has something to do with the period. Obviously, the artists have something to do with one another. They tend to set up certain common qualities among themselves.

And then we moved to New Jersey and I went to the Art Students League.

Well, there's a morality in that you want your work to be good, I suppose.

Well, I think there are artists who are more or less contemporary with Hopper who are more relevant.

Pollock looks unusual and radical even now.

If a chair or a building is not functional … it is ridiculous.

The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.

Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be.

In the summer there are twelve cottonwoods around the pool, which in the winter become an elevated thicket. There is also a courtyard with a small garden of plants that stay green all year. The winter is bleak. This place is primarily for the installation of art, necessarily for whatever architecture of my own that can be included in an existing situation, for work, and altogether for my idea of living.

In terms of existing, everything is equal.

Color, to continue had to occur in space.

If someone says it's art, it's art.

It takes a great deal of time and thought to install work carefully. This should not always be thrown away. Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved again. Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinum iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place.

You’re getting rid of the things that people used to think were essential to art. But that reduction is only incidental. I object to the whole reduction idea…if my work is reductionist it’s because it doesn’t have the elements that people thought should be there. But it has other elements I like.

The art and architecture of the past that we know is that which remains. The best is that which remains where it was painted, placed or built. Most of the art of the past that could be moved was taken by conquerors. Almost all recent art is conquered as soon as it's made, since it's first shown for sale and once sold is exhibited as foreign in the alien museums. The public has no idea of art other than that it is something portable that can be bought. There is no constructive effort; there is no cooperative effort. This situation is primitive in relation to a few earlier and better times.

Art and architecture -- all the arts -- do not have to exist in isolation,

Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.

It isn't necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful.

Design has to work. Art does not.

Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface,

Stuart Davis has more to do with what the United States is like than Hopper.