Q&A with Richard Shiff on Judd's writings

This weekend Judd-ians are gathering in Marfa, Texas for a Chinati-hosted symposium about Donald Judd's writings. The speakers include Roberta Smith, David Rabinowitch, Ann Temkin and David Raskin. You can listen in to the symposium on Marfa Public Radio or wait for Chinati to publish a paperback version of the remarks in late 2008. The symposium will be moderated by today's Q&A guest, University of Texas professor Richard Shiff.

MAN: What about Donald Judd's writings remains substantially unexamined?

Richard Shiff: Some of the later things that never got published are probably the least known. They were available to of the symposium participants. They're interesting and some of them are pretty substantial. The later things are not review writing. Primarily they're thought pieces. They're very deliberate.

They're very different from the review writing that begins around 1959 or so. [Here's a link to the 1959-1975 writings at ~40% off.] The review writing is mostly short pieces, but they're very witty and they're very incisive. It's remarkable that he did so many so quickly, but he was serving a kind of journalistic function as a critic in the streets and he did a damn good job of it. Those things he had to do very fast. The latter writings he could publish when he felt like it.

Marianne Stockebrand and Donald Judd were working on putting them together when he died. So although those writings were collected, they still haven't been published because the rights belong to the Judd Foundation. It's up to them as to what they do with it. I've found a lot of them, but I'm an academic and I used inter-library loan to find them.

MAN: The reviews are better known, even well-known. Why did he write them? Was he staking out a position relative to other artists? Was he figuring out what he was interested in? Was he being communitarian?

RS: It's interesting: He's taking very perceptively about artists who are now very canonical. His writing about Frank Stella is damn good. When he's talking about early Stella, which he really liked, he's talking about it as he's being made.

I think he was learning on the job so to speak. I think he was figuring out what needed to be said about the artists who really appealed to him: Bontecou, Chamberlain, Oldenburg, Stella, Westermann, Flavin. George Ortman is another who people have sort of forgotten about these days. These were all artists whose work had features that spoke to him because they seemed to him to break out of traditional patterns of both painting and sculpture. He was gradually by writing about these works and writing about them over and over again -- because he'd do it once a year when they'd have a show -- he'd refine his own language his own sense of what was special about them, and yes, it was affecting his own artistic development. He was learning how to be a better critic and how to be a better artist at the same time.

Part two to come later...