Q&A with Richard Shiff on Judd's writings, part two

Continuing from this morning...

MAN: For many years all of Judd's writings were out of print. Did that have an impact on his legacy or on opportunities for Judd to influence a generation of artists?

Richard Shiff: It's hard for me to judge that. Any good university library had Volume One because there were enough of them going around. Some good university libraries might not have Volume Two. [Here's a link to the 1959-1975 writings at ~40% off.]

I think that university people were very lazy about Volume One and tended not to actually read it. They would read the famous essays, especially 'Specific Objects,' the longer essays. They would read them often in excerpted form because bits and pieces of Judd ended up in all kinds of anthologies that are used by students. So I think people had a very fragmentary sense of them. I think only in the 1990s did the academic community get more serious about it and read the things in depth. That then cast the famous essays in a somewhat different light.

If you read everything you get a different sense of how Judd used words, and some of the words that seem inscrutable become almost obvious in terms of their meaning. I think he used words very accurately, but he had his way of using them. When he uses the word 'specific' he means specific in his sense as the opposite of 'general' as it is for most people. Judd applies it to art all the time. There are features of art he regarded as 'general' and that he regarded as as 'specific,' so it takes on a special meaning.

MAN: What about artists though? I mean, you can't walk through an artist's studio without seeing Smithson's writings, which have long been in print. But Judd... not so much.

RS: Smithson was, for whatever reason, in the academy a more fashionable figure. That filtered down to art students and art students would maybe take a class and the art historian would be talking more about Smithson and less about Judd - and even maybe negatively about Judd.

MAN: This is something that's been batted around on several art blogs of late: What artists today write or use writing the way Judd did?

RS: I think David Reed is a terrifically good writer and extremely thoughtful in the way that Judd was. David can take a period that he's lived through and capture it in a few paragraphs, like what the art world was doing in the 1970s. I don't think his style is like Judd's style. Judd's style is peculiar and I don't know that anyone else really wrote like that or writes like that.

The one predecessor Judd had was Barnett Newman. Newman thought he learned how to be an artist by writing. I don't know if Judd would go so far as to say that it was essential to his art career, but Newman thought it was essential to him as he developed. I think it's good for a certain kind of person. Mel Bochner used to write a lot - and he still writes I guess. He'd be a parallel case maybe, and he's one of the speakers here.