Untitled

“Three dimensions are real space. Thus, the problem of illusionism is over and done with. This means being liberated from one of most obvious relics of Europeans art against which, most objections can be made,” Donald Judd writes in 1965 in “Specific Objects”, the pioneering essay of minimal art. Illusionism, authorship, and the element of time—the characteristics of traditional European art—must be eliminated to realize so called “specific objects,” objects that are reduced to pure geometrical form and to the sheer visibility of their form, and that are merely self-referential. The small metal object on the wall, created by Judd in 1989, demonstrates these principles. In this view, knowledge of a precisely yet playfully modulated geometrical order is combined with the experience that the wandering eye continuously encounters shifting perspectives, distortions, and overlapping forms. Beholders begin to perceive their own looking as a constructive act and to experience the physical object in relation to their own position within the room. Experience of the object and self-perception prove to be two related phenomena.