If you’re going to build a farmhouse, you don’t build it upside down just because you think it’ll look interesting. That’s pretty perverse. And cities to him were a negation of thought. Judging work that way was as straightforward as, “Well, you can’t grow potatoes in the ocean, and that’s just a fact.” I ran into Anselm Kiefer last week, and he said, “You know, your dad didn’t like me.” I said, “It wasn’t personal!” Kiefer and I had a good time because he understood. As a result, the artist left behind more than 1,000 unrealized sculptures when he died in 1996.From 1975, Flavin installed permanent works in Europe and the United States, including "Untitled. That is why his furniture is the way it is and the buildings are the way they are. Nevertheless, the town’s current iteration—what 48-year-old son Flavin refers to as a “SoHo-ization”—is an unlikely art-world capital far from the “cow-town” he found there as a child in the 1970s. Do any specific books from the library come to mind?JUDD: My wife, a curator, a dada expert, [Michèle Judd, now a psychoanalyst] gave me Richard Huelsenbeck’s LaCAVA: Your father never stopped studying. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella. Until the point of sale, his sculptures existed as drawings or exhibition copies. It was all very simple and small.” When the house became too tiny to contain Judd’s art, several nearby buildings were rented and eventually purchased. He was spending nine months out of the year living out of a suitcase. If you can’t be around ideas directly, you can at least—LaCAVA: Libraries are the answer; all the ideas without the pain of people. It’s great if they’re making something new by thinking, but usually that’s not the case. If you go to a gallery in Chelsea now, the artist could be from anywhere; the gallery could be from anywhere. We get to do books. It shows how you all were always on the same level.JUDD: I don’t. The plants are going to do what they do.
So aren’t you taking advantage of that?” Samaras was one of the few people who actually thought about what Don was saying. After Don died, everything flipped upside down.JUDD: Then Don went to Leo. They think Don had this idea for all these buildings and went there to do it. Flavin's first one-person exhibition using only fluorescent light opened at the Green Gallery in 1964. Another misunderstanding is the relegation of Judd’s work to “minimalism,” a classification the artist very much denied. Two years later, his first European show opened at Rudolf Zwirner's gallery in Cologne, Germany. JUDD: Stories. But I have friends in Marfa who, to this day, say to me, “I liked Don because he talked to me like an adult.” And these were 10-year-old kids from the wrong side of the tracks. In memory of Urs Graf" at the Kunstmuseum Basel (conceived 1972, realized 1975);Flavin's first one-person exhibition using only fluorescent light opened at the In the late 1970s, he began a partnership with the His first solo exhibition in Latin America was held at In 1964, Flavin received an award from the William and Norma Copley Foundation, Chicago, with a recommendation from Each of the more than 750 light sculptures that Dan Flavin designed - usually in editions of three or five - were listed on index cards and filed away. That kept popping up in the essays.
And I think that’s pretty evident in radicalness and lack of radicalness. There is also, for instance, the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, which is gorgeous beyond belief. In a 1983 essay on abstract expressionism, for example, he writes about the “immediacy” of Jackson Pollock’s work: “No first-rate art after this is based upon the representation of immediate emotion. He wanted that kind of fact-based clarity that an astronomer or a physicist or a doctor would have. Exhibitions.
There were no plans. All first-rate art since is based upon its primary phenomena.” The same year, he writes a piece titled “A Long Discussion Not About Master-Pieces but Why There Are So Few of Them: Part I.” It discusses the decline of quality in new art: “There have been almost no first-rate artists in this time … Despite all that’s wrong in this society it’s the responsibility of the new artists to occur.”LaCAVA: Do you think your father was right? They’re ridiculous. Flavin also exchanged works with Minimalist colleagues like Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt. All Rights Reserved. Did you intentionally use that writing style for this book? JUDD: If you are making salsa, you don’t put ice cream in it, because you will water it down, and if you’re making ice cream, you don’t put salsa in it, because you will ruin the ice cream. I thought everybody was teaching themselves everything. They are all about themselves, and this becomes a moral issue.LaCAVA: Can you explain your father’s disapproval of “literary art,” a term he mentions in his writings. It’s an incredible list. It shouldn’t be that way. There was no delegation possible. JUDD: My cutoff is 1986. The gallery began representing the artist’s foundation in Europe last November and Flavin Judd is the artistic director of the Judd Foundation. The whole problem with the term LaCAVA: Your father seemed insistent on keeping the art and the activism clear and separate, as well. Essay by Michael Govan. That’s what he wanted for art. And he also notes a decline in the quality of modern architecture. FLAVIN JUDD: I suppose that Don and I share a distrust of language, so it’s better to be simple and clear. Going to a bookstore—everywhere we traveled, language barriers or not—was like Christmas.