Attrac­tors in Thought

Plane 1

On a shelf of Don­ald Judd’s library at La Mansana de Chi­nati1 is a book by art his­to­ri­an George Kubler, The Shape of Time, Remarks on the His­to­ry of Things.2 A thin vol­ume, this work devel­ops an alter­na­tive frame­work for think­ing about and expe­ri­enc­ing the his­to­ry of art. Counter to the prac­tice of posi­tion­ing art with­in the time and cul­ture of the artists’ lives in search of mean­ing, Kubler advances the idea of sys­tem­at­ic obser­va­tion of the thing itself, not­ing inven­tion, repli­ca­tion and dis­con­tin­u­ance rel­a­tive to all things that are made, from tools to fash­ion. It’s a dis­as­sem­bly of cen­turies-old assump­tions of how to regard a work of art. Kubler’s the­sis is a rejec­tion of art his­to­ry based on bio­log­i­cal, bio­graph­i­cal and lit­er­ary method­olo­gies. Pub­lished in 1962, the work is also a poignant reminder of the unpre­dictabil­i­ty of a future the read­er exists with­in now – the glob­al­ized art­world mar­ket, vir­tu­al real­i­ty and the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of every­thing ever invent­ed into a con­sumer prod­uct or experience.

Kubler presents his remarks as a new men­tal mod­el for encoun­ter­ing arti­facts with new terms describ­ing art­works that address ​“mor­pho­log­i­cal prob­lems of dura­tion in series and sequence.”3 The crux of his argu­ment lies in the expli­ca­tion of linked solu­tions over time and their appar­ent form-class. Appro­pri­at­ing con­cepts from math­e­mat­ics, anthro­pol­o­gy, lin­guis­tics and oth­er sci­ences, Kubler out­lines the nature of the emer­gence of for­mal sequences, their devel­op­ment and degra­da­tion – ​“a his­tor­i­cal net­work of grad­u­al­ly altered rep­e­ti­tions of the same trait.”4

The authors of this essay, while work­ing togeth­er on an exhi­bi­tion of Judd’s archi­tec­ture, encounter Kubler’s writ­ings and his term ​“Prime Object”; the term strikes the authors with the clear, res­o­nant ring of the bell of recog­ni­tion, a remark­able cor­re­spon­dence to Judd’s work in archi­tec­ture in the 1980’s- 1990’s. In Kubler’s words:

“…Prime Objects and Repli­ca­tions denote prin­ci­pal inven­tions and the entire sys­tem of repli­cas, repro­duc­tions, copies, reduc­tions, trans­fers, and deriva­tions, float­ing in the wake of an impor­tant work of art… Prime objects resem­ble the prime num­bers of math­e­mat­ics because no con­clu­sive rule is known to gov­ern the appear­ance of either… The two phe­nom­e­na now escape reg­u­la­tion. Prime num­bers have no divi­sors oth­er than them­selves and uni­ty; prime objects like­wise resist decom­po­si­tion in being orig­i­nal enti­ties. Their char­ac­ter as primes is not explained by their antecedents, and their order in his­to­ry is enig­mat­ic.”5

Kubler cites works of art as exam­ples of ​“prime objects”, and also clas­si­fies a large por­tion of his­toric exam­ples of ​“prime objects” as build­ings. He acknowl­edges the exis­tence of archi­tec­tur­al typol­o­gy, in his term, form-class­es. Judd like­ly encoun­tered Kubler’s writ­ings while a stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy at Colum­bia University.

Judd went on to phys­i­cal­ly cre­ate a new spa­tial art. In the spir­it of Kubler he pro­posed an alter­na­tive under­stand­ing of the art object, at dif­fer­ent scales, includ­ing land­scape and archi­tec­ture. Judd’s Spe­cif­ic Objects essay from 1964, and oth­er writ­ings that com­ment on prob­lems of art his­to­ry, style labels and crit­i­cism, seem to take posi­tions rea­son­ably attrib­ut­able to Kubler as lever­age for his own body of writ­ings and con­struct­ed works.6

Plane 2

We use Kubler’s frame­work for ​“Prime Objects and Repli­ca­tions” to con­sid­er the most com­plete work of archi­tec­ture by Don­ald Judd, the Peter Mer­ian Haus office build­ing in Basel, Switzer­land (for­mer­ly known, while Judd worked on it, as the ​“Bahn­hof Ost”).7

How this urban inter­ven­tion came to be is not so inter­est­ing as its exis­tence among less­er con­tem­po­rary works. The con­fig­u­ra­tional and for­mal aspects of this struc­ture demon­strate the breadth of the artist’s think­ing con­cern­ing hab­it­able space, urban con­di­tions and the sen­sa­tion of sur­face effects. The build­ing has both the appear­ance of a mono­lith and an assem­blage of dis­creet vol­umes. Like many of Judd’s works of art, there is present ​“dis­par­i­ty”8 with­in uni­ty. The sol­id and void of the mass­ing of the struc­ture gives the expres­sion of a closed series, with­in an over­all object that may be one of a devel­op­ment of fur­ther objects in an open sequence. The pre­dom­i­nant exten­sion of the build­ing is hor­i­zon­tal, but it’s also com­prised of sev­er­al ver­ti­cal­ly-ori­ent­ed spaces within.

Peter Mer­ian Haus is of a type, the mul­ti-ten­ant office cen­ter, but breaks with this type rad­i­cal­ly. First, it’s not pos­si­ble for a ten­ant to occu­py a floor ful­ly across the length of the build­ing. There are six ser­vice cores with sep­a­rate entrances, com­mon facil­i­ties and court­yard-like spaces that join some­what like a row­house. Sec­ond, the pub­lic can walk or ride a bicy­cle through the entire length of the build­ing over­look­ing the depressed rail yard and con­nect­ing to exist­ing streets. This hor­i­zon­tal space also con­nects to each entrance court to the six cores. Third, there are at each sixth part an inter­nal light court that pen­e­trates the floor plates under large sky­light-roofs. Fourth, there is no hier­ar­chy of forms based on the cen­ter, or front or back of the struc­ture; every­one can enter or leave the build­ing accord­ing to their needs at sev­er­al points.

All the exte­ri­or ver­ti­cal sur­faces are glazed with a sub­tly rip­pled blue-green tint­ed pan­el of vary­ing trans­paren­cy, depend­ing on its loca­tion, and off­set 5 cm out­board of the enclos­ing walls. The sys­tem is uni­form­ly mod­u­lar, but the effects are dynam­ic, atmos­pher­ic, chang­ing in real experience. 

Is Peter Mer­ian Haus a Prime Object as George Kubler might have seen it? It has cer­tain attrib­ut­es and aspects that con­vince, but con­tem­po­rary archi­tec­ture in an urban con­text is a com­pli­cat­ed propo­si­tion, with a mul­ti­plic­i­ty of func­tion­al and envi­ron­men­tal pres­sures that affect our men­tal con­cept of the work and expe­ri­ence of the place it has estab­lished in Basel.

The authors believe that as he devel­oped as an archi­tect Judd evolved in his think­ing of the object per se and its sur­round­ings. This is con­sis­tent with the evo­lu­tion of his cri­tiques of con­tem­po­rary, con­ven­tion­al rela­tions in space of art objects and envi­ron­ments. Judd avoid­ed the embell­ish­ment of tra­di­tion­al con­struc­tion tech­niques and avoid­ed the use of cut­ting-edge or exper­i­men­tal mate­ri­als most view­ers would have not seen. At Peter Mar­i­an Haus Judd’s choice and jux­ta­po­si­tion of famil­iar con­tem­po­rary mate­ri­als with­in a three-dimen­sion­al grid pre­sent­ed unique com­bi­na­tions that are dif­fi­cult to place in time.

Plane 3

The old­est sur­viv­ing craft­ed objects are flaked and pol­ished stones. There exist lacu­nae of hun­dreds of cen­turies in the known record of human-made objects. Col­lec­tions of stone tools evi­dence incre­men­tal refine­ments and adap­ta­tions over mil­len­nia. New sci­ences such as paleo-geol­o­gy, cli­ma­tol­ogy and genet­ics are reveal­ing rapid and ever-increas­ing knowl­edge of the con­text of human exis­tence and evo­lu­tion hard­ly imag­in­able by Kubler writ­ing in 1961. Kubler real­ized that the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion as a process of peri­ods of peak human achieve­ment and progress had run its course. At the time of pub­li­ca­tion of ​“The Shape of Time”, works of Abstract Expres­sion­ism were begin­ning to show signs of sat­u­ra­tion and exhaus­tion. Artists of Judd’s gen­er­a­tion were either explor­ing oth­er ways of pro­duc­ing imag­i­nary space and signs, or mak­ing real objects of inten­tion­al mate­r­i­al and actu­al space.

The evi­dence of time – the light of stars, organ­ic life and death, day and night – is Form, Form in move­ment, Form in light, Form in shad­ow. Kubler presents the visu­al clas­si­fi­ca­tion of made things, at dif­fer­ent scales, mark­ing time, as a men­tal con­cept. The men­tal con­cept of still Forms and Objects as marks of time over a much greater span of record­ed knowl­edge is of course, the sub­ject of pale­on­tol­ogy, arche­ol­o­gy and cosmology. 

Kubler points out that we have a reli­able record of the evo­lu­tion of objects and prod­ucts of human inven­tion expand­ing far beyond the two hun­dred year span of the nar­ra­tive of west­ern art his­to­ry, and that all objects made by humans are first and fore­most works of craft; in his view good artists under­stand this con­tin­u­um and the best art demon­strates these facts. The imposed lay­er­ing of mean­ing by recent art his­to­ri­ans is unnec­es­sary and only serves to dis­tract from the objects them­selves. The span of phys­i­cal evi­dence of human craft, for exam­ple, is on the order of 200 times the length of the span of the past 10,000 years, the span of civilizations. 

Kubler’s cri­tique of the bio­graph­i­cal approach to art his­to­ry, which tends to val­i­date con­cepts of genius and prophe­cy, con­trar­i­ly acknowl­edges the fact that some artists are suc­cess­ful and some not, regard­less of their tal­ent. By using the anal­o­gy of a rail­road sys­tem, Kubler asks us to regard the prod­ucts of an artist’s life, not so much sig­ni­fiers of cre­ative dom­i­nance, but as the result of a for­tu­itous and con­tin­gent entrance into the ​“track sys­tem” of the art­world.9

Don­ald Judd had what Kubler would call a for­tu­itous entrance in time and place in New York. He was not the only one, but ​“tem­pera­ment, tal­ent and posi­tion” con­verged to his remark­able advan­tage. Around 1965, Judd had estab­lished ​“the con­cate­na­tion that will grow”10 in the fab­ri­ca­tion of series and sequences of ​“box­es”, ​“stacks” and ​“pro­gres­sions.” These works coex­ist­ed dis­tinc­tive­ly, and still do, with­in the incred­i­ble eco­nom­ic plu­ral­ism, glob­al­iza­tion and den­si­fi­ca­tion of the art­world since that time.

To clar­i­fy the dis­tinc­tion between the bio­graph­i­cal and the mor­pho­log­i­cal approach to art his­to­ry, Kubler states his goal of visu­al­iz­ing time. The emer­gence and recur­rence of made things, their clas­si­fi­ca­tion, their devel­op­ment and their end, is his field of encounter. Indi­vid­ual lives, spe­cif­ic dates and human events can nev­er be com­plete­ly doc­u­ment­ed or explained, only the things that remain.

In what seems, at first read­ing, a dis­cur­sive spec­u­la­tion on the nature of time, we observe Kubler’s repo­si­tion­ing of his the­sis from the per­spec­tive of com­mon sen­so­ry expe­ri­ence. Essen­tial­ly, time seems to be noth­ing. We claim its exis­tence only through signs. The actu­al­i­ty of time is not gras­pable.11 Soci­ety con­structs instru­ments mea­sur­ing time, but time has no exis­tence in and of itself, con­scious­ly, onto­log­i­cal­ly. Judd con­scious­ly arranged for­mal sequences that avoid­ed con­tent such as a nar­ra­tive in time. Kubler set the frame­work for Judd’s exper­i­ment with the thing that could be a work of art and architecture.

Plane 4

In his ear­ly thir­ties, Don­ald Judd was search­ing for a way to make art that was not a copy or deriv­a­tive of the best art of his time. Whether or not it can be said he was aware of sat­u­ra­tion or sta­sis in the dom­i­nance of the paint­ings of Abstract Expres­sion­ism and to a less­er extent sculp­ture, Judd want­ed to make things that did not exist before. 

As both an art crit­ic and an artist, observ­ing his con­tem­po­raries and by his own exper­i­men­ta­tion, tri­al and error, Judd began to under­stand a paint­ing of his time as a three-dimen­sion­al object, weak but an object nonethe­less. A new kind of paint­ing could have a vis­i­ble spa­tial struc­ture with­in itself, not just the front sur­face, and a rela­tion­ship to oth­er sur­faces around it in real space, not illu­sion­is­tic space.

Judd was dis­sat­is­fied with the many con­di­tions of mak­ing art and the busi­ness of art and art crit­i­cism. He could not help but be ana­lyt­i­cal and dubi­ous of the a pri­ori assump­tions in the arc of West­ern cul­ture and art as they were pre­dom­i­nant­ly expressed. Judd knew that Pol­lock, New­man, and Rothko and oth­ers had made break­throughs, but, in addi­tion, they were mis­in­ter­pret­ed by the muse­ums and the crit­ics. Judd had plen­ty of expe­ri­ence look­ing at mod­ern and con­tem­po­rary art, being a review­er for art jour­nals for sev­er­al years.

His crit­i­cal eye brought him to respect­ful­ly con­sid­er works which evi­denced new qual­i­ties, some but not all using a new tech­nique. Judd dis­cov­ered that Form and sen­sa­tion could be unprece­dent­ed as a uni­ty, strong­ly present in some scale with the body, but not con­clu­sive or com­plete, rather tran­si­tion­al and open-end­ed as a series of objects.

Judd wrote that in the ear­ly process of mak­ing paint­ing more like three-dimen­sion­al works he had a rev­e­la­tion. He placed some of the works on the floor, and they seemed fine that way. He real­ized that walls, floors and ceil­ings were not mere back­grounds, but engaged envi­ron­ments.12

Two rein­ven­tions inher­ent in Judd’s works of art are worth describ­ing in rela­tion to Kubler’s def­i­n­i­tion of made things as poten­tial­ly Prime Objects and their Repli­ca­tions. One, Judd cre­at­ed both ​“closed series and open sequences” with­in the body of the type (form-class). The one hun­dred alu­minum works at Mar­fa, Texas are an exam­ple of this. Two, Judd devel­oped sev­er­al types of three-dimen­sion­al objects that do not appear to show signs of evo­lu­tion­ary change or refine­ment. None of the series Judd pro­duced are more inter­est­ing than the pre­vi­ous iter­a­tions or the sub­se­quent ones, thus deny­ing the read­ing of them as devel­op­ments in time at all.

Plane 5

The Shape of Time did not rev­o­lu­tion­ize the writ­ing of art his­to­ry. But Kubler wrote oth­er high­ly-regard­ed works on spe­cif­ic works of archi­tec­ture that are con­sis­tent with the frame­work he estab­lished in the sub­ject text, and lec­tured into the 1980’s at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty.13 One of his for­mer stu­dents, David Sum­mers, wrote his own mag­nus opus of art his­to­ry, Real Spaces: World Art His­to­ry and the Rise of West­ern Mod­ernism, pub­lished in 2003.14 The work is an elab­o­rate, kalei­do­scop­ic vol­ume of almost 700 pages lay­ing out his revi­sion­ist the­o­ry. A recent schol­ar­ly review called it ​“one of the most ambi­tious and com­pelling attempts to devel­op a new ana­lyt­ic frame­work for art-his­tor­i­cal analy­sis across geo­graph­ic and tem­po­ral bound­aries.”15 We can detect the influ­ence of Kubler in this more recent work by Sum­mers, in the empha­sis of key con­cepts, includ­ing the fun­da­men­tal impor­tance of the act of the mak­ing of things (fac­ture) and the shift nec­es­sary in our point of view from mere visu­al analy­sis to spa­tial analy­sis (his­tor­i­cal prac­tices). Where Kubler is pos­ing the object as evi­dence of real time, Sum­mer is expand­ing the frame­work to regard the object in real space.

We are tak­ing the lib­er­ty to expand the field of cor­re­spon­dences between Kubler’s and Judd’s thought beyond their life­times. The dis­course on the crit­i­cal read­ing of art and its his­to­ry, includ­ing archi­tec­ture his­to­ry, con­tin­ues, and the out­stand­ing works, when­ev­er their time of emer­gence, appear to be always new. We are also step­ping out of the trap of bio­graph­i­cal chronol­o­gy of cause and effect, influ­encer and the con­tem­po­rary influ­enced, by bridg­ing anoth­er set of cor­re­spon­dences with the help of Sum­mers. The fil­a­ments of thought and action con­nect­ing Kubler, Judd and Sum­mers are not bound by time since they con­cern ever-present exis­ten­tial ques­tions. The binders of these cor­re­spon­dences is archi­tec­tur­al space expressed essentially.

The Shape of Time is a philo­soph­i­cal work. Kubler is pre­sent­ing prob­lems that pose the ques­tion of what is real and what is illu­sion­ary. The lan­guage he uses to build his argu­ment affects our per­cep­tions. His con­cern is with the his­tor­i­cal and per­va­sive use of spe­cif­ic anal­o­gous frame­works in the writ­ing of art his­to­ry. Kubler’s alter­na­tive per­spec­tive extracts con­cepts from con­tem­po­rary sci­ence and phi­los­o­phy. He acknowl­edges that real­i­ty is ever-unfold­ing in the heuris­tics of the mak­ing of things. Kubler ends his essay at the cusp in his time of events of incred­i­ble diver­si­ty and tech­ni­cal com­plex­i­ty. The anal­o­gous frame­works that he employs ask the read­er to recon­sid­er what rela­tion to cur­rent knowl­edge have things been and are things being made. The Shape of Time is a primer for tak­ing the long, wide view of what endures phys­i­cal­ly and con­cep­tu­al­ly, as expressed in the exis­tence and qual­i­ty of objects, includ­ing buildings.

David Sum­mers con­se­quent work Real Spaces is explic­it in its ref­er­ences to con­tem­po­rary philoso­phers and presents a vast array of case stud­ies from all eras and diverse cul­tures. The rel­e­vant pur­pose of his project is to con­sid­er world art as man­i­fes­ta­tions of the reifi­ca­tion of mate­ri­als and space. His the­sis presents the his­tor­i­cal diver­gence of our per­cep­tu­al aware­ness of space per se as either real or vir­tu­al. Sum­mers empha­sizes the impor­tance of the body in the expe­ri­ence of real space and its engen­der­ing of the dis­cov­ery and appli­ca­tion of pla­nari­ty. Judd’s works are pre­dom­i­nant­ly planar.

Plane 6

Don­ald Judd used cylin­ders in sev­er­al works of art and archi­tec­ture in a vari­ety of ways. Some of the ear­ly floor and wall-mount­ed art series incor­po­rat­ed seg­ments of cylin­dri­cal space both as pro­trud­ing and neg­a­tive forms.16 In every case, the cylin­der or cylin­dri­cal seg­ment is attached to a pla­nar sur­face. One of the ear­ly out­door works of art Judd had fab­ri­cat­ed in New Canaan, Con­necti­cut, is a thick ring of con­crete where the top sur­face is lev­el and the curved sur­faces of the low cylin­dri­cal shape vary accord­ing to the sloped ground. The cylin­dri­cal vol­ume of space is dif­fi­cult to men­tal­ly mea­sure rel­a­tive to oth­er shapes of space because the cen­tral gen­er­a­tor of curved form is in space and not expressed on the surface.

The sur­face-gen­er­at­ed plane of var­i­ous pro­por­tions is Judd’s pri­ma­ry form-class through­out his works. Walls, pan­els, floors, plat­forms and shelves of rec­tan­gu­lar shape and depth give order to the per­cep­tion and expe­ri­ence of a three-dimen­sion­al vol­ume. He avoid­ed, if pos­si­ble, the con­struc­tion of cubi­cal space because of its impli­ca­tions of per­fec­tion and stasis. 

Judd pro­posed the con­struc­tion of objects that con­tained space one could observe freely and direct­ly. The space could be imag­ined as acces­si­ble to a small­er ver­sion of one­self or actu­al­ly walked through. What is dis­tinc­tive in Judd’s work is that any nar­ra­tive, feel­ing, mean­ing or sign one might find while being in the space is in one’s head, and there is only bare mate­r­i­al and form con­fig­ured in scale to respect the pres­ence of a spa­tial con­cept with­in and around the object.

The twelve anodized alu­minum floor works, first installed in 1989 in Ger­many, are a set of exam­ples of Judd’s hol­low­ing out of time by an uncom­pli­cat­ed con­tain­ment of space. Though the con­struc­tion of the works is clear, nev­er hid­den, the effects are com­plex. Large alu­minum sheets are assem­bled as prisms only open at the top, with ele­ments in each prism of the same mate­r­i­al, some in dif­fer­ent anodized col­ors, or sheets of col­ored Plex­i­glas inter­ven­ing in var­i­ous ways with­in the over­all volume. 

The work also pro­pos­es Thin­ness. The con­tain­er and the divid­ing ele­ments seem to be as thin as pos­si­ble. The qual­i­ties that result – light­ness, sharp­ness and del­i­ca­cy all con­trast with the prisms’ scale. Thin­ness allows for the use of isotrop­ic mate­ri­als and qui­et junc­tures. Thin­ness is present in many of Judd’s works, notably the impos­si­bly thin ensem­ble of con­crete build­ings in Mar­fa. All Judd’s works are propo­si­tions in archi­tec­ture. Real­ized as art and build­ings in real spaces, they are con­tin­gent, hand-craft­ed, Prime Objects among all things beautifully-made.