Methodology - cont'd

Donald Judd

In the early 1960’s, Donald Judd quit painting. He recognized that “actual space
is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.”
His move to three-dimensions was an acknowledgement that the physical environment was an integral aspect of an artwork. Minimalist sculpture broke with the conventions of illusion and translated compositional concerns into three-dimensions. The work became a product of the exchange between the object, the viewer, and the environment.

Judd championed the work of a diverse range of contemporary artists. He endorsed the, “thing as a whole,” rather than “a composition of parts.” This stemmed from what he saw as the strength and clarity asserted by singular forms. Singular forms had the unity of character of which resulted from the combination of color, image, shape, and surface.

Judd’s oeuvres of rectilinear shapes in rows and in serial progression are legible systems that incorporate space as one of its materials – creating a play between positive and negative that coheres as a totality. Progression is often expressed in a Fibonacci system (i.e. sequence in which each number is the sum of the two previous two: 0,1,1,2,3,5,…)

Spatial concerns were foremost of Judd, but color and materials always remained central to his conception of art. He sustained a rigorous investigation of space and form. His work is tempered by a rich palette of industrial materials.[i]

Judd’s work has informed this project in terms of building form. I am compelled
by the abstract and contrasting quality of his simple rectangular objects placed
within a landscape, and the overall form of his fabricated sculpture. How multiple
parts are assembled into a whole. The interpretive center program spaces are distributed
along an axial ramped gallery. The spaces are a series of rectilinear formed concretewalls and slabs that enclose spaces bound together by a ramping gallery.