The Pragmatic Minimalist: Donald Judd's Art, Principles, and Activism

FAIN: FB-52271-06

David Raskin
School of Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL 60603-6105)

The American minimal artist Donald Judd (1928-1994) was committed to the pragmatic philosophies of William James and Ralph Barton Perry, who subordinated subjective speculation about reality to empirical verification. In explicating Judd’s engagement with these ideas, I show how Judd demonstrated his individualism with machine-made art, why he found spiritual values in raw metal, plywood, and plexiglass, why he refused to distinguish between thinking and feeling while asserting that science delimited the extent of knowledge, why he claimed that his art provided intuitions of morality but not a specific set of moral tenets, and lastly, how he worked for progressive political causes that were neither leftist nor rightist but anarchist.