Donald Judd Quotes

Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.

It isn't necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful.

Design has to work. Art does not.

If someone says it's art, it's art.

Art and architecture - all the arts - do not have to exist in isolation.

You’re getting rid of the things that people used to think were essential to art. But that reduction is only incidental. I object to the whole reduction idea…if my work is reductionist it’s because it doesn’t have the elements that people thought should be there. But it has other elements I like.

In terms of existing, everything is equal.

Color, to continue had to occur in space.

If a chair or a building is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous.

I pay a lot of attention to how things are done and the whole activity of building something is interesting.

Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.

Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved away.

The art and architecture of the past that we know is that which remains. The best is that which remains where it was painted, placed or built. Most of the art of the past that could be moved was taken by conquerors. Almost all recent art is conquered as soon as it's made, since it's first shown for sale and once sold is exhibited as foreign in the alien museums. The public has no idea of art other than that it is something portable that can be bought. There is no constructive effort; there is no cooperative effort. This situation is primitive in relation to a few earlier and better times.

It takes a great deal of time and thought to install work carefully. This should not always be thrown away. Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved again.

Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be.

I think most of the art now is involved with a denial of any kind of absolute morality, or general morality.

Well, in any art there are a lot of technical things that you can get to like.

The attitude and capacity of the factory, the old metal table and the new ideas of the wooden furniture quickly and naturally suggested the possibility of metal furniture.

Well, there's a morality in that you want your work to be good, I suppose.

In the summer there are twelve cottonwoods around the pool, which in the winter become an elevated thicket. There is also a courtyard with a small garden of plants that stay green all year. The winter is bleak. This place is primarily for the installation of art, necessarily for whatever architecture of my own that can be included in an existing situation, for work, and altogether for my idea of living.

Pollock looks unusual and radical even now.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.

And that Newman wasn't, and yet to me Pollock is just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman.

And then we moved to New Jersey and I went to the Art Students League.