Whose ‘Real’ is more ‘Real’?
‘Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture’; reads the unforgettable opening sentence of the minimalist artist Donald Judd’s Specific Objects text, published in 1965. In this text Donald Judd refers to the artist Lee Bontecou as being one of the leading proponents of this ‘new work’. Lee Bontecou’s volcanically gaping canvases that frame a darkly dangerous empty space, are pictures, for Donald Judd, that do not depict the space of a hole, but are the ‘actual’ space of a hole. Here the ‘whole’ work is a real ‘hole’; a ‘specific’ space continuous with, not disconnected to, the actual space within which Donald Judd, the viewer, stood to perceive it. For Donald Judd these were, ‘threateningly concrete holes to be among’ — ‘actual and specific and … experienced as an object’.
Given this threat of ‘concrete space’, it is of particular pertinence to consider here why Piet Mondrian resisted extending his Neo-plasticism into actual space — prior to minimalism — and what this says about the ‘actuality’ of intersubjective space in minimalism: its process, potential pitfalls and internal delineations. For the distinction between an Hegelian ‘real’ as pursued by Piet Mondrian and an oppositional ‘real’ as pursued by the minimalists, is an important one to analyse and address. It is a distinction not only made, for instance, by artists Frank Stella and Donald Judd at the time but also — in terms of Hans Hofmann’s Hegelianism — by the curator E.C. Goossen in his catalogue essay for the exhibition The Art of the Real: USA 1948-1968.
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