The Beating Pulse of Donald Judd

I always thought his work was intimidatingly austere, until I discovered the plenitude at its core.

- Leslie Jamison

Bringing my toddler to the Donald Judd retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art when it opened last winter forced me to recognize the ways Judd’s objects resemble playground equipment: the diagonal ladder of red-painted wood with its single purple rod, or the red-enameled iron tube that slyly evoked (at least to my toddler-adjacent eyes) an empty kiddie pool. When we visited shortly after the show opened in February, my daughter wanted to climb on all the objects— or up them, or through them, or over them. The objects. I had trained myself not to call them sculptures, because Judd himself hadn’t thought of them that way. And neither did my toddler! She wanted to crawl through the silver aluminum boxes lined with blue Plexiglas, to bang her tiny fists against a green-lacquered galvanized- iron slab. The one thing she didn’t want to do was stay in her stroller.

Eternally intimidated by the stark, imposing presence of Judd’s pieces, I was surprised to discover their fragility—that they are easily damaged, and have often been poorly protected. In an essay about Judd’s vexed relationship with museums that appears in the exhibition catalog, Ann Temkin, the show’s curator, writes:

Once his works entered the public realm, their flat tops and boxlike forms were often read as invitations to rest an elbow or set down a purse. Their rectilinear structures tempted children and adults alike, whether to squish their bodies between elements of a wall progression, climb inside a channel piece, or crouch beneath a single stack. Unbeknownst to most visitors, the surfaces of the materials they were touching—Plexiglas, aluminum, galvanized iron—were as fragile as parchment and often irreparable.