First auction houses supersede galleries, then they move in on museums? Christie's has even provided an Acoustiguide.
Christie's has indeed behaved like a museum -- or at least in a way more museums should act. Basically, it has put art before architecture in an uncluttered display that makes the work optimally visible. The presentation is undoubtedly a fantastic sales tool, but it is also a temporary gift to the city, one that every museum professional should see.
Judd went to Marfa because he found the conditions under which New York museums displayed contemporary art to be deplorable. His point remains a good one: Art cannot be fully understood if it is not fully experienced. And if not fully experienced, it cannot meet one of its chief responsibilities: to give subsequent gener-ations of artists something to build on. Looking at the Christie's show, New York can finally see what Judd meant. It makes his case with his art, on his home turf, in the city that nurtured his genius.
Artists' museums -- the Rodin Museum in Paris, for example -- are rarely complete or packed with masterpieces. Yet their exclusive focus provides an organic, undiluted sense of an artist's basic operating principles, and that is what happens at Christie's.
The quantities of natural light and space here, as in Judd's Marfa displays, bring into sharp focus the way he combined the opposing modernist forces of Matisse and Duchamp -- art and anti-art, full-on retinal seduction and the cerebral provocation of the ready-made. Light makes his colors sing and also brings out the differences in his basic ready-made materials: metal, Plexiglas and plywood. Compare the amber color of an anodized aluminum wall stack, for example, with the glowing Plexiglas that surprises you at the bottom of a large floor box.
And like all artist's museums, this exhibition includes some unexpected quirks. One is a 1993 plain plywood wall piece, based on a 1961 red relief with a found-object brass circle at its center; here the circle is simply a hole exposing more plywood.
This piece almost makes a kind of joke of Judd's continued emphasis on a work's structural honesty, a concept he was continually tweaking. In 1988, he remade one of his first free-standing pieces -- an upright red right angle made of two slabs of wood with a found piece of right-angle pipe connecting their center points. The original was painted red, the second is stained red, allowing the (considerably fancier) grain to show. Judd also "stained" plywood with transparent colored Plexiglass, as in a beautiful late wall stack of small boxes that is on view in the lobby at Christie's. The interior back plane of each box is a different color.
In some ways, this show may be more satisfying than visiting Marfa. Here, the art is unencumbered by all the Juddian trappings: the real estate, the collections, the lifestyle and the sense of the artist as proud possessor and reigning deity. It demonstrates how unfancy and basic a space can be and yet make art look really, really good.
RSS