Furniture and Artwork as Paradoxical Counterparts in the Work of Donald Judd

Abstract

In 1986, Donald Judd recalled that when he was commissioned to design a coffee table in the late 1960s he modified a piece of his artwork to produce the table; this approach did not result in a successful object, by Judd’s account.1 Explaining that this coffee table had taught him a bitter lesson—that his furniture should not mimic his artwork—Judd excluded the table from the chronology he prepared for the 1993 catalog of his furniture. This anecdote helps to illuminate his struggle to draw a strict line between his art and his furniture. The story of Judd’s first piece of commissioned furniture evinces an agenda concerning the formal and structural resemblance between Judd’s artwork and functional objects that formed an undercurrent in his output throughout his life. In this paper, I explore the interrelationship between Judd’s furniture and art with a view especially toward the practical aspects—the fabrication processes, the predominant formal configurations, his marketing strategy, and his installation schemes—while keeping in mind Judd’s own ideas and the critical receptions of his furniture design. The connections between art and design in modernist art movements had a critical influence on Judd’s artwork and furniture. Judd’s factory-produced art and functional objects had many historical precedents and parallels: the experimental products of the Bauhaus, some innovations of the De Stijl members and the Russian Constructivists, Duchamp’s ready-mades, and Pop Art’s consumer culture-oriented works, as epitomized by Claes Oldenburg and Richard Artschwager. In general, whether Judd acknowledged it or not, these practices had a major effect on the ways in which his artwork and furniture were created and configured. Further, while Judd’s industrial-looking art and design objects would seem to represent a counter to the tactile warmness of sculptures and functional objects by Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) and Isamu Noguchi (1904–88), all three artists were profoundly engaged with issues inherent in design and with the articulation of space. Although Judd’s artwork influenced the development of usable artworks and architectural installations created by succeeding generations of artists (e.g., Scott Burton, R. M. Fischer, Siah Armajani, Vito Acconci, and Robert Wilson), the discourse about the relationship between design and art was not extensive in the United