On liking and not liking Donald Judd

Does it matter whether I “like” Donald Judd? The saintly man I encountered through “Specific Objects”, who I felt I had to learn about because… historiography of art, how often people mentioned his Marfa relics and his devotees.

There’s nothing quite wrong with Judd’s art (I even quite like it, even if not as much as Flavin et al), except that it is how it is to me that he existed (and his art now exists) wrongly, that the nexuses of interdisciplinarity and thus conceptions of newness and interest he occupies inaugurate a lineage to which I feel distinctly orthogonal. Frankly, I quite enjoy his pieces, just not how it moves. There’s something wrong with that.

I’m not quite sure if they’re even the right questions, whether I like the various aspects of Judd. People do this with O’Hara, not Judd. But I don’t see “Specific Objects” in the structures and objects. There’s stuff in between, and I can see it. He may be the theorist of a whole critical discourse, the minimalist who wasn’t, the forefather of an American qua American art, the person behind some specific objects… — but in the end, his all thatness is off to me.

When I feel minimalist, I don’t feel like him. Maybe that’s the like in liking Donald Judd. I like his art. I like his writing. I even sort of like him (he has a great voice). I just don’t like that which is somewhere between him and Donald Judd. But that is kind of his thing: the fissures between his self and his person are coalesced by this fact that he does not need me to like him — the objects are what they are.

But I care whether I like him. After all, it’s how I really feel.