COMPOSITION
Donald Judd uses the simplest compository principles. That applies in the first place to the elements he uses: a cube is constructed according to one single principle: all the sides are placed at right angles. More simple still would have been a sphere, but that threatened perhaps to remind Donald Judd of Brancusi's still organic egg.
And it applies also for the combination of the elements. Donald Judd's most cherished principle is the addition in one dimension into a row or in two dimensions into a chequered pattern. A more mechanistic composition is not conceivable. Everything that could remind of the already more organic progression, let alone of the golden section, is banned. Meanwhile, the confrontation of Donald Judd's box with Brancusi's egg makes it clear how little Brancusi's 'sculpture' partakes of an egg and, conversely, how much it partakes of a head! When, as with Donald Judd, geometrising ends up in pure geometry, the dialectic between organic and geometric, typical of every more subtle kind of mimesis, is suspended altogether and collapses into a monolithic reality. And in the installation of such rigid geometric reality, a nearly concealed anti-mimetic impulse is at work. With Donald Judd, the geometric is not only the real - the very opposite of art - but also the an-organic, the soulless - the very opposite of the human. In that sense Donald Judd's cube is the pure negation of the primeval sculpture: the human body - in sharp contrast to Brancusi's egg that is precisely its quintessence!
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