Transcript

I think it’s very easy as one talks about Judd’s work, to concentrate on all the formal qualities, in the sculpture, the processes which he used, the materials obviously and the effects. But ultimately, when you’ve experienced these works in the right context, the impact of them is so much greater, and the quality and the way in which it affects your body and in a certain sense whole being is so unexpected that you have this sense of art doing what it can do at its best, which is to in some sense begin to uncover some of the natural order in the world, in some sense make us very very conscious of ourselves, of our place in relation to that world, and Judd never unlike [Barnett] Newman for instance, for whom he had huge regard and who was clearly concerned to in a certain sense evoke and deal with the notion of the spiritual, Judd never really set out ostensibly to do that and he never received a commission for a chapel for instance, but I have no doubt at all that had he done so, he would have made one of the more remarkable chapels or spaces of contemplation that one could have gone into and had not a transcendental experience exactly but a very much a sense of one’s own place and body in the world.

Judd died ten years ago and I think it’s all still too early to say what his ultimate importance will be. What we do know is that there are many artists who revere him, that doesn’t mean to say that they copy him slavishly, but whether those artists are an artist like Anish Kapoor, on the one hand in this country or a Julian Opie or a David Bachelor, these are all artists who have found something in Judd that they feel they can use or try and do battle with in some cases, I mean to take further an element of his work, and I think that’s how artist’s influence begins to permeate into the community. It’s not always apparent at the moment they are making work, that it is going to be influential, it’s what comes afterwards that causes us to recognise the influence and I’ve been struck even in the few days that this exhibition has been open by how many people have said to me, and not just as a form of politesse, how astonished they have been by the range of the work. I think the extraordinary thing about Judd is that there are so many aspects of the work that you can then begin to explore, and I think it’s one of the things that will undoubtedly make him a figure of influence over the next twenty or fifty years.