Transcript

I met Judd several times in the 1980s by which time he was spending a lot of time in Europe, where in some ways his work has always been more appreciated than it has been in America, and I would meet him at exhibition openings occasionally or once or twice at his own exhibitions…. he was, could be, extremely amusing though obviously, as one knows from his writings, quite caustic and dry, he had a sense of his own value but then he had every reason to….he was making important art that was probably at that time not recognised for having the quality that we now see in it and that’s enough to make anyone feel slightly at odds with the world.

From the early ‘60s when Judd began to explore the notion of a sculpture which moved across the wall or up the wall, or was placed at eye level, he was very conscious that placing a sculpture in a space conditioned the way you looked at it, it conditioned the way you felt about it, it conditioned literally the way your own body responded to it, and so he became increasingly absorbed with the way in which his work was installed in spaces and most particularly in museums and in exhibitions and he was very critical of the way in which many museums handled and looked after works of art in that sense, so as soon as he was able to he began to install his own work in spaces that he himself controlled, whether it was this building which he bought and converted, transformed, rather than converted in Spring Street in SoHo in New York or whether it was that complex of buildings which he took over in Marfa in Texas, in each case he made very very simple decisions about the way in which the spaces were organised and then progressively installed his own works in forms that were satisfying to him, sometimes it took years to get the right combination, and of course in making the installation of this show we had about two weeks rather than several years but what we’ve tried to do in the exhibition was to reflect some of the principles that Judd himself adopted in organising the spaces in the first place and then in the way in which works are installed in particular spaces.