The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hosts “Donald Judd: Specific Furniture”, an exhibition that aims to uncover the logic that underpins the American artist’s designs. The narration of his visual logic is assigned to his own pieces and his design collection, along with photographs of the spaces he lived in, where the previous two coexisted. Sitting, touching and contemplating: the visitors are invited to experience the artist’s pieces before and after the exhibition.

In “Donald Judd: Specific Furniture”, the artist’s work intensely dialogues with pieces coming from his own collection – such as Alvar Aalto’s stool 60 (1932-33), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s MR Side Chair (1927) and the Red Blue Chair by Gerrit Rietveld – intended as pieces for both use and contemplation. These pieces were arranged into compositions set in the places he lived and worked in, notably in his New York home at 101 Spring Street, SoHo, and his residence in Marfa, West Texas, now the venues of the Judd Foundation.

Taught in art and philosophy at Columbia University, Judd (1928-1994) saw art and furniture design as contiguous practices; his work in these fields share a common visual logic, based on a study on proportion and materials. Nevertheless, the specificity of the disciplines was clear in the artist’s mind as, in his words, “Art and goods are divided by the frontier of function; to think of a commodity as a work of art – or vice versa, a work of art adapted as a commodity – means to create an ugly work of art and an ugly object”. The understanding of the specificity of the disciplines he engaged is structural in his work and emerges even more clearly in the spatial configuration of Marfa’s domestic and working spaces, where each building dispersed in the ranch land serves a specific function: an art studio, an architecture studio, a writing office, a library, and several large-scale sculptural installations. The integrity of Judd’s work on furniture design consists in the liberation from ornament and to a conceptual reduction to the unavoidable dialogue between function, form and material, where “form need not necessarily follow function, but it must not violate it.”

Notes: both quotes from the text by Emanuela Frattini Magnusson, In New York, At Eichholteren, from Domus 759, April 1994.