Miss Lucy Pink

There are two opposed and seemingly irreconcilable tendencies in the critical appraisal of John Chamberlain’s sculpture. The first has been to treat the works as if they are simply and purely abstract, attending almost exclusively to...

Much of the cogency of Judd’s best-known essay, ‘Specific Objects’, comes from its being both a statement of aesthetic principle and a broad critical assessment of the new forms of sculpture or three-dimensional art making an impact in the New York art world in the mid-1960s. Because he was trying to explain why he felt impelled to depart from accepted modernist understandings of the art object, the essay has a striking sense of urgency. But it does not deal directly with his own sculpture. …

Judd said that he came close to writing actual art criticism only once, as opposed to his usual review articles. That was with “John Chamberlain: another view,” an essay from 1963, and he described how Chamberlain’s excessive crumpling, crushing, folding, and joining made the works seem as if they were continuously changing. He called this quality “superfluidity,” and its senses of “freedom . . . and indeterminacy” are the central characteristics, I shall argue, of credible art. …