Donald Judd's Specificity

The conception of “specific objects” synthesizes Donald Judd’s contribution to the idea of abstract art. But what “specificity” does Judd talk about? How does he mean it and in what way is it different from the one already claimed and theorized by the previous and contemporary European abstract art and also, in particular, by Clement Greenberg’s Modernism? Accused of aporia, interpreted in a formalistic way by some or in a phenomenological or post-structuralist sense by others, Judd’s theory, deemed as the background of the Minimal Art movement, is indeed also different from Robert Morris’s or Carl Andre’s and then from the minimalist critical vulgate it has given birth to. For all these reasons, in order to verify the hypothesis on which it is grounded, rereading Donald Judd’s fundamental text becomes for us the occasion for re-discussing its theoretical result.