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It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp 1993Donald Judd

In the middle eighties I wrote that in the middlesixties someone asked me to design a coffeetable. I thought that a work of mine which wasessentially a rectangular volume with the uppersurface recessed could be altered. This debasedthe work and produced a bad table which I laterthrew away. The configuration and the scale of artcannot be transposed into furniture andarchitecture. The intent of art is different from thatof the latter, which must be functional. If a chair ora building is not functional, if it appears to be onlyart, it is ridiculous. The art of a chair is not itsresemblance to art, but is partly itsreasonableness, usefulness and scale as a chair.These are proportion, which is visiblereasonableness. The art in art is partly theassertion of someones interest regardless of otherconsiderations. A work of art exists as itself; achair exists as a chair itself. And the idea of achair isnt a chair. Due to the inability of art tobecome furniture, I didnt try again for severalyears. However Ive always been interested inarchitecture and continued to sketch ideas.

Of course if a person is at once making art andbuilding furniture and architecture there will besimilarities. The various interests in form will beconsistent. If you like simple forms in art you willnot make complicated ones in architecture.Complicated, incidentally, is the opposite ofsimple, not complex, which both may be. But thedifference between art and architecture isfundamental. Furniture and architecture can onlybe approached as such. Art cannot be imposedupon them. If their nature is seriously consideredthe art will occur, even art close to art itself. Themistake I made with the table was to try to makesomething as unusual as I thought a work of art tobe. Back of this was the assumption that a goodchair was only a good chair, that a chair couldonly be improved or changed slightly, and thatnothing new could be done without a great,strange effort. But the furniture slowly becamenew as I dealt easily with the reality. A good chairis a good chair. The particulars slowly created thegeneral forms that could not be directlytransferred. I can now make a chair or a buildingthat is mine without trying to derive forms from myown works of art. After a few years I designed apair of sinks for an old building that I bought inNew York City and for which Ive designed muchsubsequently. These were designed directly assinks; they were not a conversion; I didnt confusethem with art. The basin of the sink is an ellipse,which so far Ive never used in art, instead of acircle, which I do use. I also designed a largetable with chairs, somewhat like benches, to bemade of folded 1/8 inch stainless steel, brass orcopper. This was never made because the fourthfloor of the building in which it was to be is veryopen, primarily two planes, floor and ceiling, whilethe table and chairs are very closed. The latterwould ruin the space. I later made somebookshelves for the third floor.

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I kept the building but moved to West Texas withmy two children, where I rented a small house onthe edge of town. The house was quartered intoeleven by eleven foot rooms. There was nofurniture and none to be bought, either old, sincethe town had not shrunk or changed much sinceits beginning in 1883, or new, since the few storessold only fake antiques or tubular kitchen furniturewith plastic surfaces printed with inane geometricpatterns and flowers. The two small childrenplayed and slept in one of the four rooms. In orderto give them each an area of their ownnotwithstanding the one room, I designed a bedwhich was a closed platform of one by twelveswith a central, free-standing wall, also of one bytwelves. The bed was designed so that the lumberyard could cut the few different lengths to size andI could then nail them together in place. I liked thebed a great deal, and in fact the whole house, forwhich I made other furniture. Later, in a largeplace in town, I designed desks and chairs for thechildren using the same method of construction.More furniture developed from this beginning.

Its impossible to go to the store and buy a chair. InNorth-America since the “Mission” style becameunfashionable in the twenties and in Englandsince the similar furniture derived from WilliamMorris also became unfashionable, there hasbeen no furniture which is pleasurable to look at,fairly available and moderate in price. The onlyexception is the bentwood furniture developed byThonet, which became less fashionable in thetwenties but has continued to be made until nowby Thonet and others. This is still not expensivebut it is not down the street in the store. Thefurniture designed in the twenties by the well-known architects that continues to be made isexpensive for most people, although not asexpensive as the materials and the constructionimply, and is hardly nearby to purchase. Neither isall of it agreeable. Mies van der Rohes is still thebest and should not be considered as only a wornstatus symbol. As bad ideas should not beaccepted because they are fashionable, goodideas should not be rejected because they areunfashionable. Conventions are not worth reactingto one way or another. Most of the other furniturein production, such as Breuers Wassily chair andLe Corbusiers furniture, is an early civilized andalmost forgivable sentimentalizing of the machine.The chairs of both architects are derived from thebetter camping and military chairs of thenineteenth century. Old good ideas made new andshiny are now a dismaying precedent.Sentimentalizing the machine is now a malignityof the century. This is present in most availablefurniture and in most buildings. It is extreme inPompidou and Lloyds. In furniture this puerility isusually combined with the puerility of domesticity,the societal progress of the machine with personalprogress in the society.

Almost all furniture made since the twenties andmuch before in any of the “styles,” “modern” and“traditional,” has been junk for consumers. As Ivewritten, the ornate and overstuffed furniture of thelast half of the nineteenth century, crowded intocorresponding rooms, was not supplanted bysimple and functional modern furniture. Instead, this was turned intoVictorian furniture, also crowded into matchingrooms. Decoration isnt just applied; a chair isdecorated. Modern, progressive furniture hasbeen corrupted into the opposite. Primarily,“traditional” furniture, Victorian furniture,continues. Its ordinarily whats in the store. This iswhat most people have to choose from, whetherin Yellowknife of New York. As in politics, thisfurniture is not traditional and conservative but is

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an imitation of past furniture. The appearance ofthe past represents status by invoking a higherclass in the past than the purchaser is in in thepresent. The imitation old furniture symbolizes upand the imitation modern symbolizes forward.Usually the first is in the home and the second isin the office, sometimes one or the other in both,and seldom the reverse. Good office furniture isalso difficult to find. The bizarre and complicated“modern” office of the rich executive, who hasphotographs on his desk of his wife and childrenin their traditional setting, is a summation of thesurrounding corporate headquarters. Since he orhis wife are on the board of the museum, it mustlook progressive, like the headquarters, but with atouch of tradition, for her, for upward mobility tothe past, for something better than business, suchas learning, although there is nothing better, andgenerally for the gentility of art, which symbolizedall of these. Then, also, he may be on the towncouncil, or he builds shopping centers, or hebuilds apartment houses, giving the people whatthey want, to go with the furniture in which theyhad no choice. Upward and forward, and lowerevery year, not only in architecture and art, buteconomically and politically, since reality is equallyabsent. Anyway, what kind of a society is it whenyou cant even buy a chair?

Architects, designers, business people, evenpoliticians, say that they are giving the peoplewhat they want. They are giving the people whatthey deserve, because of their negligence, butthey are presumptuous to claim to know what theywant. What they want is what they get. Anexception to imposing upon the public what theywant, or perhaps a rare good guess, is the designof Sony television sets and other equipment, ofsome other Japanese companies and of someEuropean companies. This has no relation totraditional Japanese architecture, which isfortunate, because if it did the new version of theold would be just as debased as it is in the UnitedStates. Department stores in Osaka are floor afterfloor kitsch, as they are in New York. And alwayssurprisingly, and always, everywhere, newJapanese architecture, and Korean, show nofundamental lessons learned from their pastarchitecture, the same as in Paris. In the UnitedStates the television machine began disguisedand continues as at once the myth of the machineand the myth of the old home. The Americansgave the Americans what they wanted; they didntwant it. Neither did anyone else. In addition to thesuccess of Sonys design, there is the smallersuccess of Braun, whose design must be themodel, somewhat better as earlier usually is, forSonys design. A few months ago there was acurious article in Lufthansas magazine justlypraising Braun and its chief designer, DieterRams, praising “German” design of course, butexplaining that “German” design was now second to “Italian” design (Consumer products are notwhere nations differ in design) but that Germanywould catch up. This means become worse.“Designer” Italian furniture is the worlds worst.The only things as bad are the plastic bottles forliquid soap. It is an exception and a possibility thatyou can go down the street and choose a TV andenjoy looking at it when its turned of. In Texas,when I made the first furniture, I wanted atelevision set. This wasnt down the street, butalmost so twenty-five miles away. All the setswere American, all were made of plastic imitatingwood, some like your Anglo grandmotherssideboard, some like your Italian grandmotherscredenza, some like your Latino grandmothersaparador. I chose an Anglo set by Zenith. Againas usual, the design and the technology werecongruent. The color was that of the first coloredcomic strip, printed during an earthquake.

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Most of the furniture that I have designed remainsfairly expensive, because of its methods ofconstruction, and it is not easily available. Wehave made a serious effort to lower the prices butthe furniture is handmade, basically even thesheet-metal pieces made by Janssen, one by one.These would be cheaper made by hundreds butstill there would be considerable handwork. Thewooden furniture cannot change. Lower pricesrequire great numbers which require a largedistribution. This usually leads to the departmentstore. The distribution of furniture, and of books,probably of most things, are monopolies againstdiversity, which eliminate exceptions andcomplication, which have an invariable scheme forproduction and for costs, and of course forappearance, and for books, subject-matter. Forboth furniture and books the designer and theauthor absolutely receive very little. Theproduction cost of furniture is not as fixed as thecost of the designer, but it is low. The cost of thedesigner must have developed from that of realmodern furniture, since the architect was alwaysdead. The producer, not the factory, and theretailer, or both as one, receive the most money,some as profit, some for the expenses of thedistribution and the salesroom. This makes animpossible price. And of course it seems that themiddleman should get less. The larger thedistribution the more to the middleman. Thereforethe best method is a small distribution, which iswhat we do. And, importantly, we are theproducers, which combines that profit and myprofit into one, leaving only the retailer as extra.Our furniture goes around the world, but only oneby one. Most things could be made in the area inwhich they are consumed, eliminating the bigdistributor, often one company charging for threefunctions, instead of two for one as in our case,charging three times as the distributor, theproducer and the manufacturer, that is, profitingas corporations. Almost anything they can doanyone can do anywhere. And obviously evencars and TVs could be made by any large city orsmall country. I have always thought it strangethat there are no cars built in Switzerland. I haveheard that there was once a company. Whyshould Texas import cars and trucks fromMichigan? The oligarchy of monopolies ofdistribution prevents innovation, invents onlyrestrictions, and raises blank walls. The flat andboring society is a maze of blank walls just above eye level. This preventsnew and real inventions, so obviously there is nochance for only a new chair or a little book. Thepurpose of big business is to maintain its oligarchyrather than to do anything else, for example, tofulfill two of its biggest claims, competition andinnovation. Efficiency is another claim, part ofprogress, efficiency for profit, not necessarily forproduction, and not for the public. Only in themythical “progress” is there a suggestion ofbenefiting society. Most business people think thatsuch slight altruism is part of their advertising. And“free enterprise” is a slogan of the Pentagon.

Noam Chomsky writes: “Free trade is fine foreconomics departments and newspaper editorials,but nobody in the corporate world or thegovernment takes the doctrines seriously. Theparts of the US economy that are able to competeinternationally are primarily the state subsidizedones, capital intensive agriculture (agribusiness,as its called), high-tech industry, pharmaceuticals,biotechnology, etc.

“The same is true of other industrial societies. TheUS government has the public pay for researchand development and provides, largely throughthe military, a state-guaranteed market for waste

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production. If something is marketable, the privatesector takes it over. That system of public subsidyand private profit is what is called free enterprise.”

My experience is that both furniture distributionand book distribution are impossible. On the otherhand the art business is such a one-horsebusiness that something larger seems better. Butthis is perhaps because the context for art is soweak. The only possible way perhaps to makecheap mass produced furniture is to start with aconstruction cost and to design accordingly. Atpresent we would have to debase the constructionof the existing furniture for mass production.Beginning from a fixed construction of the existingfurniture for mass production. Beginning from afixed construction cost still leaves the questions oftoo little to the designer and too much to theproducer-organizer-wholesaler and to the retailer.

The roughly made pine furniture made by me andothers in Texas was made first, with a fewexceptions. So far this has not been made forsale. Next, well made furniture in fine solid woodwas made for my building in New York and then insmall numbers to sell, as it still is. The wood andthe craftsmanship make this the most expensive.In 84 I designed some chairs, benches, a tableand some beds in sheet metal, which werepainted one color to a piece. There were also acouple of chairs and a table made of copper. Thiswas for myself but also was the first furniture tobegin as furniture to sell. Since this was sheetmetal and the construction is common, I thought itwould be cheap enough to be used outdoors inpublic, but there is still too much handwork. Untilthen, except for the first pine chairs, all of the furniture was somewhat heavy.Five years ago I designed some light chairs andtwo tables in solid wood. These are simply butwell made in Yorkshire. Similar ones were maderecently for outdoors in galvanized steel and ofgranite, again heavy, and also in Texas in paintedsteel and of slate. A few years ago, first for use,then for sale, desks, tables and a bench weremade in Cologne of clear plywood. The sheets ofplywood are cut as little as possible and areslipped together, interlocking, like a childrens toy,an old idea. These also, sometimes with theplywood coated commercially with a color, as wellas chairs like those in pine, are made in NewYork.

I am often asked if the furniture is art, sincealmost ten years ago some artists made art thatwas also furniture. The furniture is furniture and isonly art in that architecture, ceramics, textiles andmany things are art. We try to keep the furnitureout of art galleries to avoid this confusion, which isfar from my thinking. And also to avoid theconsequent inflation of the price. I am often toldthat the furniture is not comfortable, and in thatnot functional. The source of the question is in theoverstuffed bourgeois Victorian furniture, which asI said, never ceased. The furniture is comfortableto me. Rather than making a chair to sleep in or amachine to live it, it is better to make a bed. Astraight chair is best for eating or writing. The thirdposition is standing.

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