Muttering and Listening
Editorial work involves listening, opening one’s senses to silenced voices, to the quiet whispering at the porous edges of our consciousness. Gail Hastings notes that sometimes artworks seem to be reticent teachers, “muttering a lesson,” which we have to pry out of them. As both an artist and scholar reading the material and spatial in Donald Judd’s sculpture Untitled (DSS 33), Hastings rejects this metaphor, stating with and through Judd’s works and words that “The knowledge we therefore seek of DSS 33‘s space cannot be found as a critically apt, well-packaged utterance detachable from the work. It is found, instead, in the reciprocal movement of the work’s self-determination, the ‘living force of its existence,’ forever in process of creating space while perpetually wading through the ‘natural confusion’ of life this embroils.” (A pause, here, to agree wholeheartedly with Hastings’s formulation while recognising it as, indeed, a well-packaged utterance of the highest calibre, one that does not deliver a didactic lesson.)

Rebecca M. Brown, ‘In This Issue: Muttering and Listening’, in Rebecca M. Brown (ed.), Art Journal, College Art Association, New York, vol.77 no.3, Fall 2018, p.5.