bent reflections: a response to Judd’s writings

UNA STANZA … 1990

This begins in the beginning. Clyfford Still wrote in 1966:

Few institutions that would survive among the power structures of our culture can afford the presence of an individual who would challenge the merit of their rules, nor dare they embrace a code of conduct or administration that does not seek, and yield to, the collectivist denominators of this time.

9 November 2016 Pacific Junction, IO

For names in politics as in art, their currency is timely. The fate of being unaffordable, is to find one’s agency in the shadow of another light.

6 February 1991 Köln


The present war is the final proof that there is no end to the Cold War and to war. Everything changed from low to lower and will change to lower still.

9 November 2016 Pacific Junction, IO

Even the lover remains untouched.

10 February 1991 Vienna


The circumlocutions of liberalism went so far as to become the statements of fascism. Both met.

19 November 2016 131 Bowery

Patterns of transformation being observed over long periods of time allow the unexpected to appear as the inevitable. The snake is biting his tail.

28 January 1989 Casa Perez


Those who know less and less dominate more and more those who resist less and less.

12 November 2016 Omaha, NE

To act on what you know is to seek a relation to truth.

28 July 1990 Marfa


Don’t know what it all means either do nothing or do as much as possible since there is some future meaning or there is none and this is it.

12 November 2016 Baltimore, MD

Freedom is knowing where thought is being received and can liberate con-science-ness.

2 January 1989 101 Spring Street

Behavior by most is not by thought, but by attitude; therefore it’s important to attack their attitudes by instances of attitude.

12 November 2016 Baltimore, MD

The nature of resistance is instinctual, rather than strategic. Yet, to move beyond its initial gesture, resistance requires a resistance to its own nature.

6 May 1990 La Mansana de Chinati

Cortés surrounded after La Noche Triste, WWII, etc.

Over and over only assumptions cause defeats and victims.

12 November 2016 Atlanta, GA

The clearing of assumptions is akin to the clearing of a minefield.

9 July 1989 Las Casas

Most people are not even going to look unless the work and the artist are well known, unless the work has an aura, while for new work and the artist the main negative effort is to get rid of an aura, or several auras, rid of accumulated importance.

19 November 2016 131 Bowery

The misconceptions surrounding the aura in works of art lie on the grave of Walter Benjamin, whose thought has been stripped of its primary dialectical nature in the process of translation.

AYALA DE CHINATI 1989

… there are no words since there are no ethics that correspond to the present known nature of the world.

4 May 1998 New York, NY

Form follows silence.