“SHOULD you ever find yourself in this town, about an hour and a half north of Manhattan, and come across an old white pickup with its hood and tailgate painted black, you might chalk up the two-tone paint job to a D.I.Y. project gone awry.
But you’d be wrong. In fact, the handiwork was performed decades ago by one of the pillars of the Minimalist art movement, Donald Judd.
Judd, who stopped making paintings in the 1960s and died in 1994, was known for his geometrically precise sculptures and installations. In 1971, he moved from New York City to Marfa, then a dying town in the high desert of West Texas, less than 100 miles from Mexico.
“Because of the glare, he painted the hood black to kill the reflection,” said Evan Hughes, who bought the 1972 Dodge Power Wagon 200 from Judd’s son, Flavin, in 2000.
Judd didn’t stop there. He painted the tailgate and the bumpers black, which gave the truck its distinctive look.
But, he said, driving the truck “around the city is just crazy.” It has no radio or air-conditioning. The engine is a 360 V-8 with a 4-speed manual transmission, and it’s geared very low.
“It does not go much more than 75 miles per hour,” he said.
Here in Putnam Valley, Mr. Hughes does not ask much of the truck aside from hauling firewood and some light construction. Like the art of its first owner, he noted, the truck is quite minimalist.
“It’s not more than what you need,” he said.”
Art and Simplistic Living
I think that this article was able to capture a lot for me in thinking about how we apply art into our daily lives as designers and non designers, as well as what we define as being an artistic or creative trait. For Judd, he was just working on his vehicle in a way that made it fit his own needs. Personalization is a crucial thing for artists, being able to change the space around us to fit our needs and our wants. And in this case, just a simple change was enough to make his truck a pillar of the minimalist art movement of the 1970’s. Art doesn’t need to be complicated, it only needs to be what’s asked of its audience. In this case, a dark hood and tailgate to prevent glare without worry of breaking conventional truck aesthetics.
This type of thinking of changing what we need without overhauling the system is a way of thinking that we don’t work with much in todays age of rapid production and viral products. The way something ends up successful is by being massively different, not by tweaking the details a little at a time. But some brands, like Honda, continue with their “safe and simple” approach to design that keeps their products timeless and functional.
