Sculpture versus the work

Lesley and Michael came over for potato pancakes last night, and we watched a DVD I've had out from Netflix since mid-July which turned out to be two distinct documentaries on Donald Judd and Tony Cragg. We've been talking about going to Marfa, Texas with Lesley and Michael for a couple of years, Michael having emigrated from Texas to California and still having family there, so the Judd documentary was like a vicarious version of our dreamed-of road trip. As for Tony Cragg, we bought an etching of his from Crown Point Press a few years ago without knowing anything about him, and all I had learned since was that he had won the Turner Prize back before that was the key to becoming a billionaire British artist. Watching the two documentaries in sequence was most interesting in terms of trying to get past the rhetorical devices that made Cragg "look bad" in the inevitable comparison between the two. It's clear, first of all, that Judd has a "theory" and displays work that has an attention to ongoing consistency and that these inherently play better when confronted with a video camera whose purpose, like Naughty Noo-Noo's, is to gobble up anything that moves. Tony Cragg's work, as viewed through a half-hour lens, looks like it's all over the place, the range being such that almost anyone is likely to wince at some piece of his even while considering a couple of others pretty interesting. Also, he's portrayed in the thick of managing his career as a sculptor as well as making art, whereas Judd is completely separated from either the creative or the physical processes that went into creating his works (which would have been great to see). It's Judd, by the way, who gets the chance before Cragg (the way this DVD is organized) to state that he never refers to his work as sculpture, a way of handily sweeping Cragg and his cohorts into the dustpan of history without ever even having a fair fight about it.