The first thing you see when you walk into Donald Judd’s home and studio at 101 Spring Street in the SoHo district of New York is a pile of bricks standing on the floor. It isn’t a big pile, just eight red bricks placed one on top of another, and it looks higgledy-piggledy as if it might tumble down at any time. Even if it didn’t, the sight of something so perilous in a spot where it could so easily be knocked over seems too odd to be coincidental.
It isn’t. The bricks in question are ordinary building bricks with which the sculptor Carl Andre constructed ‘Manifest Destiny’, a piece he made in 1986 for the home and studio of his friend and fellow artist Judd. The two men decided to place the sculpture in the spot beside the front door with the only decorative element of the bricks, the logo of the Empire brickyard, turned defiantly towards the wall.
