I texted my friend, Cody Barber, to tell him that I’d revisited Donald Judd’s writing in preparation to review his solo show, Impact Works, on view at Marfa Country Clinic in Marfa, TX. “Make sure I don’t come off as Judd Jr. tho,” he replied. To his point, it is hacky to draw reference to Judd at an art exhibition in Marfa but, I’m hacky enough to do it anyway. Judd himself was particularly wary of the artistic allusion; “This was an accidental, recognized, and encouraged reference…the only time I’ve referred to anything, a practice I consider unnecessary at best by those alien to a time or place,” he writes on page 3 of his 1985 essay, “Marfa, Texas”. Still, I couldn’t help but find Judd’s 1964 essay, “Specific Objects”, useful for understanding Barber’s Impact Works. Applying Judd’s schema 60 years later, Barber’s Impact Works are related to specific objects, though not like an offspring (certainly not one named “Judd Jr.”), but within a lineage of work whose inherent physicality extends its conceptual reaches beyond its immediate presence.
Cody Barber’s solo show, “Impact Works” on view at Marfa Country Clinic in Marfa, Texas. Photo: Rowdy Dugan
Impact Works is installed on the walls in the clinic’s reception area. The space is intimate, in size and context, with chairs for about ten people and a check-in desk for patients on the right-side wall. The large windows on the building’s exterior allow abundant natural light to illuminate the show and maintain viewability from the sidewalk outside business hours. The artist titles the series for exactly what it is: works made by various modes of impact inflicted, by Barber, on sheets of aluminum using different tools. Barber’s experimentation produces indentions and punctures into the soft metal corresponding to his action and choice instrument, such as a sledgehammer, pitchfork, pickaxe, and crowbar. Barber then powder-coats the material in one solid color, making the series a cacophony of color swatches.
“Impact Works” on view at Marfa Country Clinic. Photo: Rowdy Dugan.
Impact Works’ Minimalist ancestry is clear. Square and rectangular forms of industrial material are arranged in space to pose phenomenological encounters for viewers. Though Judd and others famously rejected the term, “Minimalism,” in “Specific Objects,” Judd heralds common qualities among his contemporaries that define a new order of three-dimensional work, or specific objects, synthesizing and subverting painting and sculpture. “Half or more of the best new works in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually, it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other,” Judd opens. Throughout the 6-page essay, Judd assesses how this new three-dimensional work subversively utilizes canonized media, painting, and sculpture, to “get clear of these forms. The use of three dimensions is an obvious alternative. It opens to anything” (“Specific Objects,” pg. 1). Judd enumerates practitioners who best exemplify this endeavor, namely, Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, and Frank Stella — all of whom famously have permanent installations at the Chinati Foundation. Writing in the mid-60s, Judd acknowledges the new works’ nascent status while intuiting its further development, stating, “the characteristics of the three dimensions are those of only a small amount of work, little compared to painting and sculpture. A few of the more general aspects may persist, such as the work’s being like an object or being specific, but other characteristics are bound to develop. Since its range is so wide, three-dimensional work will probably divide into a number of forms” (“Specific Objects,” pg. 4). Impact Works presents a new form of specific objects with developments unique to Barber.
Cody Barber’s “Impact Works.” Photo: Melissa Bent
13 of the 15 featured impact works hang on the back wall arranged in a horizontal grouping that swells then tapers. The powder coat salves the works’ disfigurations and the assigned hues extract the vaguest references to reality from the abstract forms. “Everyone wants this one to represent bullet holes,” Barber told me when I visited the show, gesturing to the concluding piece in the arrangement: two holes diagonal from the other punch through the metal sheet, the material lipping around each, powder-coated in a course matte black. We agree that the dark blue central piece with a group of bulbous impressions resembles a blackberry. The deep fleshy pink with a single vertical slit…you can probably guess. For the practitioner though, the subjective associations are secondary to the objective experiments at hand and by hand. “I start by selecting an instrument and placing the aluminum on the sand,” Barber explains. “There is an instantaneous satisfaction that comes with the suspense of not knowing how the metal might react, or how many times I might decide to strike it. It feels like a dance and I like to think of the process as choreographed. There are certain moves and I get to decide which ones go where.”
Installation view of “Impact Works.” Photo: Caroline Frost
According to Judd, specific objects are made from materials that “vary greatly and are simply materials — Formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglass, red and common brass, and so forth.” Further, he states that “the material never has its own movement. A beam thrusts, a piece of iron follows a gesture; together, they form a naturalistic and anthropomorphic image.” In the same way, Barber’s impact works bear the literal brunt of his gesture. The resulting forms fossilize past actions while also warping the material so drastically that some works require bespoke installation hardware to mount onto the wall — both outcomes satisfy another key component of specific objects that Judd outlines: spatiality.
Each impact work hangs 1-2 inches off the wall, exposing the installation system unique to each work depending on how the impact affected its plane. Informed by his background in furniture design, Barber attached readymade parts, similar to leveling feet, onto the backs of the impact works to achieve an inconspicuous installation. The work-on-wall install refers to the traditional display for painting, an ancestor to specific objects, and in doing so, exhibits their departure from painting in their relationship to the space. Judd notes that “actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface. Obviously, anything in three dimensions can be any shape, regular or irregular, and can have any relation to the wall, floor, ceiling, room, rooms, or exterior or none at all. Any material can be used, as is or painted” (“Specific Objects,” pgs. 4-5). Impact works, like specific objects, combine elements from both painting and sculpture to occupy space distinctly.
“Each impact work breaks up the continuity of straight lines that define most architecture. Once a perfect square or rectangular panel has been struck with, say a sledgehammer or pickaxe a couple of times, the lines go places,” Barber says. “The straight edges that once framed the panel take their own winding path and, combined with a flat wall or placed near anything considered level or straight, there is an instant disruption to acknowledge there.”
Installation view of “Impact Works.” Photo: Caroline Frost
However, impact works surpass specific objects because their spatiality functions twofold: their physical spatiality, the impact, empirically implies their temporal spatiality, the impact moment. As an impression of a prior action, or a past event, each impact work denotes a timeline beyond the gallery walls, inviting viewers into its conception. The impact is a plot point on the material’s lifespan, giving the work depth, texture, action, and history. This distinguishes Barber’s impact works as a new class, a new generation, of the three-dimensional work Judd outlined in 1964. Impact Works is like an addendum to “Specific Objects” because the material is not presented purely, — manipulated only by arrangement — it’s adulterated, maimed by a gesture that individualizes the object and refers to something outside of itself.
A car parked outside of Marfa Country Clinic. Photo: Caroline Frost.
After I left the clinic, I noticed that the car parked in front of mine had a linear incision with an indention on the left side of its bumper. Life imitates art, right? I’ll save the Wildean essay for another time.
Cody Barber in the doorway of Marfa Country Clinic. Photo: Melissa Bent
Impact Works is on view at Marfa Country Clinic in Marfa, Texas through January 1st, 2025. View and purchase Impact Works here.
