Damage control.

To the Editor:

It would be wrong to conclude from Ann Temkin's "Wear and Care: Preserving Judd" [Summer 2004] that Judd tolerated damage to his art. Visitors to "The Block" in Marfa who wonder about double standards, because they aren't aware of how Judd worked after 1964--when fabrication began--or how he sometimes used damaged pieces returned to him in Marfa to work from (in what were, at the time, extremely private studios), are missing much of the importance of what they're now seeing.

The leap from Judd's interest in the subject of history to his appreciating damage to his art as "history" is spectacular. In fact, Judd hated damage and considered it a kind of graffiti, if not vandalism.

I agree that it's relevant to the Judd restoration question to discuss "Panza," but only if the discussion is based on what really happened at the time, not the version found in later, hardened positions. The dispute essentially started out as a disappointment about bad workmanship. Even after Panza had refused to use Judd's New York fabricators, if he had bothered to construct the works competently and correctly in Italy there might very well have been no dispute. Bad workmanship, even if the materials and dimensions were otherwise correct, was a kind of damage; wrong details were unwanted details.

Incidentally, rough workmanship and bad workmanship are not necessarily the same thing, and irregular materials such as plywood and galvanized iron with "inherent markings" (grain and spangle) are no less injured by noninherent detail than "number four" stainless steel or "mirror" copper.

Judd had no hesitation or Walter Benjamin--esque nostalgia about repainting or replacing damaged parts, or entire pieces, if they were wrong or damaged to the point of detracting from the art. Worrying about "something made in 1966" looking as if it were made later was never his concern. His remark in an argument with Stella in the '60s on the subject of anachronismos in art is telling: "Frank, there isn't old work and new work, there's only good work and bad work."

During some years in the '70s and '80s about 5 percent of Bernstein Brothers' work for Judd was repairs and replacements. There might have been even more but for the small-shop bottleneck effect: As Judd's work came to be more and more concentrated with a single mechanic (working in a roped-off "Judd area" of a larger business that made other products), shifting that worker away from new production to restoration work brought new production to a halt.

By the early '90s the problem and number of unrestored Judd works had become so great and backed up that Judd thought briefly about setting up a separate restoration service, but the mostly financial complications were never resolved--and there was still the small-shop effect.

Temkin's article is timely and adds to the discussion, but unfortunately it misses a little too much important history. Maybe it just needed to be longer.

--Peter Ballantine, New York