Blue Block in Three Parts 1966

John McCracken made this blue block in three parts, sometime in his career, using who knows what materials. It’s so smooth and perfect, like a minimalist dream. What strikes me is the color. That blue, it’s so…blue. Like the platonic ideal of blueness. I wonder about that surface. It’s so uniform, almost industrially perfect, that it makes you think about how it was made, or rather, how it wasn’t made by hand. Does it even matter? Maybe the process is about erasing process. That perfect blue cube is like a deadpan joke. It’s like, “Here I am, a blue cube. What else do you want from me?” It's not unlike the kind of thing you might see from Donald Judd, but where his works feel like pristine objects from another planet, McCracken's have a more casual, Californian vibe. It's all about surfaces, and the art of seeming like it was no work at all. Is it thought provoking? Is it just a blue block? It can be both, and neither, and everything in between.