Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or tradition in contrast to, for example, rationalism which relies upon reason and can incorporate innate knowledge.
I'm thinking of Donald Judd today. And the idea of factory made forms, bean bags and pillows. The below text is taken from Judd's NY times obituary, written by Roberta Smith, in 1994. The above images are not Donald Judd's works but are by Martin Creed, and Elad Lassry. I'm sure there is a connection somewhere.
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"Mr. Judd disliked the word Minimalist, calling himself "an empiricist" when pressed, and refused to call his work sculpture because he thought that implied carving. Like the efforts of other Minimalists, including Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, Carl Andre and Robert Morris, his simple, factory-made forms were seen as "radically depersonalized" (in the words of one critic, Hilton Kramer), devoid of emotion and signaling a dead end for art.
Much was made of the fact that Mr. Judd's work was fabricated by others and that mathematical progressions sometimes determined his compositions. One of his most famous, and most misconstrued, pronouncements was "Art need only be interesting."
text taken from here...
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