Showing posts with label Marfa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marfa. Show all posts

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Chinati

Robert Boyd

In my post about Marfa, there is a large Chinati-shaped hole. Without Chinati, Marfa is just a Border Patrol post/cow town. But it happened mostly by accident. New York artist Donald Judd, who had long liked the desert Southwest and had taken his family on camping trips many times, happened to be offered a couple of buildings for sale cheap in Marfa at a moment when he was pondering moving out of New York.

Donald Judd was a successful artist in New York. Certainly he was one of the most famous of the minimalists--perhaps not as well-known as Frank Stella, but up there. His name was known in the art world long before his art was because of his years as an art critic. In some ways, he made as big an impact as a writer than as an artist--his writing style is admirably matter-of-fact. Indeed, it recalls the stripped-down prose of Cormac McCarthy, another transplant to the desert southwest.
Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other. The work is diverse, and much in it that is not in painting and sculpture is also diverse. But there are some things that occur nearly in common. [Donald Judd, "Specific Objects," 1965]
This quote from Judd's famous essay "Specific Objects" doesn't exactly sound like he's talking about Minimalism per se. When we think of Judd, we think of him in the company of Stella, Carl André, Dan Flavin, and so on. One of the things that surprises one about Chinati is that it isn't all striped-down Minimalism. You have work by artists like John Chamberlain, John Wesley and Ilya Kabakov there whose work has nothing to do with Minimalism. Judd had surprising broad tastes, and even in "Specific Objects," he refers with approval to artists who are working far afield from the Minimalist idiom.

His object with Chinati was not, therefore, to build a temple of Minimalism.  What drove him to the sheds and barracks of Fort D.A. Russell was a concern for display. As a sculptor, he had been disappointed with the way museums displayed his work. There was always too much other stuff around it--paintings in particular. His feeling was that sculpture needed to be in a dialogue with architecture, but that the relative clutter of a museum prevented this. (His ideas have been adopted at various newer museums, like the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art.)

To put his concepts of display in practice, he first bought a six-storey building in New York City that would be his home, his studio, and exhibition space for his work and work of artists he collected. But this building apparently became overwhelmed with artworks. He had the same problem as a museum--too much work to show.

In the meantime, Judd and his family had taken many trips to the Southwest, including two summers spent in Marfa. In 1971, he rented two dilapidated warehouses to store a bunch of his larger artwork. He subsequently bought the warehouses and some adjacent property in 1973. After restoration work, these would become Judd's studio and house in 1979.



Donald Judd's compound

The addition of a high wall around these structures give it the look of a compound. It ain't exactly neighborly. It makes me wonder what Judd's relation to the town was.

Today, this compound (and several other buildings downtown) are owned by the Judd Foundation. They contain his personal art collection, which is apparently substantial. I didn't see this work or the insides of these buildings, unfortunately. Despite their close relationship, Chinati and the Judd Foundation are distinct operations (I'd like to know the story behind this). You can tour the various Judd buildings in Marfa is you make a reservation and are willing to cough up $50. I passed this time, but maybe the next time I'm in Marfa, I'll take the tour.

In any case, Judd's personal properties were kind of a dress rehearsal for Chinati. Working with the Dia Foundation, Judd started buying up property around town with the intention of exhibiting some large pieces of art by himself, Dan Flavin and John Chamberlain. The first two properties purchased were the artillery sheds from Fort D.A. Russell. These large brick structures had been used for storing munitions and during World War II for housing German POWs. These buildings had been basically out of commission since 1949. Judd replaced the garage doors on the buildings with large windows, and when the roofs leaked, he added quonset-style metal roofs.



The artillery sheds at Chinati

These two buildings house 100 aluminum boxes by Judd. I'm sorry to say that I didn't take any photos of them--photography was not allowed. I'm sure there is some artistic justification for this, but the effect is to force viewers to buy the Chinati coffee table book, which I did. Here's a picture of Judd's boxes from Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd.


Donald Judd, Artillery Sheds with 100 Works in Mill Aluminum (detail), 1982-86, brick structure and aluminum objects

All the boxes are the same dimensions, arranged in four parallel rows. The large windows allow one to look east at another large Judd sculpture out in the field beside the old fort. To the west are old barracks. This display seems to fulfill Judd's desire for an uncluttered environment in which to view his work. It's easy to see the whole project as a bit megalomaniacal. The sheds were unair-conditioned, and it was cooler outside than in. It made us want to get through it as quickly as possible. But the environment was beautiful. Judd really created a work that made sense as a piece of architecture. The boxes came across as non-functional furniture within the space. It was the combination of the boxes and the architectural setting that made it work. And that was obviously Judd's intent.

The Dia Foundation commissioned the boxes, but all was not well with Dia. The main problem was that the foundation was financed by Schlumberger stock that it owned. (The stock came from Philippa de Menil, one of the founders of Dia and a daughter of John and Dominique de Menil.) I'm assuming that Dia financed Marfa through a combination of dividends and sales of the stock. The problem was that Schlumberger stock tracks oil prices (Schlumberger is an oil field services company). In 1980, the stock reached $21 a share. By 1982, it had reached $8.50. It climbed a bit in 1983 to $15, but it quickly fell and remained at $7 and $8 for the rest of the decade. The price of oil went into a 15 year decline. The Chinati book blandly states,
In 1983 an extremely critical phase began: Dia's financial situation took a turn for the worse. The foundation was financed almost exclusively by the returns on Philippa Pellizzi's Schlumberger stock, and after the price plummeted over a year's time and continued to decline, Dia was forced to take "extreme measures." [...] Marfa was to become a non-profit organization apart from Dia.
The actual story was a bit more complex. When Dia suggested to Judd that Marfa be spun off, Judd sued Dia. There was a great deal of tension between Dia co-founder Heiner Friedrich and Judd. Judd was very aggressive with Dia, and had negotiated a extremely lucrative contract with them. According to New York Magazine, after 1981, Marfa "would be permanently maintained and [...] Judd would get $17,500 a month as a combined installation payment and salary." ("Medicis For a Moment," Phoebe Hoban, New York, November 25, 1985) Basically with the threat of a lawsuit over their heads, Dominique de Menil effected a coup at Dia and tossed Freidrich out on his ear. But no board reorganization could make Schlumberger stock increase in value, so the divorce from Dia was completed despite Judd's wishes. (I'm reminded of the t-shirt that SubPop published when it went through an existential crisis--"What part of 'we have no money' don't you understand?")

This was how Chinati began in 1986--lots of assets but no money. Judd suddenly had to go begging, which must not have been pleasant, particularly for a guy who acted like he was entitled to Dia's millions just a few years before. Nonetheless, he was successful, even if it was touch-and-go for the rest of his life. When he died, his estate was in debt. The Chinati Foundation had to quickly expand its board and secure additional sources of funding. Which it accomplished.

In the meantime, Chinati had grown substantially. In addition to the 100 aluminum boxes, Judd placed a series of large concrete boxes out in a field on the southwest side of the old fort. Unlike the other works in the collection, visitors are permitted to photograph these Freestanding Works in Concrete. But you aren't allowed to touch them.



Donald Judd, Freestanding Works in Concrete, 1980-1984, concrete



Donald Judd, Freestanding Works in Concrete, 1980-1984, concrete



Donald Judd, Freestanding Works in Concrete, 1980-1984, concrete

When I posted a photo of myself posing in front of one of these boxes on Facebook, Dan Havel wrote:
Ahh, good ol' Judd land. Whenever I see those concrete boxes of his, methinks Judd was just influenced by culvert construction...In fact, seen monumental stacks of these by highway that are much more interesting than Judds. On the other hand, 100 boxes is incredibly beautiful in context of the buildings they are in. (Comment on Facebook, August 14, 2012)
This comment was attached to a photo of concrete culverts that he had photographed--which look remarkably like the Judds. And the thing is, these kinds of practical undecorated concrete structures are all around us, mostly unnoticed. Obviously Judd noticed them.



Donald Judd, Freestanding Works in Concrete, 1980-1984, concrete, with concrete cisterns in the foreground

In fact, in the same field as Freestanding Works in Concrete were several old concrete cisterns, presumably dating back to the fort's days as a cavalry outpost. Aside from the fact that they are a bit worn and open on top, they are extremely similar to Judd's artwork just beyond them. Leaving them in the field had to be a deliberate action on Judd's part. He may have been reminding us that these sculptures, though abstract in any ordinary sense, were based on something--the practical heavy objects that people made of concrete.

But to me, when I imagine the way these cisterns have been used over the decades, or when I recall exploring storm sewers and culverts as an unsupervised kid, the preciousness of Judd's works seems slightly absurd. DO NOT TOUCH! I think Freestanding Works in Concrete would be improved by the addition of several teenagers drinking beers and smoking on them.



John Chamberlain Building in downtown Marfa

Not all of Chinati is on the site of the old fort. The John Chamberlain Building is in downtown Marfa. This former mohair wool warehouse sits alongside the railroad tracks that run through town (and which provided Marfa its original reason to exist, as a watering station for trains). The wool industry was subsidized by the U.S. Army during World War II. The armies invading Europe needed warm clothes, so that meant that West Texas, which had never had a wool industry before, was roped into the war effort. After the war, the subsidy and the industry disappeared, leaving behind this vast empty building. In fact, Marfa went into a long decline after World War Two--the military bases which had been so important to the city closed up, and between 1950 and 1957, there was a drought so severe that the area never fully recovered. Many farmers and ranchers simply pulled up stakes and left. When Judd came to town, land and buildings could be bought cheap.

The mohair warehouse was used to house a large collection of John Chamberlain. Again, photography was not allowed. And again, the work in conjunction with the architecture was perfect. I have long loved Chamberlain's work, and I was extremely pleased with his retrospective at the Guggenheim this year, but this was a much finer setting for the work.



Interior of the John Chamberlain Building

The pieces were large and impressive, scattered across the vast floor like boulders rolling off a mountain into the plain. That seemed deliberate. It was as if they wanted you, inside this warehouse, to be reminded of the landscape outside. But the arrangement was not random. It was more like a Japanese garden, where each element has a kind of autonomy while looking beautiful in conjunction with the other elements. A viewer had the ability to walk all around each piece, to step back and come close. But in this process, that viewer was always capturing glimpses of other Chamberlains receding into the distance. This effect worked well with the lockstep 100 boxes in the artillery sheds and worked equally well with this scattered group. It was the size of the spaces that Judd needed to do this. And this notion of massive spaces for large works has been repeated at such venues as Mass MOCA and Dia: Beacon. I propose that in this era of dead malls, defunct superstores, and places like the Astrodome, this concept could be expanded. I, for one, would pay money to tour Dia: Astrodome.

Most of the other works are in the barracks buildings. These U-shaped buildings seem a little awkward for displaying art. Judd initially offered them all to Dan Flavin, but Flavin only wanted six of them. His installations were not completed until after his death, and they are some of the most spectacular of all the installations at Chinati.

You enter one side of the barrack. The room is empty and fairly dark (there is a window at one end, so there is some natural light). The long thin room ends at the bottom of the "U", and the viewer can see some colored light shining faintly from this dark end of the room. When you walk down to the end, you see two trapezoidal hallways. And at the end of the hallways (which can be long or short, depending on which barrack you are in) are a series of colored fluorescent lights and a second bunch of differently colored fluorescent behind them. So each hallway has a different combination of colors.



Dan Flavin, untitled (Marfa project), 1996, installation



Dan Flavin, untitled (Marfa project), 1996, installation

Standing in these halls was extremely disorienting. The slanted lights and walls gave it the feeling of a funhouse. The longer I stood in the halls, the more you felt myself wanting to lean. I wonder if viewers ever fall over. These works show that "minimalism" is not necessarily the right terms for his art. He is using his medium--fluorescent lights and architecture--to create a total experience. It's not about subtracting or paring down. And by using architecture as an element, he was in tune with Judd's conception of Marfa.



Ilya Kabakov, School No. 6 (detail), 1993, installation

The same can be said of Ilya Kabakov, even though he is a very different artist from the others above, and his use of the barrack he was given is likewise very different. He wasn't interested in creating a perfect environment for displaying some objects. He was interested in the barrack's status as an abandoned, defunct space. These barracks had held cavalry soldiers, ready to mount up and push back any spillover from the Mexican Revolution. They were an obsolete corner of the history of the 20th century. Kabakov decided to create another obsolete corner of that history here--a Soviet schoolhouse called School No. 6.

The work barrack is filled with wrecked furniture, papers, straw, dirt, musical instruments, sports equipment, books, school supplies, and vitrines filled with pictures and little written notes. One good reason to buy the big Chinati book is that it translates the notes. They are memories of children of various events the school. Some seem quite universal, and some are very Soviet specific (a pilot donates a matchbook and a single burned match to the school--when he was shot down, he survived in the forest by lighting fires to keep warm as he made his way back to the front. The burned match was his very last one, with which he lit a signal fire and was rescued). The installation depicts a turned page of history.

The courtyard, unlike the other barracks at Chinati, has been allowed to become overgrown with desert plants. The top of the "U" is crudely fenced off. The fence is flimsy and has many gaps--when you look through them, you see Judd's artillery sheds. I think this may have been a little joke on Kabakov's part. He wanted you, standing within this deliberate shambles, to be able to see the clean perfection of Judd's vision.

When Kabakov created School No. 6, he took off the doors and windows facing the inner courtyard. The idea was that the elements would enter the building, allowing the artfully-created illusion of decay to become actual decay. Sand and desert critters would come inside. But when the staff discovered that insects were eating the paper, they asked Kabakov if they could close off the inside from the outside. Kabakov must have been amused by this request, but he assented. A staff of Chinati so dedicated to permanence--DO NOT TOUCH!--couldn't handle the idea that a work was designed to erode away to nothingness.



Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen, Monument to the Last Horse, 1991, aluminum, polyurethane, paint

And conservation is sometimes a challenge. Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen's Monument to the Last Horse was being repaired when I was there. The piece was made out of aluminum (fabricated from a small model by the same fabricators that did Judd's boxes.) But the rough surface was made of polyurethane attached to the aluminum framework. Then the whole thing was painted brown. It's a lovely tribute to the history of Fort D.A. Russell, and as an outsized sculpture of a normally small thing, it simultaneously fits in with Oldenburg and Van Bruggen's oeuvre and fits in with other local monuments--for example, the mammoth roadrunner Paisano Pete in Fort Stockton.

The problem is that the paint was being slowly sandblasted away by nature. The polyurethane was in danger or eroding if the paint went away. When I was there, they were removing the paint by "sandblasting" it with ground-up walnut  shells (a substance that turns out to have a large variety of industrial uses) in preparation for repainting it. The ground around Monument to the Last Horse was covered with reddish walnut shell dust.

In addition to these pieces, there are paintings by John Wesley, sculptures by Richard Long, Roni Horn, David Rabinowitch and Carl André, and drawings by Ingólfur Arnarsson. The base hospital is being slowly converted into a space for work by Robert Irwin.

In the end, Chinati feels like a monument to Donald Judd's ego, but that doesn't bother me so much. Many museums start their lives as monuments to someone's ego. Usually it's some rich guy--"Look, here is the beauty I owned." Why not let an artist do the same? After all, Chinati feels very different from your garden variety museum. Judd was willing and able to give the work he displayed profound dignity--each artist has his own place and room for the work to breathe. It should be noted, however, that his vision is very macho--gigantic pieces made of construction materials, and only one female artist in the whole bunch (and the piece Van Bruggen helped create is itself sort of a male fantasy). You see this and wonder, what would a female Chinati look like? What if Donald Judd had died 1970 of a brain tumor and Eva Hesse had lived on to create a vast collection out in the desert?

These are the kind of thoughts that can come to you as you wander from barrack to barrack, going crazy from the heat.


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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Seen in Marfa

Robert Boyd



(More here)

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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Road Trip: Marfa

Robert Boyd

When you turn off the freeway just west of Fort Stockton, you feel like you are falling off the map. As long as you are on or near I-10, as I have been since I left Houston, you feel connected. I'm a big city boy, and these two-lane blacktops through the desert are a bit alien. Fort Stockton is a small town (8,283 in 2010 according to the census) but it feels like part of the great American road trip because it's full of name-brand chain hotels. I think people passing through and stopping to eat or sleep may be one of its major industries, along with agriculture.

Turning south on highway 67 is exciting because suddenly you're surrounded by mountains. At first, just purple shapes on the horizon but as you continue south they take form. Eventually, you start driving through them. These aren't huge majestic Colorado-style mountains, but after so much flatness, they are pretty impressive. Up in the mountains, you come to the town of Alpine (pop. 5,905). Just based on the drive through, Alpine seems quite nice. It has a college--Sul Ross University--and has a bit of a college town feel. But things are slow now at the tail end of summer. I filled my tank and moved on.

Marfa is less than 30 miles from Alpine, but you get out of the mountains before you get there (they are still all around, but distant). Fort Stockton and Alpine are bustling metropolises compared to Marfa, which has a population of 1,981. I was curious about the economy of Marfa--does all this art stuff make its people better off? This is a big question, but I figured the 2008 U.S. census might be able to shed some light.



Marfa is the county seat of Presidio County, a huge, sparsely-populated rural county in west Texas. So Marfa is doing better than the county it reigns over, but not all that much different from the towns it is near to--Fort Stockton, Fort Davis, and Alpine. (Valentine is a tiny village about 30 miles northwest of Marfa. I can't explain its numbers except to note that it is surrounded by several very large ranches, and perhaps the ranch owners and their families push the median incomes and education levels up. Because when you drive through Valentine, it looks like an impoverished hell-hole.)

Marfa's gorgeous courthouse

The point is that despite all the galleries and art spaces in Marfa, most people are pretty poor compared to the rest of America and even the rest of Texas. You have two separate societies in Marfa--the mostly Hispanic and poor majority, and the well-educated, well-paid mostly Anglo art aristocracy. I went to a reading at the Marfa Book Company by Alan Heathcock, author of Volt, a short-story collection about an impoverished town where bad things happen. It was a good reading--he was amusing and the story he read was powerful. But I noticed that the crowd for it was 100% white. Indeed, when it was time for questions, many of the questioners had English accents. The Hispanic majority of Marfa stayed away.

But I felt comfortable there. Here were artistic people who loved literature, listening to an writer who had been, for a while at least, a part of their community. Here was an excellent bookstore in the most unlikely of spots. Hell, you could buy Mark Flood's book here.

Books at the Marfa Book Company

And they have their own gallery, showing interesting work by a Marfa artist named Adam Bork. According to the New York Times, Bork is an Austin transplant who in 2004
moved to Marfa to work at the Thunderbird Motel [where I am currently staying-RB], a satellite of his previous place of employment, the San Jose Hotel in Austin, Tex. Two years later he and his wife, Krista Steinhauer, a caterer and chef, bought a food truck and started Food Shark, a mobile “Mediterranean by way of West Texas” eatery. A longtime collector of vintage televisions, and a recording artist formerly known as Earthpig, Bork embraced his new home in a way he never had in the Hill Country Live Music Capital of the World. He put out a new album under his own name, moved into a geodesic dome and began creating fusion works of art unique to a multi-hyphenate of his pedigree: video installations, largely, that employ his many old TVs.
Here's some of his work:

Adam Bork, The Eyes, 2012, televisions and stands

 
Adam Bork, Self-Portrait South Bronx (two states), 2011, light table

Adam Bork, Organ Vision, 2012

Adam Bork, Horizontal VI, 2012, six Commodore 1702 monitors

Adam Bork, C Major/C Minor, seven televisions on stands, 2012

C Major/C Minor was my favorite because it was accompanied by long, spacey chords that appeared to be sung by the faces on the TV. I couldn't tell if the chords were made by human voices, or if they were, if they were really from the mouths opening and closing on screen. Whatever the case, the effect was hypnotic.

But I was still curious--what is the main business of Marfa? It can't be modern art because only a small portion of the population is involved in that industry. It can't even just be tourism--art and tourism work add up to 15% of the working population. A lot more than the U.S. as a whole, but about average for the area. Some people I talked to suggested the Border Patrol was a major employer, and they do have a large office here. And according to the census, it looks like about 30% are employed by the government. That includes people who work for the schools, the courthouse, and various social services, as well as the Border Patrol. And 17% work in agriculture or mining. As prominent as modern art is in Marfa, Uncle Sam pays the rent for a lot more people.

That's been the case for a long time. In the first half of the 20th century, Marfa was home to Fort D.A. Russell, a cavalry outpost, and during World War II, it also had the Marfa Army Airfield, where American soldiers trained to fly. The government has long been a major presence and employer in Marfa.

But art is really prominent. Donald Judd came here in the early 70s and started buying up the town--which I will discuss in a subsequent post. His legacy--and his name--are all over Marfa. The Judd Foundation owns several downtown buildings, and various Judd relations have offices downtown.

Judd, Judd, Judd, Judd

If Ashley and Wynonna came to town with open checkbooks, the whole city could be owned by Judds. And they'd find plenty to buy. Marfa doesn't seem to be all that healthy if judged by the number of houses with for sale signs on them.

Houses for sale in Marfa

These were just a few of the houses for sale that I saw. I asked a resident what the story was. She told me that there was a lot of churn--people come to Marfa to live and find living here is harder than it looks. Sure, they have a great bookstore, but there's no pharmacy here. But she also suggested that Marfa had been part of the same property boom that much of the rest of America had in the last decade, and that many of the "for sale" signs had been there since 2008.

And even if Marfa's art scene employs a small minority of its residents, it has made a permanent mark on the town. Marfa has more than its share of modern houses.

Marfa moderns

Not to mention funky houses, like this pink one with its rough glass brick wall.


Pink, funky house

And of course the art is all around. After Chinati, Donald Judd's enormous personal museum, the biggest art institution in town is Ballroom Marfa. Ballroom Marfa has been here since 2003, and from what I can tell, it was a big catalyst for Marfa's current hipness. Obviously Chinati is the bedrock of Marfa's art scene, and the story has it that friends and colleagues of Donald Judd had been trickling in (and out) of the town ever since Judd first showed up in the early 70s. But Ballroom Marfa wasn't about housing a mostly unchanging collection of art the way Chinati does. Ballroom Marfa is continually doing new things--new exhibits, new performances, new film and video programs--not to mention amazing music performances. (Between Ballroom Marfa and local juke-joint Padre's, Marfa has a very happening live music scene.) This meant that post-2003, visitors to Marfa could expect to find something new every time they came.

Ballroom Marfa

Unfortunately, Ballroom Marfa didn't have an exhibit up when I was there. (Let's just say that August is not the ideal time to visit. The action seems to really happen in September and October.) But they were running the Artists' Films International, so I stopped in and watched a few.

Elmgreen and Dragset, Prada Marfa, 2005, adobe bricks, plaster, paint, glass pane, aluminum frame, MDF, and carpet, Prada brand shoes and purses

Ballroom Marfa's most famous project, however, is actually about 30-odd miles out of town. This is Prada Marfa, a tiny fake Prada storefront by artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingmar Dragset. It is seriously isolated--there is nothing but a highway and a railroad track near it. Despite that, I managed to blow right past it at 90 miles an hour without noticing it. I had to backtrack to find it. It's really small--smaller than it looks in the photos.

Elmgreen and Dragset, Prada Marfa, 2005, adobe bricks, plaster, paint, glass pane, aluminum frame, MDF, and carpet, Prada brand shoes and purses

This is because it is shallow--it is far wider than it is deep. There it nothing behind the visible showroom. The doors to the nonexistent back of the building are just mirrors. In the photo above, you can see my image reflected in one of those mirrors.

Elmgreen and Dragset, Prada Marfa (and me), 2005, adobe bricks, plaster, paint, glass pane, aluminum frame, MDF, and carpet, Prada brand shoes and purses

Of course I took my photo in front of Prada Marfa. Everyone does. But the thing that's weird is that anyone drives a 60+ mile round trip to see it at all. It's just a joke, a humorous bit of incongruity that one one hand combines the suave urbanity of Prada with the awesome nowhereness of the desert, while at the same time making fun of the increasing trendiness of Marfa itself. While I was there, reflecting on this absurdity and my complicity with it, I was reminded of a passage from White Noise by Don DeLillo:
Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

"No one sees the barn," he said finally.

A long silence followed.

"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

"We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."

Another silence ensued.

"They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

"What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?"
Of course, before it became the most photographed conceptual art project in the desert, Prada Marfa was nothing. It has never been anything but the "accumulation of nameless energies." As I got in my car to drive back to Marfa, a truck coming from that direction slowed down and and turned in front of it. A young, hip couple got out, no doubt to take pictures of themselves in front of Prada Marfa.

Thunderbird Motel

Once Ballroom Marfa was there, new hip hotels and restaurants started opening. The Thunderbird, where I am staying, was remodeled and turned hip in 2005 (designed by Lake/Flato Architects). Food Shark opened in 2007. Cochineal opened in 2008. Hipster trailer hotel El Cosmico opened in 2009, I think. In short, your lodging and eating options in Marfa have broadened considerably in the years since Ballroom Marfa set up shop.

 
The Ayn Foundation is in this building

And in addition to all these places to stay and eat and hear music, art has metastisized in Marfa. There is the Ayn Foundation, which has two large painting installations in downtown Marfa. One is called September Eleven by German artist Maria Zerres, which I thought was pretty terrible. But I was surprised how much I liked their other installation, some Andy Warhol Last Supper paintings.

Andy Warhol, Last Supper paintings

Andy Warhol, Last Supper painting

Exhibitions 2D is a co-op gallery featuring a rotating collection of work by nine different American artists. The work is minimal, which fits into the Chinati vibe, but decidedly unmonumental. The gallery is modest converted house.


Exhibitions 2D gallery

John Robert Craft had some floor pieces that I liked a whole lot. His story is interesting. He didn't start making artwork seriously until he was forty. And he makes it on his family farm in Clarendon, Texas, way up in the Panhandle. It somehow makes sense that he'd bring it from one remote part of Texas to another to sell the work. But in the end, there is the work--heavy and rugged, it looks like the kind of scrap you might find in a heavy oil-field equipment manufacturer factory floor. Its weight is emphasized by its placement on the floor.


John Robert Craft, Mid-Point Bar, cast steel, 3.5" x 3.5" x 53"


John Robert Craft, Point Ring, cast iron, 21" diameter x 5"


Gloria Graham, Carbon of Carbon Dioxide, 1994, graphite, kaolin, canvas, wood panels, 34" x 170"

Gloria Graham's obsessively penciled drawing reminded me a little of Serra's, except using graphite made it seem more "drawing-like" than Serra's paint stick drawings. Graphite gives is a shininess, but it also seems somehow more obsessive than using a big fat paint stick.

Some of the galleries I wanted to see were closed. (Again, August--not ideal for Marfa). I missed Eugene Binder and Galleri Urbane (with a name like that, they should be selling Nagel prints), which had been on my list of galleries to visit. But I did make one serendipitous discovery, Arber & Sons Editions. As I was walking down a nondescript street, I heard a big hello. It was the woman who had taken our group on the guided tour of Chinati the previous day. Her name is Valerie Arber, and she was standing outside a little storefront with the following banner above it:

 
 
Arber & Sons Editions

This symbol is the "chop" for Arber & Sons Editions. (I liked that it looked like a brand such as you see on so many ranch signs around Marfa.) Robert Arber is a printmaker who apprenticed at Tamarind (one of the storied art printers in the U.S.). The Arbers came out to Marfa before everything blew up. They have long ties with Chinati--they have published prints by Judd and several other Chinati artists. And they have an annual project where they work with a former Chinati resident to produce a beautiful boxed print set, all 30 cm x 30 cm.

Daniel Göttin, SIXXS, 2003, six lithographs in the 30 x 30 cm project

A devoted print collector could, over time, collect a bookshelf full of these handsome portfolios. The printshop itself is a small old movie theater. The lobby area acts as a showroom for Valerie Arber's own artwork and for the 30 x 30 cm project. Where the seats were is where they keep their presses (and a collection of old motorcycles), and the pair live in the projection booth.

Donald Judd prints at Arber & Son Editions, with Robert Arber in the foreground

I guess the thing about being a printmaker is that you get to keep some of the prints. So they had an amazing collection hanging on the wall (and on the floor leaning on stuff) of prints by Donald Judd, Ilya Kabakov, Bruce Nauman and more.

Bruce Nauman prints and motorcycles

But the coolest thing was seeing the printing gear, including litho stones, like this one with an image by David Rabinowitch.

 
A David Rabinowitch litho stone

That's Marfa as I experienced it except for one big thing--Chinati. And that's my next post.


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