It’s always Marfa Marfa Marfa!
Posted on | July 12, 2009 | No Comments
I tried to explain where we were headed to any number of people back in NYC and invetiby the conversation went like this:
me:…and then we’re going to Marfa Texas.
someone: Martha?
me:No, Maaarffffffa
someone: and it’s where?
me: deepest darkest West Texas
someone: so where’s Dallas again?
me: it’s not near anything, including Dallas
someone:and you’re going because?
me: because a town in the middle of nowhere surrounded by deserts, mesas and minimal art sounds awesome
someone: and it’s called Martha?
Marfa isn’t for everyone. There’s a review on Tripadvisor.com of the Chinati foundaiton(a museum outside of town) that is basically a rant about how boring and terrible this whole minimal art thing is and blah blah blah. Look, this is a town of two thousand people and it’s closer to San Diego than Houston. Driving here takes seven hours from Austin and there are not a lot of cars on the highway. Maybe I’ve read to many Cormac McCarthy novels but this is beautiful country. We drove through so many places that looked and felt the same during our trip. Suburban Texarkana looks a lot like Suburban Fort Worth looks a lot like suburban Nashville etc..I don’t take a bleak and dystopian view of these places(it’s a question or land use policy rather than corporate greed or government conspiracy)but the way all of these places get constructed produces a landscape with few differences, even across thousands of miles.
West Texas looks and feels completely different from those places. The inroads made by modernity in the form of gas stations and supermarkets stand out from the old newspaper and utility buildings, the town halls and hotels that have stood, often empty and patient, for the better part of a century. I’m not romanticizing this place. It exists at the intersection of a lot of complex forces, not all of them positive: the oil boom, the railroad boom, the subsequent busts, the transformation of america from a rural agrarian society to an urban one. We waited in line at a convenience store behind ten or fifteen Mexican day laboreres just off from work buying forties and snacks. I hardly think that they find their life on the lonely plains of rural Texas romantic. But the sun is different here, the sky is the bluest you can imagine and the desert goes for miles filled with cactus and scrub brush. And in that desolation there is something fascinating, a placelessness, a welcome disorientation. This is truly nowhere which also means that it could be anywhere. Perhaps I am looking for the long since closed frontier. Perhaps there really is something magical in the famous Marfa Mystery Lights. Who knows.
And the art is wonderful. There are giant Donald Judd sculptures in the desert and you can touch and climb and walk around them. We took both tours, morning and afternoon, at the Chinati Foundation which is the organization in charge of this part of Judd’s estate. The tours are great because you don’t get a lot of information. It’s a little like having somone read those little cards next to paintings at a museum. Name, materials, date. You get to just look, think and take pictures. The foundation’s laid back approach and amazing collection stands apart from the Judd Foundation’s tour of their namesake’s studio and home. The Judd foundation seems to be a on a mission to take Judd’s work as seriously and obsessively as Judd apparently did, and they’re doing a great job. Taking the tour of the living quarters and studio one is confronted over and over again with the unfotunate conflation of the man and the work. A collection of cassete tapes sits on a trunk and has obviously not been moved since Judd obsessively organized them before he died, a library is maintained exactly the way it was including the placement of every single volume. You cannot take any picture or touch ANYTHING. One gets the sense that this is not so much as museum as it is a tomb. I understand that he is a seminal artist but that doesn’t mean that having his children live with the kind of spare uncomfortable furniture and spaces that he preferred was anything short of cruel.
And I LIKE the work. I really do. It’s minimal and precise and well built. But can we stop speaking with such revereance about the way some of the spaces are concevied. The architecture here really ought to be thought of as rudimentary and gimmicky. There are tons of plan tricks and proportions that are impossible to detect while actually occupying the space. Some square footage adds up to other square footage but you’d never know from looking because doing shit like that in plan is so dumb you’d get laughed out of the room in any architecture school. It’s the kind of stuff that you learn NOT to do. And it’s frusturating to listen to tour guides speak with such reverance about such an easy trick. We don’t experience space in plan. Are you in a room right now? Can you tell me how big it is? How many square feet? Probably not with any certainty because our brains just don’t process space like that. Plans are abstractions of the physical form. Getting caught up in the plan something that happens to home renovators and amateur architects like Judd.
Even with all that, we still had an amazing time. We ate the best Pizza I’ve had west of the Mississippi(it was so good we went twice), we went to the darkest observatory in the US and saw Saturn through a telescope and we drove through some of the most desolate beautiful country I’ve ever seen. I took about three hundred pictures which I must go through before posting and about a dozen polaroids(thanks Ben!) that I’ll be putting up as soon as we get back. I really liked this place and am sad that we have to leave it today.
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