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“If you are interested in a thing it is interesting, and if you are not it is not.”—Donald Judd
[The Chinati Foundation]
Marfa is a small Texas town set in a shockingly beautiful desert landscape. It is chiefly known as the artist Donald Judd’s former home, where he worked and lived—activities that were always inseparable for him. Over our two days in Marfa, my very dear old friend Erika and I visited Chinati, Judd’s residence (including his extensive library and three large studios full of his early work), and the former Wool and Mohair Building in the middle of town, which houses John Chamberlain’s work. It was a weekend of seeing and thinking about—and really almost living in—art.
Docent-led tours of Chinati begin with Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982–1986, which are installed in a regular pattern in two former artillery sheds. When Judd acquired this place in the seventies, it was a three-hundred-acre deserted military base. The artillery sheds once held German prisoners of war. You feel the military history as you walk around, as if it is a shadow or a former life, hovering behind the present. There are still commands in German painted on the walls. Moving within and between the artillery sheds, you sense that you are both inside and outside; there is no air conditioning, which contributes to the feeling of collapse. You can almost always see the sparse Texas landscape, to which Judd was so drawn, as you walk through converted buildings, past their windows and doors.
You feel the military history as you walk around, as if it is a shadow or a former life, hovering behind the present.
Dan Flavin’s work occupies six former military bunkhouses and makes up the second phase of the tour. Judd wrote in “Specific Objects” that Flavin “appropriated the results of industrial production” in his use of fluorescent lights; certainly, this resonates with Judd’s own use of aluminum and concrete, among other materials. Judd outlined the potential of what he termed “the new three-dimensional work” in the 1965 essay. He predicted that “…it will be larger than painting and much larger than sculpture, which, compared to painting, is fairly particular, much nearer to what is usually called a form, having a certain kind of form.” His rejection of illusionism and his embrace of its alternative—geometry—is everywhere at Chinati. And the extraordinary breadth of art is a testament to Judd’s vision for the place. Also on display is Roni Horn’s Things That Happen Again: For a Here and a There, 1986–1991, a work in solid copper, and Carl Andre’s poem installation for the more linguistically inclined. Chinati is, as Judd would say, interesting.
There are several terms that float around in your head as you walk around Chinati. Material. Scale. Space. You feel what David Raskin has termed the “vitality” of Judd’s work. Judd acquired a degree in philosophy from Columbia University in 1953. He often invoked Hume’s empiricism and the principle that only what one can feel or experience can be verified. While I was part of these extraordinary landscapes and spaces, I felt reminded that there is only the material, only matter, and that everything else begins, and comes, from this.
After our tour of Chinati, Erika and I went to see Chamberlain’s work and Judd’s residence and studios, which he bought in 1973. Later that day, I returned to Chinati by myself and walked into the field where Judd’s 15 untitled works in concrete, 1980–1984 are installed. I listened to the sound of my sandals on the dirt and felt the heat of the sun on my arms as I walked along, around, and through these works, these units in space: parts and wholes in and of themselves. These works make you feel both free and bound by space. Maybe the sense of freedom they impart is an effect of being bound. Our weekend in Marfa was part of a road trip I took from New York to Los Angeles, so when we arrived, I had already been thinking about space and about what it means to be a subject in space. I had travelled from New York down to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, then along the Blue Ridge Parkway and into the Smokies of Tennessee, and down through Arkansas and into Louisiana along a beautiful country road, and then into the hill country of Texas, where I met up with Erika. We were college roommates, back in the day.
I listened to the sound of my sandals on the dirt and felt the heat of the sun on my arms as I walked along, around, and through these works, these units in space: parts and wholes in and of themselves.
The metaphors of the road trip are inescapable and, at times, oppressive. When you are in the middle of such a trip, you feel trapped by narrative and image, unable to shake free of the many representations you have seen before. People will say that the dominant metaphor of the road trip is the road before you—this road that unfurls itself beneath the tires of your car—but this is not true. The real figure for the road trip is the rearview mirror; you are always moving away more than you are moving towards. Because the road is linear, we connect it to narrative: it has its own past narratives—trips taken by countless people, through marked and unmarked space—and it generates new ones for all who travel along it. For me, Chinati offered a freedom from narrative—those we generate, those we consume, and those in which we participate. Freedom, even, from Marfa’s own narratives of what it is and where it came from.
[Judd’s Residence and Studios]
Judd’s residence challenges all definitions of a house. His actual house—or primary living space, as he “lived” in his studios and library as well—is one of many buildings that make up a kind of compound in the center of town, a fortress surrounded by a nine-foot adobe wall. These buildings are set in an outdoor space that might be characterized as a courtyard. The house itself is not usually open to the public, but our guide let us walk through since we were the only people there that afternoon. (Judd also purchased and renovated a Manhattan lift building in 1986, and this space is now open to the public as well.) Judd collected textiles—lots of Scottish tartans and Native American blankets and rugs. I particularly liked the three knight-in-shining-armor puppets that hung in the stairwell that led up to his bedroom. He made his own furniture. He entertained a lot. In some ways, the house has much in common with the studio spaces.
While I was part of these extraordinary landscapes and spaces, I felt reminded that there is only the material, only matter, and that everything else begins, and comes, from this.
The studios struck me as memorial spaces, as places where Judd could look into the dark abysm of time. In each of the studios is a bed. He could sleep in these rooms if he wished; he could live in them, not as cold gallery spaces, but as part of his home. Sitting on beds that he designed and looking at his earlier works was like surveying a past version of himself. These pieces form one of the collections at his residence, and they remind you of the breadth of his work and his materials. Over the course of his career, Judd worked with galvanized iron, wood, colored Plexiglas, stainless steel, lacquer on aluminum and wood, oil on wood, enamel, brass, copper, unpainted plywood, concrete and hot-rolled steel. The other collection is his library, another form of autobiography. Walter Benjamin knew a thing or two about what a collection says about its collector, particularly when it comes to books. He said that ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Objects embody the chaos of memory. These volumes map out an intellectual life: ideas and memories, memories of ideas.
Judd’s library is divided into two large rooms and ordered chronologically by subject. I remember lots of books about stars and the universe. I remember books about Richard Serra, lined up in the middle of the first row of shelves, the row you can see most clearly. Benjamin’s Illuminations was on the second shelf, right around the middle of the room. And in the other room, which houses the earlier materials, I remember lots of green and red Loeb editions of the classics and paperbacks of English Renaissance poetry and plays. Donne. Milton. Shakespeare. Herbert. As Erika looked over the shelves, she mused that some of the books were the same editions that we read at Columbia. They weren’t valuable editions, and this is part of the reason that they remain on the shelves—just as he left them. Even the books he was reading before he died are still on the table where he was working. Their colors are faded by the sun, their pages curled from the heat. I liked this aspect of the library, that the books have been left as they were rather than moved into a temperature-controlled vault. The volumes are bound by time, doomed to decay as they stand as memorials of the past.
[The Town of Marfa]
Now “Marfa” is something other than the former home of Donald Judd, though it is hard to untangle the town’s art scene from its emphasis on tourism. It is a cultural phenomenon. Marfa is both highly artificial—a kind of playground for urban bourgeois intellectuals—and deeply sincere, or invested in its own authenticity. I found this to be an appealing combination. Marfa has a way of foregrounding its own tensions and inconsistencies. Residents and visitors talk a lot about the food there. The desire for good food and drink—it would be easy to chalk this up as the ultimate bourgeois fetish, and certainly there is some truth to this. But eating in Marfa reminds you that the mind and the body are not discrete units, but points on a material continuum.
The town may be carefully curated, but it remains bound up in the elements and in the physical. Erika and I arrived in the early evening, just as the sky was darkening. By the time we had checked into our room, a violent hailstorm was underway. The storm drove everyone who had been sunning by the pool inside. We kept our door to the central hotel courtyard open and drank bourbon as the storm tossed hail through the threshold. The storm suggested that we were in an uncontrolled, even hostile, landscape. People come to Marfa for the Chinati Foundation. It is a kind of pilgrimage. We tend to think of pilgrimages as “spiritual,” to use a rather imprecise term, but we forget how physical a pilgrimage is: it is hard work, and it reminds you that nothing can be understood apart from the body. To go to Marfa is to take a pilgrimage into matter—into its presence and its remove.
People in Marfa will tell you that there was “nothing” here before Judd arrived. Of course, this is not true. Cecilia Thompson’s two-volume History of Marfa and Presidio County outlines the development of the region from the Indian occupation of the Big Bend area to the mining and ranching settlements of the 1890s up through the Second World War. The ranching population still makes up the majority of the town’s 2,000 or so residents, but the artsier denizens of Marfa are invested in a narrative that insists on a creation ex nihilo. A genesis. Marfa has always been a something, but it strikes one as oddly in dialogue with nothingness, too. There is something magical about this part of the Texas desert, and it does seem capable of transforming nothings into somethings.
After dinner on the second night, we drove nine miles outside of town on Route 90 to look for the Marfa lights. Erika stood against the railing of the viewing platform and looked out at the horizon. I lay down on the still-warm stone floor and looked up at the stars. W. S. Merwin wrote a poem about these mysterious lights in which he called them “…candles at noon being carried / by hands never seen never caught on film / never believed as they go up the long stairs…” After a while, Erika noticed a series of white lights off in the distance that would appear and disappear. They certainly looked strange—not like car headlights. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but I felt that I was seeing something.
We kept our door to the central hotel courtyard open and drank bourbon as the storm tossed hail through the threshold.
Why do people come to the desert, to these vast, empty spaces? Is it because one can mark the presence of the human so dramatically against a backdrop of sand? Several days later, when I was in Palm Springs, I had the same thought. What about all those mid-century movie stars who came from Hollywood to the desert to eat, drink and be merry? They built pools and cabanas. They mixed cocktails. They donned gowns and tuxedos. They created an “oasis,” as Palm Springs still refers to itself. The dominant aesthetic of Palm Springs may have nothing in common with that of Marfa, but the two share this investment in a desolate landscape molded by humans. As you drive into Palm Springs, you pass through hills blanketed with row upon row of enormous, chalk-white windmills. I drove past these machines as the sun was setting; they were whirling away, their blades cutting through the air. These looming objects made the landscape strange, and they reminded me of Marfa. I don’t know why; I suppose I thought that Judd would like them. Maybe Palm Springs and Marfa are utopias in the sense that the Greeks meant: no-spaces, places that do not exist.
[PRADA Marfa]
We drove to PRADA Marfa on our last day. We were headed to El Paso, where I planned to drop Erika at the airport and continue my westward push. The permanently installed, site-specific land-art project—a model of a PRADA boutique by Danish artist Michael Elmgreen and Norwegian artist Ingar Dragset—is located about 30 miles outside of Marfa near Valentine, Texas.
The installation is about inspiring consumer desire while shutting down the possibility of fulfilling this desire. The PRADA shoes (all right-footed) and handbags housed in this store-that’s-not-really-a-store are reminders of the power of the fetish even as they also operate as empty signifiers. One views them through the store window, the ultimate constructed fantasy space, but one cannot obtain them. They remain withheld, which is, of course, appropriate, as desire must remain unfulfilled: it is always in excess of its object. As Erika said, the installation also draws attention to the absurdity of displacing a luxury clothing brand into a desert landscape. The shoes and handbags are decontextualized, useless. It’s not a stretch to read PRADA Marfa as a comment on Marfa’s own bourgeois transformation. Perhaps none of this—art, fancy restaurants, hipster-y hotels—belongs in the Texas desert. Perhaps we don’t either.
We met a young Dallas artist at the installation—she was the only other person there—who was taking pictures of tourists taking pictures of the store. She asked if she could photograph us, and we said yes and held up our iPhones, dutifully reducing the installation to photographic form, consuming it as an art object as one consumes a pair of platform shoes. We had already taken pictures of the store when we arrived, so this moment was a repetition of another moment that had already taken place. PRADA Marfa seemed to disrupt time. I wasn’t sure where, or when, we were.
PRADA Marfa seemed to disrupt time. I wasn’t sure where, or when, we were.
PRADA Marfa is really a memento mori. The structure will never be repaired; it will decompose over the years and, eventually, be reduced to nothing. This will take a long time by the standard measure of time of one person. It will not take a very long time by any other standard. Like Judd’s work, it makes you think about materials—in this case, adobe, aluminum, plaster, paint, glass, fiberboard, carpet—and their necessary impermanence. The dead flies that litter the carpet are haunting, and I have found myself thinking back to them since I arrived in Los Angeles. In a sense, the PRADA store is dead: it is uninhabited by human form, locked, and filled with beautiful things like the beautiful things that populate Renaissance vanitas portraits. In Hans Holbein’s 1533 painting The Ambassadors, an anamorphic skull stretches across the image of two well-dressed, powerful men surrounded by luxury objects of the day—luxury objects not unlike those on display at PRADA Marfa. These objects remind them that they will die.
Erika and I spoke about memento mori over the weekend. She had recently completed a triptych of a decomposing tree, and I was working on an article about the mourning of an English Renaissance poet and courtier. We talked about how uncomfortable people are with the subject of death. There are strong cultural prohibitions against talking or thinking about death; you are deemed “morbid.” But of course you have to think about death in order to feel alive; to deny thanatos is to deny eros. There was something mournful about PRADA Marfa, as if it was an abandoned ruin from a lost civilization or a memorial to something unknown. Set in a desolate landscape, alongside a highway that stretches into nothingness, PRADA Marfa is a monitory emblem, a reminder of the future. Viewing it, I felt something akin to what Holbein’s ambassadors were supposed to feel. The awareness of being fastened to a dying animal. And I felt good. And as we drove away from the store, I thought of those dead flies, and the hot Texas sun, and all the lengths of road that were behind me.
Susan Harlan is an English professor at Wake Forest University, where she specializes in Shakespeare. Her essays have appeared in venues such as The Awl, The Guardian US, Curbed National, The Toast, Roads & Kingdoms, The Morning News, Skirt!, and Public Books. She wrote a ten-part series for Nowhere called “The Nostalgic Traveler” that considers how objects and places both connect and alienate us from the past.
All photography by Claire L. Evans.