Leaf 20
Project: On the Road in West West Texas
The Davis Mountains to the Chinati Foundation: Minimalism as Material Epiphany
One may be the loneliest number but West Western Texas challenges that perception by the occasional brusque encounter of human with beast. [fig.1] We are on the road again Now heading from Alpine to Marfa, to the Chinati and Donald Judd Foundations. Conceived by the New York artist in the late 1970's, the stunning Modern Art collections,—literally grounded in the desolate Chihuahuan Desert—are scattered across a scraggly 340 acre site. Grid, Timber Spindle and Lever Sculpture by Carl Andre, Roni Horn's feral conceptual pieces at a confrontational stand-off, iconic and fashionable cars blow-torched into witty ensembles by John Chamberlain and lavishly exhibited off-site in a vast building in town. Then there are color-pulsing OP Art experiments by Dan Flavin and Roni Horn's cast glass Conceptual pieces, as well as much much more, living inside and outside repurposed buildings. Not forgetting the comical graffiti and caricatures left behind by departing military units.
Think of the dazed and amazed visitor—visually gorged with Contemporary Art by its most rigorous abstract masters—from Canadian David Rabinowich's austerely-smooth, linear and elliptical steel geometries to one of Richard Long's concentric Sea Water Circles [1988], a triple-ringed assemblage of pumiced Icelandic lava. Like Long's piece, also outdoors and near the former Army stables, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen seemingly hang their whimsical Monument to the Last Horse [1991] over our heads and framing a cerulean sky. Imagine a gigantic horseshoe, pierced by a crooked nail driven into the rust, floating above a small concrete slab.
This interactive gesture—to conjoin the stark natural environment with stripped-down structure— takes on a symbolic meaning in Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's mythic as well as historical School Number 6 installation [1993]. In a wrenching Minimalism, the artists capture a bygone era concentrated in its abandoned, now drab, educational bits and pieces. A handful of dingy rooms in a disused army "cottage" poignantly evoke the mournful interior of a former Soviet schoolhouse. Floors accumulating years of dust are dotted with dried shreds of yellowing paper. Our sense of an unremarked vanishing is heightened by the small, scratched student benches adorned with cracked blackboards and disappearing words. Faded and torn propaganda posters mounted on the institutional green and peeling walls, plus a gaping bookcase all, taken together, conjure a broken bell jar whose inhabitants, period content, and high purpose have evaporated into the granular air.
It's easy to get lost in this flat and inconspicuous Trans-Pecos town. Even with instructions, we wandered disoriented down unmarked dirt roads and by the bones of peopleless neighborhoods on the way to its internationally renowned, but unfashionably under-advertised, art epicenter. The colorful trompe-l'oeil Prada store front –just up the road–only accentuates Marfa's air of punctuated emptiness. Minimalist landscape coupled to Minimalist aesthetics. This sense of desolation, interrupted by strategic visual shocks, is underscored by the fact that the permanent installations are housed in two repurposed artillery sheds [now undergoing repair] that heighten their isolation as well as singular connectedness. These former military buildings were originally part of the decommissioned [1946] Cavalry and and Air Reconaissance units stationed at Fort D.A. Russell established to protect West Texas from Pancho Villa raids. If San Angelo's Fort Concho Heritage Site was memorable for its bezel-like parade ground, centering a gem of a late nineteenth-century Cavalry Post, Marfa's structures appear scattered and heedless as if having undergone the geological whims of the surrounding borderlands.
Even to get there is a haunting experience. Leaving San Angelo on Route 67, we skirt the Eastern edge of the Permian Basin wandering among gracefully-dipping pump jacks, haphazard oil storage tanks, and fields of towering white wind turbines festooned with long arcs of air-slicing blades. At night, this strange choreography turns dystopian. Fiery methane gas flares rim the horizon. Shapes vanish into mysterious points of light: electrical generators glow brightly and windmills come alive with blinking red dots whose height, position, and timing vary according to the speed of rotation of their metal "sails". What under hot sunshine appears controlled, neutral, turns unpredictable and nightmarish in the dark. We intuit that an apocalyptic technology is relentlessly reinventing itself just out-of-reach. An apt thought since, Southeast of Marfa, an AI Data Center is potentially projected on 80,000 acres of former ranch land.
Fort Davis, Big Bend, Alpine, the Glass Mountains, Presidio and the dwindling Rio Grande: all: showcasing art depicting the high plains, regional culture, desert-ringed mountains and a newly-glorious dark night sky. In the breadth of this outback, imagine the dust storms, the edginess, and the relentless moving light and shadow that drew Donald Judd to the hard tack of Marfa in 1971.
As sculptor, architect, and designer of lucid space, Judd is also the crowning master of the box. This iconic structure–simultaneously sculpture, architecture, furniture, mechanical device, achieved one of its most memorable artistic embodiments in the Wonder Cabinet reigning in the Early Modern Period. Skillfully-crafted cabinetry, virtuoso intarsia, ostentatiously inlaid inside and out with rare woods, these mysterious, secretive, and unique containers were an omnium gatherum of the world's rarities. In the nineteenth-century, their ideal of holding and displaying the natural and artificial curiosities of the known world evolved into a host of boxed optical and theatrical devices in every conceivable medium. These encyclopedic hold-alls crested in the popular snappy and omnivorous camera, flickering motion pictures meant to be seen in the dark, automated apparatus heading ultimately to the twentieth-century's box of boxes–the self-contained and all-containing computer for everyman and every woman.
Judd has stripped this witty as well as profound container to a repetitive industrial core: to a rectangular aluminum or Cor-Ten "frame" that visually frames whatever and wherever it happens to be set. The road into Marfa, for example, is lined with what, at first glance, looks like casually-stacked concrete culvert reinforcements or machined units for the repair of bridges and Interstates, a transit project presently ongoing throughout the state. Yet, it's this revolution of the box into a hundred boxes that makes Judd's 3-D grids so precisely a part of the long history of the box. He upends our expectations. Voided of inherent content, his impersonal prefabricated work allows portions of the landscape to have its moments under the sun, to slip into our attention. This is a concept that doesn't flaunt itself or show-off individual workmanship. I find a refreshing humility and reticence, a contemporary care for what is so quietly collected,
For the dramatic, visitors must go indoors. The white-painted and large-windowed sheds dissolve his stunningly arranged boxes into a cross-cutting web of high-polish reflections. Some are so brilliant they transform the Cor-Ten into glass. Others "open" them into deep, translucent caves. The earth-level windows not only look out over scorched sand, ragged mesquite, fragments of inscrutable mountain, but one side of the flanking walls is always in shade, while the other flames with hot brightness. Inside the exhibition space, the cast boxes are more complex, wiped into a radiant shimmer or transformed into opaque black boxes.
These differentially-shaped geometric solids have sections pared away. Squared table tops, arcs, dips, hollows, holes catch, repel, or attract the subtly varying illumination depending on the time of day. The installation principle is one of conjuring forever: long, linear, adjacent rows of reflecting steel boxes that seemingly could stretch beyond the confines of the building and conjunct with the parched and glittering landscape. Barely perceptible marks scraping the floor, however, interrupt our imagining of an eternal process. Faint smudges show how the punishing alternation of cold darkness and brutal light have made some boxes inch away from their initial placement.
Six smaller buildings hold Dan Flavin's 1961 perception experiments that similarly have the visitor stand at the start of a dark corridor-like hall. At its end is a canted wall hiding its contents at the base of a long acute angle. Visible from a distance–resembling the thinned pigment dripping from a watercolor brush–a greenish glow leaks out and tints the building's rear wall turning it into a screen.
In this collaborative optical project, Flavin and Judd [who did not want to see their collaboration together] created an auratic effect with commercial phosphorescent neon tubes angled to the left or right in a rectangular array. In these light, perception, and focus experiments, the artists obliged automatic color processes to show themselves physiologically. They were specifically interested in performing the bodily effect of chromatic reversal with colors from the opposite side of the color circle: i.e., secondary colors which, when stared at for a period of time, reversed themselves: thus green had an after image of red; yellow of violet; orange of green. These automatic flipping operations were only physically revealed when the visitor walked outside into the other half of the same building.
As remarked, if the hidden interior of the acute angle contained a tilted rectangle or drapery composed of eight orange tubes, violet stains the adjacent wall. More gripping, however, is the trip to the other, hidden side of the installation. There, the visitor is invited to reach through the violet tubes from the back. As my hand pushed into the primary exhibition room, it turned incontrovertibly violet as if pulling on a glove. No trick, but an optical fact of the materiality of light and the organic processes of brain and body. The Newton's prism experiments demonstrated that all colored light blended together results in white. Strangely, this paradox applies to my uncanny Marfa art experience. The radical emptiness of the surroundings, the implacable yellow light, the moving violet shadows over the pale oceanic desert spur a heady conceptual mixing. Like Judd and Flavin, raw terrain and austere monochromatic sculpture or painting collaborate perfectly in the limiting of sensory information and unleashing the visionary. in the co-creation of wild art–an ineffable something in between earthy natural monuments and a mythical geometry–as old as Cyclopean masonry and as new as the contemporary heath and mountain-inspired immaterial abstraction of Mathieu van Riel.