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Article Excerpt
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This is not an essay about Marfa. By now you've probably read an article or two about the place, breathless odes in a variety of publications--glossy monthlies, art journals, travel magazines, the New York Times. You've heard about how this tiny little one-traffic-light town, isolated in the high scrub just north of Big Bend, has become the improbable pleasure ground of the Euro-American art crowd, how galleries and boutiques and nice hotels and restaurants have opened there, how it's been turned into an oasis, or perhaps a blight, in West Texas. I'm not going to talk about that at all. [paragraph] This is an essay about space and time, and if that sounds even more dreadful, let me explain: I spent a month in Marfa last spring, as the grateful guest of the Chinati Foundation. They had invited me to stay in a bungalow on the grounds of a decommissioned Army base, which now serves as a 340-acre compound dedicated to the art of Donald Judd and the artists he loved and which hosts, on a semiformal basis, artists from out of town who need space and time to work.
Judd settled in Marfa more than thirty years ago. Soon after he arrived, he began buying local properties, and in time he came to own a good part of the town, along with 40,000 acres of land down by the border. In 1979, with the help of the Philippa de Menil-funded Dia Art Foundation, he bought what had once been Fort D. A. Russell. On the grounds were two run-down artillery sheds, which he rebuilt and renovated, giving them great windows along the sides and semicircular roofs, and in which he installed 100 large boxy sculptures made of mill aluminum. They're identical in their dimensions--41 by 51 by 72 inches--but they differ in their construction: Some are whole, some are transected, some have recesses or partitions. There are 48 boxes in one building and 52 in the other, immaculately arranged in rows of three, from one end of the space to the other.
Marfa is a company town, and the company is Judd. The sheds at Chinati are the purpose and point of the whole endeavor, but the boxes they contain are mysterious things, mute, silvery, exact, definitively modern. My bungalow lay right beside them, and there I sat, through most of April. My truck was parked in a garage in Alpine, waiting for a new transmission, so I couldn't get around, and anyway, I was supposed to be working on a novel. But mostly what I did was...
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