Robert Irwin, the octogenarian light-and-space artist, designer of the Getty and lacma gardens, wearer of Hawaiian shirts and baseball caps, looked out at one of the largest unpopulated areas in the contiguous United States. His vantage point was a rooftop (in fact, our rooftop) at the edge of the Far West Texas town of Marfa. And while the view stretched out 60 or 70 miles (tall yellow grass and gently sloping mountains), Irwin’s focus was on a former army hospital less than a mile away. He has been working on plans for the renovation of this structure for more than a decade. The current iteration requires that the building be knocked down and reconstructed with a sunken floor and windows which begin at chest height so that, as the artist told us, “you will see a little bit of landscape and a lot of sky.” From within, the West Texas desert “will look like a Dutch landscape.” This permanent, large-scale installation will be the crowning work of his career. Irwin added, “Hopefully I won’t go facedown in my pudding before it’s done.”
The project of demolishing and reconstructing a hospital in order to evoke a van Eyck fits into the history of this remote border town (about 200 miles from El Paso or Midland—take your pick). Irwin’s contemporary, the New York minimalist artist Donald Judd, settled here in 1972. Judd purchased dozens of buildings with the help of the New York–based Dia Art Foundation—which at the time had unlimited access to the Schlumberger oil fortune—and filled them with his own work, as well as pieces by artists he admired, before his death, at the age of 65, in 1994, halfway through the process of creating “permanent installations of contemporary art that are among the largest and most beautiful in the world,” as his New York Times obituary put it. In the years since his death, the town of Marfa has changed radically. He left New York to escape the “glib and harsh” art scene, but because of his singular vision here, Judd laid the groundwork for present-day Marfa, which one resident described as an “East Coast Utopia” and another as an “art cruise ship where you just hope the last stop is a Betty Ford Center.” Take your pick again.
Irwin took a sip of a margarita (salted rim) and said, “The first time I came to Marfa it was really cold in L.A. So I drove down to San Diego. But it was cold there too. So I started following the course of the Rio Grande. When I got here I saw Don Judd sitting on a corner.” It was the late 70s, and Irwin had had no idea that Judd was in Texas. We tried to imagine the white-bearded, heavyset, more than occasionally kilt-wearing Judd sitting on the sidewalk like a panhandler.
Irwin went on. “So I pulled over and we talked for a while. He wasn’t sure what he was doing. He’d been taking these trips down in the wilds of northern Mexico. And now he was in Marfa. He was trying to figure out what to buy.”
In the end, over two decades, and after spending a couple of million, Judd acquired two aircraft hangars, a bank, a 300-acre former cavalry base (for which Irwin’s hospital was originally constructed), 40,000-odd acres of land, the Safeway, a hotel, a handful of commercial buildings, six homes, and the local hot springs, together valued in excess of $30 million today. Following the artist’s death, these holdings were divided between two entities, the Judd Foundation, which manages his private properties, and the Chinati Foundation—named for a nearby mountain peak—which operates as a museum on the former cavalry base. The distinction between these two foundations is almost arbitrary. All the buildings, which were renovated to Judd’s exacting specifications, are used to some degree as exhibition spaces for his own work and original work by artists he admired: Rembrandt, Richard Long, Yayoi Kusama, and Frank Stella, among others.
Irwin finished the drink. “So we talked for a while. Then I got back in my car I made it all the way down to Key West, and when I got there I thought, Well, now I’m committed.”
He carried on up the East Coast, all along Canada, and back home to L.A. “I circled it,” Irwin said. “That’s where all the stuff is going on. The edge.” Such a tour of America resonated as almost a parable to us of why people move to Marfa now: the fierce, near irrational desire to get outside the mainstream. But Marfa isn’t an outsider redoubt of the sort the Unabomber might have favored (even if David Kaczynski, his brother, did live in isolation nearby). With high-end restaurants, concerts, and theater (think André Gregory directing Endgame), it’s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too sort of outsiderness.
Marfa is the seat of Presidio County, which was near-Switzerland-size (12,000 square miles) at its founding, in 1850, but registered no population in that year’s U.S. Census. Its terrain was later reduced to the current, more manageable Rhode Island-times-three size. But even today, if the county’s density were imposed upon New York City, Manhattan would be home to 46 people. Marfa’s population peaked at 5,000 people in the 1940s, when ranching was profitable and 600 soldiers (guarding 200 German P.O.W.’s) were billeted at Chinati. Now, permanent residents having dwindled steadily, in inverse proportion to Marfa’s fashionableness, the population is 1,981. Tourist numbers are higher than ever.
Marfa became a railroad water stop in 1883. Some of the first documentation of the area comes from accounts of mobile, luminous pinpoints on the horizon—the Marfa Mystery Lights. Popular with ghost- and U.F.O.-hunters and the subject of a study by U.T. Dallas, the lights have never been satisfactorily explained. Marfa became a cattle town in the late 19th century when half a dozen ranchers, among them Luke Brite, the great-great-grandfather of the New York artist Leo Villareal (who works mostly in L.E.D. lights), drove a herd of longhorns and other native stock from South Texas and became the founders of a community where 32 churches, an opera house, numerous dance halls, and a grand hotel were eventually constructed—the infrastructure that provided Donald Judd with so much exhibition space. The army pulled out in 1946, and this, combined with a severe drought, “jerked the rug out from under the economy,” according to Cecilia Thompson, the county’s nonagenarian historian.
The Chinati Syndrome
We first went to Marfa together in 1996. Judd was dead. The town was dead. Chinati was in mourning. Tumbleweeds the size of shopping carts blew down the wide streets—with no one even there to photograph them. There were a handful of Tex-Mex cafés with flyswatters on the tables and a drive-through window at the local bar. Nearly every storefront on Highland Avenue leading up to the courthouse was empty, save the ones installed with artwork by Judd. The phrase “art pilgrimage” was routinely invoked by thin-on-the-ground visitors. Of the near-ghost-town feeling, the painter Jeff Elrod, who arrived as an artist-in-residence at Chinati in 1998, said, “Anybody of interest who was in town in the nineties you definitely ended up sitting around a table with them eating dinner every weekend [at Chinati] … me—some ne’er-do-well artist—Yve-Alain Bois or Rudi Fuchs or Tommy Lee Jones. There was no town. Everyone was up there, sort of captive.” Be they art historians, European-museum directors, or movie stars, they would find one another.
We stayed in Judd’s former print studio at Chinati. Marianne Stockebrand, a German curator who was Judd’s partner for the last five years of his life, and Rob Weiner, Judd’s former assistant, were trying to figure out how to maintain a world-class collection of minimalist art with no money in the middle of nowhere, in a town that was indifferent or even hostile to their mission. When Judd installed a kilometer-long series of large concrete boxes at the edge of the property, ranchers said jokingly that they were square drainage culverts. A Chinati neighbor told us that he’d spent years watering a tree so that it would block the view of Judd’s work from his bedroom window.
In the mid-80s, Judd parted acrimoniously with the Dia Art Foundation, which had begun pulling back from its funding obligations. Judd threatened a lawsuit, thereby securing a $1 million payout and the transfer of Dia’s Marfa holdings to the newly established Chinati Foundation. On his death, the museum was left with $400, with the rest of his holdings—and debts—going to his estate (which became the Judd Foundation), of which his children, Rainer and Flavin, were the executors. The two organizations, despite their common cause of maintaining and promoting Judd’s legacy, have surprisingly little to do with each other. All that was part of Judd’s realm while he was alive became more markedly divided after he died. The Judd Foundation took on the private side of Judd, and Chinati became the more pronouncedly public face. (Stockebrand stepped down last year, and the museum is currently run by the senior staff and the museum’s board.)
For a time Chinati paid no curatorial salaries. The staff worked anyway. And Stockebrand and Weiner, in a situation that might have led others to scramble for cash, pursued Judd’s vision and expanded the collection, rather than exclusively soliciting funding. The pair reached out to artists who had been part of Judd’s world, such as Robert Irwin and John Wesley, a close friend who worked at Chinati in the 80s and whose Pop-Surrealist paintings now have a permanent exhibition space in a former stable. And in a most daring act of reconciliation, Stockebrand visited Dan Flavin in the final months of his life and encouraged him to sign off on drawings he had done years before for a massive installation that now fills six barracks with colored fluorescent-light sculptures, a project that was abandoned when he and Judd, who had named his son Flavin, had a falling-out in the early 90s. The critic Michael Kimmelman titled his review of the Flavin piece “The Last Great Art of the 20th Century.” Money followed.
But Chinati also supported up-and-coming work. In the case of Elrod, Weiner’s endorsement brought him to the attention of the New York art dealer Pat Hearn, who sent down a truck and filled it with every painting the artist had made during the last six months of his Chinati residency. She sold the lot in two weeks, transforming his career. Chinati was always, as Weiner puts it now, “watering the culture of the place. We had to make sure that each person who came was enchanted by it.” And so: internship and artist-in-residence programs, free children’s art classes, lectures, banquets, concerts, and symposiums such as “Art and the Landscape” and “Art and Architecture” (bringing in architects such as Frank Gehry and Jacques Herzog). Weiner and Stockebrand also continued Judd’s tradition of annual open-house weekends with music, a barbecue for the whole town, a bonfire, and offering the use of empty exhibition space for pretty much any local artist or performer with an idea.
We, too, were early beneficiaries of Chinati’s singular definition of what a museum could be when not bound to convention—by simply being allowed to live there and be immersed in Judd’s vision of large-scale work, in harmony with architecture and landscape. The town’s culture, part Mexican-American and part Anglo (“rancher”), was flinty to the point of being cranky, but its authenticity was preferable to the chirping, saccharine “Howdy—how’re y’all doin’ today?” that you find at points farther east in Texas. In Presidio County, when you greet anyone you pass on the road, the social code is to lift two fingers ever so slightly from the steering wheel. A nod is considered excessive.
And then there is the land. In 2004 our friend Mary Farley, who describes herself as an “art-world participant” (perhaps inevitable, considering that her ex-husband is Matthew Barney), left her job as a forensic psychotherapist in New York and that winter went to Marfa for the first time. She once said, “I’m always impressed when you can feel diminished by the natural world Things can hurt you here—plants, snakes, bugs. It’s exciting.” Rudi Fuchs, the longtime director of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum (Holland’s MoMA), proclaimed the vistas “terrifying.” In 2000 we bought a two-room sheep shed at the edge of town, now our second home.
Thompson, the historian, who passed away in January, described Marfa’s renewal as a three-phase process: Judd’s establishing of Chinati, in 1979; the arrival of Texas attorneys and law-school classmates Pablo Alvarado (who grew up in Marfa) and Tim Crowley in the late 90s; and the arrival of arts foundations and nonprofits beyond Chinati, most prominent among them the Santa Fe-based Lannan Foundation, which owns five homes that serve as writers’ residences, and Ballroom Marfa, described by The New York Times as “a certified alternative space,” which took over an old dance hall, started a concert series (Lyle Lovett, Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo), and is planning the construction of (presumably) the world’s first art-house drive-in movie theater. The town’s status as a Hollywood movie set—for the James Dean-Liz Taylor feature, Giant, in the mid-50s—was revived with No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.
Now, finally, there is food. First came Maiya’s, in the early 2000s, an Italian trattoria whose owner-chef was just nominated for a James Beard award. In 2008 the former owners of an Upper East Side restaurant Ruth Reichl described, in her two-star review, as “astonishingly exuberant, accepting no limits and recognizing no boundaries” opened Cochineal in a 100-year-old adobe building. In 2011 two chefs from Virginia’s acclaimed Inn at Little Washington briefly opened a place called Miniature Rooster in an old gas station, serving a mix of southern and Indian food—it’s now a catering company. The Food Shark, a silver-and-orange truck with a constantly changing menu—Veracruz-style shrimp, pork banh mi, brisket braised in Guinness—parks most afternoons under a massive corrugated-steel canopy in the middle of town known as “the Shade Structure.” It was built and opened to the public by Tim Crowley, the Houston lawyer, and acts as a gathering place for an absurdly well-educated group of 30- to 80-year-olds who have chosen to build furniture, restore adobes, make prints, light concerts, design clothing, start a Montessori school, D.J. rare country songs a couple of hours a week for the local NPR station (smallest listenership in the Lower 48), or operate a pirate radio station from a “jailbroken” iPhone (recently shut down by the F.C.C.). Others, in their 20s, are finishing up first albums, first novels, first films, or first installations while working three jobs and wearing fashion-blog-worthy vintage ensembles. Notable recent shade seekers include Richard Hell, Robert Plant, David Byrne, and, lest you think Marfa really is a coastal Utopia, Karl Rove, who slept in a vintage camper at El Cosmico, a field full of rent-by-the-night Airstreams. (A Cosmico employee told us, “There were Afghan poppies all around the trailer we gave him.”) Elrod—who “paints” abstractly on a Mac and then painstakingly re-creates the images on canvas, knitting together the handmade and the digital—moved from Brooklyn in 2007 and says, in contrast to the atmosphere of the late 90s, the experience of being in one of the many new restaurants in town is like visiting “a badass international airport bar I’m in a first-class lounge of American Airlines. I’m talking with really interesting people from all over the world who I won’t ever see again.”
Don’t Mess with Excess
One evening last summer we found a live hollow-point handgun round marked “S&W .40” in the gravel outside the El Cheapo liquor store. When we pulled it out over drinks in the courtyard of the El Paisano hotel an acquaintance whistled and said, “Law enforcement carries that.” A lawyer immediately disparaged the prosecutors in Presidio County as “weaklings” who wouldn’t even go after murderers. “Nothing gets prosecuted here but drugs.”
We went to the Masonic Lodge and found a note explaining that the 70s Marguerite Duras movie India Song would be shown later in the evening, signed, “Love, Nicolas.” We went across the street to Maiya’s for a drink. An older, bald, grizzled man with a patch over his left eye sat in the window. Jeff Elrod was at the bar with a slender, dark-haired woman in a tight teal dress.
We pulled out the bullet. Teal Dress grabbed it and slammed it down on the concrete bar.
“Whoa! That could go off!,” an observer shouted. Manic laughter. Elrod clamped it between his teeth and bit down hard.
We asked if they’d be attending the French movie and lecture.
“What kind of French movie?,” Teal Dress wanted to know.
Hard to say. A frustrated iPhone search—AT&T is still useless in Marfa—led to the conclusion that it was about leprosy.
Teal Dress said, “Leprosy?! I’m going to go rub myself on a leper and come to this lecture and say”—she pressed her dress tight against her body and pointed at her chest—“This is leprosy!”
“How do you rub yourself on a leper so it takes?,” Elrod asked.
His friend began pistoning on the barstool, feigning intimacy with a leper. It was time to go.
In front of the bookstore, dressed in black, Marianne Stockebrand seemed, by virtue of her impeccable posture, to tower above the Francophiles gathered around her.
“Ben Schonzeit, the painter, is in town visiting his son,” she told us.
We surmised that he’d just been eating in Maiya’s window and said so.
“Oh,” she said. “You know, he does paintings that look like photographs. Still.”
“Photo-realism?”
“Yes. He still does it.”
“Hmm.”
“He’s very attractive.”
“With the eye patch?”
“Yes.”
The film contained no leprosy. The subject was, nominally, ennui. Staged tableaux of various languid diplomats in a subcontinental French consulate were overlaid with passages of poetry. Stockebrand began to loudly sigh. Next she began to laugh. After an hour she said, “I’m leaving.” When the screen said “Fin” we went to Elrod’s studio, a cinder-block-and-steel building two doors down from the only stoplight in town—about as urban as Presidio County gets.
Cars at odd angles filled the lot. A sign that read GALLERY, advertising the space next door, had been defaced with the addition LAME. A dozen partyers were inside, among them the New York artist Christopher Wool. Picture the short-cropped hair and concentrated features of the artist who painted black text on white canvas:
SELLTHE
HOUSE S
ELL THEC
AR SELL
THEKIDS
Wool played pool. The studio serves as a clubhouse/greenroom/crash pad for artists, musicians, and filmmakers. Elrod, “a Puck for the ages,” per Chinati’s Rob Weiner, proffered a whiskey bottle and a pool cue, while a tall, tattooed woman sauntered up, plucked off a player’s hat, and placed it on her own head.
Elrod’s studio is, as one local put it, “the center of some scene that defines Marfa for this moment that I think is self-destructive, not sustainable.” It’s hard to argue with this. But ideas are generated here. In 2008, the New York installation artist Justin Lowe co-created, with Jonah Freeman and Alexandre Singh, a multi-room piece called Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, described by an awestruck Roberta Smith as “an immense, labor-intensive, maniacally contrived walk-through”—the best installation in Marfa since Flavin’s barracks. We asked Lowe if he had hung out at Elrod’s studio while making the piece. His reply: “Hell yeah, I did. Like every day.” Smith said of the piece, “Like Alice’s rabbit hole, [it] will take you as deep as you want to go.” Sponsored by Ballroom Marfa, the artists re-created a burned-out methamphetamine lab, a red-carpeted Upper East Side mansion, and a hippie Valhalla. Lowe told us, “By the end it felt like the whole town had contributed in one way or another.”
On another Marfa evening we found ourselves in Elrod’s studio with the photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark (Tulsa, Kids) and David Hollander, an L.A. transplant (and child star—in Airplane! he suavely brings a girl some coffee, only to be told, “I take it black, like my men”). Hollander, with his wife, Jennifer Lane, co-founded CineMarfa, the town’s newest film festival (the first one crashed and burned). In 2011 they featured 70s and early-80s No Wave films alongside banned and sexually explicit work by Clark. Before one screening, a local punk band called Solid Waste played a set. Anglo and Mexican-American, all in their twenties, two of them have a child together. Clark was smitten and just finished shooting a new film in Marfa, featuring the lead singer.
Videos were projected on a wall, and visitors drifted in and out. At midnight a group, ranging in age from 10 to 50, decided to go on a full-moon bike ride out on Ranch Road 2810, which winds through mountains until dissolving into a boulder-strewn track suitable only for four-wheel drives. After a few miles the riders stopped, and an illuminated Frisbee was thrown between two rock outcroppings, above the spot where Javier Bardem killed the Marfa National Bank president, Chip Love, in No Country for Old Men. Two border-patrol S.U.V.’s idled down the road, observing. When it was proposed that the group head out and visit the border-patrol checkpoint, five miles south of town—naked—we went back to Elrod’s.
Red Tecate cans mingled with cans of spray paint. Solid Waste discussed their first album. An art teacher and waitress changed the video on the wall from a ballet dancer performing on a rainy Oakland street corner to rapper Kreayshawn in Minnie Mouse ears strutting through Beverly Hills: “Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada.” Clark took in the scene with a slightly detached air. Hollander did an animated impression of Doris Lessing’s reaction when she won the Nobel Prize. (“Oh Christ,” she said, half dismissing it all.)
There was an attempt to appoint one of us Clark’s designated driver, a job we did not want, and managed to evade by noting that we had come by (non-tandem) bike. He helped by declaring that he wasn’t leaving.
On the night of the pool game, Wool teamed up with Tavahn Ghazi—a perhaps too handsome (though not the town’s handsomest) young musician who moved to Marfa from the Bay Area to complete an album in the same studio building where Grizzly Bear had just recorded. He said, “I wake up in San Francisco, life’s too easy—I’m the captain of my neighborhood What it’s like in Marfa, in comparison, is that every single person I’m around is absolutely 100 percent better than me.” He gestured around Elrod’s studio. “I want to fight to become this incredible person—that is the exact goal and point of all of this mess.”
The spectators were: a sound artist who had collaborated the week before on a piece with Elrod (at Chinati), using audio tracks from the Terminator movies broadcast from aged boom boxes and scavenged MP3 players; a wiry and stoned performance artist who, during the Chinati Foundation Open House Weekend in 2010, incinerated hot dogs over a flaming grill in Elrod’s parking lot and threw them at a crowd that had gathered for an impromptu concert (he now peered out of a nest he’d made amid towers of Elrod’s books); a handful of teenage girls who looked as if they could have been cast in the Larry Clark movie; a visiting M.F.A. candidate from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; and a young curator who had publicly stated her opinion that the authors of this article were “provincial” (owing, we guessed, to our early departure from a lecture she’d organized … which led us to further surmise that she’d intended to denounce us as philistines but got confused).
In an upset Wool and Ghazi were defeated, while a dark-haired woman hollered repeatedly, “Ma che cazzo?!” (What the fuck?!)
Wool gave a gracious nod.
We asked the “Ma che cazzo?!” woman, “Do you speak Italian?”
She said, “That’s the only Italian I know.”
If this all has an element of performance to it, perhaps it is due to the fact that beautiful and talented Marfans operate under the impression that they are about to become famous. Elrod said, “These kids think it’s all a wonderland of fame and fortune and they’re just going to wait to be discovered. They think if they just chill and do their cool thing, someone will swoop in and make them.” We could only point out that that is exactly what had happened to him.
And so a myth abides: glamour, money, and artistic recognition will fall out of the sky above Marfa, as actual meteors often do. The town has certainly been adopted by the would-be arbiters of culture: T magazine ran a series of columns on “The Real Artists of Marfa”; the painter Wilhelm Sasnal flew Solid Waste’s progenitors—the outrageous, now disbanded Latino punk group Satanic Punk International Conspiracy (yes, SPIC)—to play in Warsaw (their first trip out of Texas); and every road-tripping filmmaker just might return with a camera.
A Marfa State of Mind
Aregularly posed question: Is Marfa like Santa Fe? The idea makes Marfans scoff. As Mary Farley, who brought Christopher Wool to town, told us, “If you ever see me putting on a piece of turquoise, airlift me out of here.” It’s a place, she said, for “artists transgressing social mores.” A place where an elected official recently walked into the Museum of Electronic Wonders and Late Night Grilled Cheese Parlour after a Sean Lennon concert (in a funeral home turned bar) and shouted, “All the guys, get your dicks out and put ’em in your hands!” (These instructions were ignored.) A place where Rocky Barnette, the chef-owner of Miniature Rooster, told us, “This is a different country, where you can do doughnuts in the middle of town in your jeep if you want to.” And then you can go eat some escargots with parsley and garlic butter, drink a $200 bottle of Barolo, and watch the fiction writer (and MacArthur genius grantee) Deborah Eisenberg tell her “boyfriend” of more than 30 years, Wallace Shawn, he’s a “worthless piece of filthy shit”—in a production of Shawn’s play Marie and Bruce, at the Crowley Theater.
Don Culbertson, who runs a Marfa medical clinic, describes the two adjacent towns, Fort Davis and Alpine (each 25 miles closer to “civilization”), as “hair catchers in the shower. Fort Davis gets the tourists who want the Wild West, and the relocated baby-boomers who don’t know any better go to Alpine.” Judd’s sculptures may sell for six to eight figures, but he remains a rarefied pleasure, virtually unknown in the world at large. Artists, intellectuals, iconoclasts, and, yes, elitists make it to Marfa. A Connecticut shipping executive keeps a 1950s Nash-Healey here and has a mechanic on retainer, like a groom, for maintenance. And then there are the people trying to escape the escapists. Notably absent from the party, though married to Wool, is the abstract painter Charline von Heyl. She made a roomful of work in Marfa for her recent show at the Tate Liverpool. The landscape painter Rackstraw Downes—a former Chinati artist-in-residence and yet another recent MacArthur genius-grant recipient (Weiner calls Downes “our Corot”)—now spends half the year 70 miles south of Marfa hiding out in the emptiness of southern Presidio County. He occasionally appears in town for dinner or a lecture. “I come to Marfa to play,” he told us.
In classic artist-as-gentrifier style, proprietary feelings can be most pronounced in the recently arrived. During a rock festival on the edge of town a local covered 250 cars’ bumpers with stickers reading, KEEP AUSTIN THERE (a slap back on the capital’s self-satisfied slogan, “Keep Austin Weird”). Anthony DeSimone, a 28-year-old who is in two bands and has been cast as the lead in a forthcoming Wallace Shawn production (Rob Weiner, who co-produced Shawn’s last play, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, is directing), told the story of serving a couple dinner at Cochineal one evening. When the man learned DeSimone was originally from Tiburon, California, he said, “So that’s interesting: you come from a place some would call heaven, and you’ve chosen to live in a place that some would call hell.” Yes—that is what we want you to think.
Of course, distinctions among Austinites, New Yorkers, and Californians are meaningless to third- and fourth- and fifth-generation locals, to whom all newcomers are now simply “Chinatis,” whether they have an affiliation with the museum or not. One sixth-grader we know, who was born and raised in Marfa but whose parents come from the East Coast, was teased in school: “Are you a Chinati? Do you wear sandals? Do you ride a bicycle?”
But the moniker is apt. The Marfa renaissance started with Chinati, Judd’s public face and in many ways his unfinished work. Part of the thrill of being in Marfa is adding to what Judd left undone. The town is animated by a state of perpetual suspense: Will Irwin’s masterwork coexist alongside Judd’s and Flavin’s? Will the county support the construction of a superhighway running up from the border, making Marfa into a highbrow truck stop? (This was an early Rick Perry plan that never came to be, though some of the county’s weaklings recently allowed a monolithic electrical transmission line to be erected through Chinati’s view, degrading a landscape that had been close to pristine for approximately the last 250 million years.) Will Ballroom Marfa’s drive-in be anything more than a jaw-dropping photograph in Artforum, and will the Judd Foundation open its doors? (The artist’s daughter, Rainer Judd, encouragingly, told us she’d like to see “more cooking” in the artist’s shrine-like private spaces.) Finally, who among the talented people congregated in Presidio County will realize their creative ambitions and take them beyond this enclave to a wider audience, and does it matter if they do? Wanting to be a part of that narrative as it unfolds compels us to stay. That Marfa is a scene there can be no question. But walk out of Elrod’s studio, and there is silence and space—to think, to create a waking dream. Judd’s friend Rudi Fuchs described the artist’s vision in Marfa and in life: “In Judd’s scale of values … beauty and perfection are ultimately matters of dignity, not only of the artwork but of nature and culture in general. Beauty is a very special and noble state Yet Judd fervently believes that such an idealistic notion of beauty … is, in the end, much too limited. Like the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, people have a right to things beautiful.”
FROM THE ARCHIVE
