How come Marfa, Texas Is All of a Sudden a Mecca for Art People and Such?

 

"Art should stand unequivocally on its own and simply exist."  Donald Judd

     Unless you are involved in the world of art, you probably never heard of Donald Judd.  Judd claimed to be an artist, and he may have been.   As every successful artist must be, he was a salesman.  He could sell just about anything to just about anybody, and to get the most money for the least effort, he learned to concentrate on selling ideas to rich people.  Ideas don’t cost anything, so he didn’t have to tie up a bunch of money in inventory. 

      For obvious reasons, poor people are not good sales targets, and rich people, especially those with second or third generation wealth, go around feeling guilty about being rich.  The second generation is uncomfortable with wealth and desperately wants to believe that they are smarter than poor people and deserve to be rich, so they are apt to buy ideas, especially ideas they don’t understand.  The third generation is comfortable being wealthy but feels obligated to make the world a better place by sharing. Judd discovered early on that the more difficult an idea is to comprehend, the more money it is worth.  He understood that a complicated idea couched in impossibly obtuse language and properly presented was priceless.

     Donald Judd was born in Missouri, went into the army, and moved to New York City when his enlistment was up.  He got a degree in philosophy from Columbia University, and worked toward a master’s degree in art history.  From the late forties through the mid-fifties, Judd concentrated on painting, but he wasn’t very good and didn’t sell much. 

      He supported himself by writing art criticism for major magazines and discovered a talent for writing long, complicated, absolutely meaningless sentences.  For instance, he “found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values, these values being illusion and represented space, as opposed to real space.”  One of his basic premises stated, “art should not represent anything, … it should unequivocally stand on its own and simply exist.”

     The classic European idea of  ”representational sculpture” takes the position that a sculpture should represent something—a horse, a man, or a naked woman—and be recognizable.  Judd decided sculpting something recognizable was way too hard, so he went about selling the idea that representational sculpture was “old hat” and to be contemporary, sculpture must be unrecognizable.  Rich people jumped on that idea like a hen on a June bug. 

      Donald Judd continued to work with sculptures that occupied real space, stood unequivocally on their own, and simply existed.   He discovered that kind of art was almost as hard to do as art that actually looked like something, so he had craftsmen do the work while he thought up the ideas.  Because his work occupied space but didn’t look like anything, he named most of his works “Untitled” and dated them.  Examples are the stunning “Untitled 1976,” or the inspirational “Untitled 1982.”  Rich people lined up to dump money in his lap, hoping to get a chance to bid on something untitled.

     In 1971, Donald Judd needed to get away from it all.  The tension of making art to fill up space—not representational space, but real space—thinking up ideas to pedal to rich people, and doing it all surrounded by New York City, was wearing him to a frazzle.  He rented a house in Marfa, Texas, and moved out there for a vacation and a change of pace.

     As with most people who have never been exposed to limitless space, clean air, clear crisp mornings, and sunshine so bright it hurts your eyes, Judd was astonished.  Never, in his experience, had he been able to see farther than he could point.  Mountains hovered off in the distance and details were plain forty miles away.

     The people out there were different.  To start with, there weren’t many of them and they all dressed like Ralph Lauren.  Threadbare jeans, faded chambray work shirt, turquoise and silver belt buckle, scruffy straw hat and well worn, comfortable boots seemed to be the uniform of the day.  Everything moved in slow motion—the people talked slow, they stopped on the street to visit with each other, no one was in a hurry—for a New Yorker, this place was downright weird.

     Donald Judd got the inkling of an idea—he needed money and these poor people needed art.  He turned the idea over in his mind.  He toyed with it, nursed it, and the thought began to mature into a full-blown plan.  Donald Judd would bring art to the people, art for the masses.  What an inspiration.  Judd realized that only he could bring art to these people and, to do it, he needed to sell his idea to some billionaire’s guilty offspring.  No problem there—he had a list.

      Short-sighted individuals might think that Marfa, Texas, was a funny place to bring anything to the masses, much less art.  Perhaps Marfa wasn’t overrun with people, but it had advantages more populated areas lacked.  Marfa was available, and in the great scheme of things, with the right financial partner, it was affordable.

     The Dia Foundation provided Judd with money to buy an abandoned army base, Fort D. A. Russell, outside Marfa.  He purchased a 60,000 acre ranch, the Ayala de Chinati, and several older buildings in town.  Judd established the Chinati Foundation to oversee the operations and handle funding details, placing himself above crass financial matters. He stayed busy restoring older buildings.  Restoration can be an exacting and painstaking task, but it is not nearly so difficult if others provide the money.

     To get started on his “Art for the People” project, Donald went to the army base.  He restored two motor pool buildings and installed a hundred polished aluminum half-cubes, each six feet by six feet by three feet and precisely placed to best demonstrate the play of light and shadow as the sun moved over the structures.  Outside, in a field, Judd placed several large steel-reinforced concrete cubes.  Each was positioned with discipline to maintain a proper relationship with the others.  He fittingly named the installation “Untitled 1980-1984.”

     As storm clouds gathered on the distant horizon, Donald Judd was flying high.  Stay tuned.

John Chamberlain, one of Judd's favorite artists, did this.  It is on display at the Hirshhorn Museum in New York City.  In 1973, two three-hundred-pound pieces Chamberlain did were stored temporarily on the loading dock of a gallery warehouse in Chicago.  They were reported stolen, but it was discovered that the garbage men hauled them to the dump.