West of Everything

Take the train, west. It leaves San Antonio before dawn and you’ll be in Marfa, Texas (population 2,121), by afternoon. Maybe you’ll hook up a ride into town from the nearby Alpine train station on marfalist.org, a quirky community list board where you can score a dozen cookies or a "questionable futon." On the train, you’ll have plenty of time to take in subtle variations in the minimalist landscape of scrubby, brown hills and plains of Texas. It’s perfect advance training for viewing the art of Donald Judd.

Judd is the main reason people have been making the trek to Marfa for 30 years. He set up studio here in 1971, when he was already a highly successful sculptor seeking a hot-weather home far from the New York gallery scene. Years after his 1994 death, his presence colours Marfa: he seemingly turned half the town’s buildings into studio and exhibition spaces; his ambitious Chinati Foundation museum still brings a steady stream of artists and creatives to town.

Well before it was an unlikely contemporary art hotspot, Marfa was a draw. Its cupcake-pink, cupola-topped circa-1886 courthouse announces lofty expectations that were realized when Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean all lived in town for three months in 1955, while filming the George Stevens epic Giant (Dean’s last film). As far back as the mid 1800s, outsize personalities like outlaw rancher Milton Faver settled nearby; his property is now the luxe Cibolo Creek Ranch, visited by the likes of Mick Jagger. The town is known worldwide for the so-called Marfa Mystery Lights, unexplained apparitions in the night sky visible just east of town.

Within minutes of arriving I see my first hipsters, carrying takeout lattes. He looks like British comedian Russell Brand, all skinny jeans and shaggy hair; she looks like a young Courtney Love. I trace their steps back to Frama, a coffee shop owned by Austin expats, with great Big Bend Roasters coffee and a Scrabble-letter menu board bearing some stern admonitions. ("This is not a Starbucks-style macchiato, but we can make it that way if you want.") Two young women work on laptops and flip through Wallpaper at one of the tables. A little sheepishly, I pull out my own MacBook to catch some free WiFi.

That night I walk Marfa’s streets catching the last light, thin bands of gold and blue layering on the horizon before the sun is suddenly, completely gone. There are few sidewalks here, in neighbourhoods that mix restored century-old adobe homes with ramshackle houses and a few sleek, modern boxes. I walk the Highland Avenue main street and it’s as quiet as the desert, though a warm glow comes from Maiya’s, one of two upscale restaurants. There’s the offices of the Big Bend Sentinel, the weekly paper. Inside the Marfa Book Co., design and architecture books are meticulously laid out on long wooden tables. There are few street signs, and Marfa’s assets are cleverly hidden. A boxy building with a faded "BALLROOM" stencil on the front is a hip art gallery. An Old West façade marked "JM Dry Goods" is a trove of southwestern vintage and housewares. A sleek linear shelter by the railway tracks could be a UFO landing pad but turns out to be where the town’s beloved Food Shark lunch truck parks and where the farmers’ market sets up shop. There’s a low-slung, International-style building marked Post "Office." Assuming it’s a clever play on words, I ask a local what it is. "That’s the post office," she answers brusquely. "Only business in town open at lunchtime, because everyone goes to check their mail."

Marfa is almost small-town typical. The notice board downtown informs that a dog is available. Talent show auditions. A gallery opening. Slam poetry and cowboy poetry, both. Ranchers and farmers come in early and often to Carmen’s, a linoleum-floored, Formica-countered café, for strong coffee, homemade doughnuts and cinnamon rolls.

The next day I drive up to the Chinati Foundation, the old military base that Donald Judd repurposed as a modern art complex. Judd believed in site-specific installations, and today like-minded artists are exhibited here, in a setting that profoundly affects how you see the art. As a symbol of that philosophy, the property’s east perimeter is marked by 15 large concrete-box Judd sculptures stringing a full kilometre, arranged in patterns as simple and impenetrable as a modern Stonehenge.

A tour takes us through six old barracks buildings filled with fascinating fluorescent-light installations by Judd contemporary Dan Flavin. At first they seem like a simple exercise in showing that coloured lights don’t mix like, say, paint colours do. Yellow bulbs form clear lines, separate from the blue glow behind, like those sunset bands on Marfa’s horizon. But as I explore the long, white corridors the lights start to play tricks on the eye. They cast phantom shadows in the corners, pink and green forming a line of blue, blue and yellow casting triangles of red. A Carl Andre exhibit does the same thing in words, repeating "yellow" over and over on a typewritten page until you begin to question the spelling, the rivers of space between the letters, the word itself. What is yellow, anyway?

Unquestionably, the highlight of Chinati is the two former WWII artillery sheds that Judd converted into huge, windowed galleries for his 100 identical boxes in milled aluminum. If I could watch it all day, every day, as the Texas light-virtually a medium of all the works-plays over it, I’d die happy. The huge, heavy boxes are as luminous as if they were made of mirror, of glass, of mercury. Their interiors differ, each partitioned with various precision-cut pieces of aluminum, an exercise in appreciating negative space: what’s there and not there, what is and what appears to be. In Judd’s art, as in Marfa, all the exciting stuff happens between the lines, in the hidden places. Apparently, it can get so hot inside these glass galleries in summer, the boxes expand and contract slightly, minutely crawling across the gallery. "I kind of like the idea that one day years from now they’ll be all askew," says one local, chiding Judd’s legendary penchant for exactitude.
That precision is evident from a tour of Judd’s private living and working spaces, available through the Judd Foundation. I start to recognize the design vocabulary of a Judd-modified building: huge pivot doors, sleek aluminum-cased windows, weathered concrete, hangar-style roofs, wood frames stained dark with linseed oil. There is an extreme fussiness to the interiors of these spaces, which have been left exactly as they were at the time of Judd’s death. Though he is often called a minimalist, Judd created spaces that are loaded with stuff-tableware, books, the Hopi and Anasazi blankets and pottery he collected-all arranged just so, like curated tableaux in a design museum.

I head out to walk the concrete sculptures, a larger-than-life complement to the aluminum ones. On the way, I pass some low, trapezoidal concrete forms. I stop to consider them, actually wondering if they are artwork, until I see the rusted pipes that suggest old watering troughs. They are weathered, cracked, crumbling. A lone iPod-wearing curatorial intern is meticulously painting a freshly patched spot on a Judd concrete sculpture to look like the old. I wonder if it’s what Judd would have wanted. Do you build concrete sculptures in the middle of a hot, dry Texas field if you want them to stay pristine? My tour guide speaks earnestly about conserving the Claes Oldenburg sculpture on the property, a giant horseshoe made of painted foam. Experts were being consulted; far-flung paint samples were being matched. The lumpen brown sculpture reminds me of Vegreville’s giant Ukrainian Easter egg or Kelowna’s Ogopogo statue. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that Oldenburg-an artist with a terrific sense of humour-might have been having a laugh.

Whatever legacy Donald Judd and his colleagues created here, Marfa has become a living, evolving arts community that attracts creative pilgrims. The Lannan Foundation, a prestigious Santa Fe-based writing endowment, houses a handful of writers in residence in Marfa each year. A film festival, soon to celebrate its fourth year, screens alternative and independent movies every May. Liz Lambert, the hotelier behind the hip Hotel San Jose in Austin, operates two properties in Marfa, the smartly renovated Thunderbird motor court and El Cosmico, a cluster of yurts and retro Airstream trailers near Chinati.

"Marfa is not that different from living on an island," explains gallery owner Mary Etherington, who recently moved here from the East Coast enclave of Martha’s Vineyard. There’s the remoteness and the difficulty and expense of getting things you take for granted in the city, but also the small-town friendliness and the whimsical unpredictably of its slow pace.

JD DiFabbio, a curator at the Ballroom Marfa gallery, came to town for a brief stay, her heart set on a move to Chicago. It’s been here five years. "I feel like this is a rebound place," she laughs. "People break up with the big city and come here for a while." There’s a flux of interns and artists-in-residence coming and going. The ebb and flow of one gallery or coffee shop closing and another opening, never seeming to tip the balance toward gentrification.

My last night in Marfa the sky is cloudy, and my hopes equally gloomy as I drive about 10 miles east of town. Everyone, I’m sure, will ask me if I saw the Marfa Mystery Lights, and I want to be able to say I at least tried. As I pull up to the viewing pavilion just off the highway, there is only one other vehicle there, two hours past prime viewing time. A couple stands huddled, whispering, and at first I scoff at what they’re pointing to. It looks like vehicle taillights or maybe lampposts on distant ranches, both possible explanations sometimes given for the Marfa Mystery Lights. But then the round red and white lights on the horizon start to bob, weave and loop like distant Tinkerbells, pulsing shades of pink and gold. The phenomenon is so delightful and quirky I giggle. "The Mystery of these lights remains unsolved," says a solemn plaque on the parking lot’s edge. I’m certain the people of Marfa will keep it that way. wl