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Donald Judd
" I should put the
flag up - it's been a month," Jeff Kopie said
fretfully. "There's no need to be maudlin." The
flagpole stood in the yard of La Mansana de Chinati, normally known as the
Block. The flag was at half-mast for its late owner, the
great, often cantankerous, artist Donald Judd, who had died
of cancer in February 1994 at the age of sixty-five. Kopie,
a pale, distrait man, who had been one of Judd's principal
administrative assistants, knew that maudlin sentiments were
among things – the many, many, many things -- that Donald
Judd had abhorred.
There were tall plum trees in the pebbly
yard and an uninviting swimming pool, surrounded by concrete
blocks and pieces of wood furniture - all of Judd's own
design. "Don pretty much regarded all this as a work of
art," Kopie said. Judd's adobe walls were high, but not
quite high enough to wall off West Texas in the form of the
silvery cylinders of the Godbold Feed Mill. A couple of black-and-white German
shepherds loped up and began to gambol around as Kopie
unlocked the door and let us into the nub of what was one of
the most ambitious art fiefdoms anywhere. Ever.
This was April and my first visit to
Marfa, a cow town, from which life had been leaking since
the Levi Strauss factory and the Coca-Cola bottling plant
had been shuttered soon after World War II. The small,
conservative-minded town was now best known for two
phenomena, the Marfa Lights and Donald Judd. The Marfa
Lights are a nocturnal show of moving flickering lights over
the local scrubland for which no objective evidence exists,
aside from some blurry UFOesque photographs, but which a
great many claim that they have seen. Perhaps a leap of
faith is required - rather the same sort of faith that is
often required by art. Some art, anyway. Like Donald
Judd’s. Typically, Judd himself declared that the Marfa
Lights were "a hoax."
By the time of his death, Donald Judd had
bought up enough of the local buildings to have become
Marfa’s largest property owner. These included some of the
swellest buildings in town, including the Marfa Hotel, many
private houses, the First Marfa National Bank, where he
maintained a drawing office, the Wool & Mohair Building,
which he filled with the baroque artworks made by John
Chamberlain from the carapaces of Detroit automobiles, to
the more-or-less polite befuddlement of most Marfans, and
the unswell but imposing Block, through which I was being
conducted by Jeff Kopie.
The fundamentals of the Block are a
couple of airplane hangars, originally on a local base but
moved into Marfa’s little business district after the end
of the war. They had seen service as an automobile repair
shop for a while, but Donald Judd had bought them in 1973
and raised his family there. The spaces - rooms is not the
word - were filled with Judd’s work of all periods,
furniture of his own design, and other goods in which he saw
merit, like Mission furniture, Biedermeier, horse saddles,
Navajo blankets, and arrowheads - all in quantity. There was
a bar, richly stocked with tequilas and Scotches, especially
the single malts of which Judd was fond, and a scholar’s
library. The roofs are hangar roofs - metal, with struts.
"It gets cold here," Kopie
conceded. "The room with the Navajo blankets has
another bed. You can put another heater in. It didn’t
affect him much. And it can get to be 110 degrees. He hated
air conditioning. The heat didn’t seem to bother
him."
We walked out into Marfa. Sunny, with
unpeopled streets, it had the feel of one of those brightly
eerie American townscapes in a movie by a European director.
Many of the Judd-owned houses, it turned out, were as empty
as when the artist had bought them, but one building was hung
with the earliest of his artworks that he cared to show,
thickly textured and rather labored abstractions, made
before he had repudiated painting as "finished."
His businesslike later sketches on yellow paper lay on desks
in the bank building, but the casualness was misleading.
"Don kept every drawing," Kopie said.
One room contained a palette bed close to
the ground. Judd, who was meticulous in allotting different
spaces to different work uses, had such simple beds, ready
to drop into, in most of his houses. I peered from an
upstairs window. CLARENCE JUDD was lettered on a road-level pane
across the street. This was the building within which Judd worked on
architectural projects, using his grandfather’s name, but not for
sentimental reasons. “He didn’t want to be sued by the
Association of American Architects,” Kopie explained. “He
wasn’t licensed.”
There was another oddity about that window. It
was brown-papered from within. That, it came to me, was a reason
the streets had struck me as eerie. Most of the Judd windows were
similarly papered up. A security measure, I supposed, occasioned by
the artist’s death. Wrong. “Don was having a fight with the
town,” Kopie explained. It had been just before his death, and he
had been threatening to move out of Marfa, his buildings included.
It had been the last in a life of fights.
We drove to the most ambitious project of all,
the Chinati Foundation, which is on the outskirts of town and
occupies the 440 acres of Fort D. A. Russell, a former army camp. On one
side of the entrance lay the big, bland headquarters of the
region’s largest employer, the Border Patrol; on the other were
some shanties and satellite dishes. At the entrance itself stood a
metal historical marker, noting that during World War II the fort
had been “home to a chemical warfare battalion, as well as
German prisoners of war.”
The core of Chinati are thirty-two former army
huts. They are the color of creamy peanut butter and the shape of
much-elongated Monopoly houses, except for eight, which are in a
squared-off U shape, and they still look much as they must have when
the soldiers pulled out in 1946. But the stuff in and around the
huts includes a gargantuan red horseshoe by Claes Oldenburg, a
ring of stones by Richard Long, an installation Ilya Kabakov, and
plentiful Judds - enough, in short, for Donald Judd to have
described Chinati as “one of the largest visible installations of
contemporary art in the world.” Kopie explained: “He felt
otherwise it wasn’t going to last.”
Most immediately visible of Judd’s own pieces
are a row of concrete blocks lined up on the ragged land immediately
inside the camp’s gate. They are examples of Judd’s never
ingratiating art at its least seducing, and “Buck” Newsome,
author of Shod with Iron: Life on the Mexican Border with the
United States Border Patrol, certainly represented a segment
of local opinion when he railed to me over a cup of coffee about
“those cement things - so-called art.” But the pieces have an
obduracy other than they might have against the usual white walls,
standing among rough grasses against the sky, and it suggests
Judd’s singleness of vision that sitting not far from his pieces
there are some plain circles of slightly yellower concrete, getting
crumbly. Drinking troughs from army days. It simply never occurred
to the artist that they would tug away attention.
I threaded my way through the antelope droppings
and prickly-pear cactus toward the twin gun sheds, which are the
biggest buildings at Chinati. Their original flat tops had been
replaced by hemispherical roofs of Judd’s own design and the walls
that ran lengthwise were mostly glass. There were still
German-language orders painted on the brick interior walls, and the
poured concrete floors had a greasy glimmer. Aluminum boxes lay on
the floors of both gun sheds in three lines, sporadically broken by
columns. Each box was as high, wide, and deep as the others. Every
edge was screwed or joined, not cast - Judd could be raw but was no
brutalist - and no two boxes were precisely alike, because the
interior of one box had a single horizontal shelf; another, two. A
third had a shelf set at such-and-such a slant, and so on, so that
the light pouring in through the great windows affected each box differently,
causing one to stand out in hard detail, making another transparent
as glass, while a third was substanceless, as though carved in
smoke. I looked into one box and it was dark - it was like peering
into a well, but its neighbor was filled with furious light - which
was like looking into a furnace. Then the sun dropped behind a cloud
bank, and everything changed.
I wondered just what Donald Judd would have been
thinking when he looked the way I was looking. Walt Whitman has some
lines where he described God as a sort of living square. Walking
through the gun sheds wasn’t a bit like walking through a museum
(and, God, Donald Judd abhorred museums) because there was a sense
of scale and time, so it was more like walking the aisles of a
cathedral or among standing stones on a Bronze Age site. This,
though, was a monument to the of Reason, and as such, it looked both
fiercely rational and quaintly vulnerable in a way that
old-fashioned work is not. The moldy wreckage of the Parthenon still
looks pretty good, considering, and many experts suggested that the
murky ceilings of the Sistine Chapel be left that way. But wear and
tear is ruinous to much Modernism. A smear will ruin a purist
painting - an Ad Reinhardt black painting, say - and when the work
is not just purist but high-tech, the problems become overwhelming.
Now that their peppery creator and guardian is
gone, increasing numbers of visitors will come to the gun sheds.
Kopie cautioned me against touching any of the
seductive surfaces. “Your handprint would come up a couple of days
later. It doesn’t come off,” he said. For those who positively
have to cop a feel, there is a metal slab leaning beside the
entrance to each building. A visitor in a wheelchair has already
gouged one of the boxes. The Chinati Foundation can replace a panel,
perhaps even an entire box, but at what point does it stop being a
Donald Judd? No wonder the artist once told a friend, Peter Arason,
that he had contemplated making his masterwork in Iceland. He
didn’t, though. It is in the Judd fiefdom in the ratty Chihuahua
Desert. It is there that Donald Judd rules - a crackpot visionary in
a peculiarly American vein.
© 1996 Anthony Haden-Guest. All rights reserved.
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