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Art And Marfa Part 1

Okay, so last time I said we were incredibly flattered that David and Emily wanted to share Marfa with us. I also promised that I’d explain a little more about that. And I’m a man of my word. No. Really. In fact, several words. Heck. I’m a whole dang dictionary.


Where was I? Oh, yes. Marfa and them.


Well, first, you have to remember that David and Emily are both artists by training and temperament. They both have degrees from the SMFA in Boston. And they went from there to get master’s degrees in Architecture (David) and landscape architecture (Emily)...both of those being professions in the applied arts. They love to be in places where the arts are practiced, and being thought about, by talented people.




About the Photos: First, another snap of Donald Judd’s super-minimalist artworks on what used to be a military base. Second, a shot of some of the plant life in the area I took while we were out walking one morning. Third, and (for once) actually having something to do with the story, here’s a shot of Martha at the Hotel Paisano, a great deal more about which is to come.



And, they are also outdoorsy folks. They love to hike and ride and be in nature. They love places like, well, Big Bend.


Okay, now that that’s established, let’s head back to Marfa for a moment. Like I said before, it’s a tiny place that was originally like any other small community in the vast, sparsely-populated expanse that is West Texas. It was established for the benefit of a railroad, and it served as a commercial center servicing the ranches around it. It also had a political function. It was and still is the county seat of Presidio County.(1)


Plus, it had a U.S. Army base to bring in people and money. Specifically, it had U.S. Army Fort D. A. Russell, which, among other things, was an Army Air Corps training facility. According to the town’s Wikipedia entry it “served as a training facility for several thousand pilots during World War II.” (2). The pilots included Robert Sterling, who was better known as an actor in Hollywood in the late 1930s and then, after the war, as a TV star on all manner of programs. (3)


However, the base closed shortly after the war. Then, to add injury to, well, injury, the agricultural community in the area suffered a downturn for reasons ranging from drought to the vagaries of economics. Plus, those ranchers who were still left turned increasingly to other towns for their needs (for instance, Alpine, Texas). And so, Marfa was in trouble. Like thousands of similar small towns and rural communities all over America, it no longer had an economic purpose. Perhaps, in time, it would have dwindled down to nothing...becoming just another ghost town...as have so many other American towns over the last eighty years.


But, then...the plot twist! The cavalry rides in over the hill...in the the form of Donald Judd!


How to describe Judd? Well, again to quote the ever useful Wikipedia, “Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, 1928 – February 12, 1994) was an American artist associated with minimalism.”(4) In practice, that means after a childhood spent in Missouri, and after a stint in the Army as an engineer, Judd went to New York where he wrote art theory and did impressionistic paintings. Then, starting in the late 1950s and early to mid-1960s, he turned to sculpture and became one of the great exponents of what came to be called “minimalism.”


Which also needs to be defined. Alas, that isn’t as easy as you might think. I did a search on the web, and I got several definitions of Minimalism, but they all tended to be ...er...maximalist. They could run for pages and pages. I’m not going to be able to reproduce much of that here.


Finally, I turned in some desperation to ChatGPT. It generated a definition which, I think, is as good as any. To wit: “Minimalism is an art movement that emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s focusing on simplicity and reducing art to its essential elements. Artists used clean lines, geometric shapes, and limited colors, aiming to highlight the purity of form and material. The movement often featured large-scale works that invited viewers to focus on the physical presence of the artwork itself.”


Okay, so Judd was one of the premier names in Minimalism and sculpture in the twentieth century. He also liked to travel. By the 1970s, he was tired of New York and its art scene, even though he was very successful there. Somehow...somehow...he stumbled across Marfa, a dying town with a large abandoned air base.


And he fell in love.(5) The area’s vast empty spaces, it’s wildness, and its openness were just what he needed.


So, with the help of the Dia Art Foundation, he “purchased a 340 acres (1.4 km2) tract of desert land near Marfa, which included the abandoned buildings of the former U.S. Army Fort D. A. Russell.” (6)


Thus Marfa became a vast and amazing open air studio for Mr. Judd.


And that was only the beginning of the story.


More to come.




Footnotes:


1. Marfa’s Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa,_Texas


2. The Fort has its own Wikipedia entry, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_D._A._Russell_(Texas). In the entry, we learn that the Fort was originally named Camp Allen, and that it was established in 1911 as a “base for cavalry and air reconnaissance units sent to protect West Texas from Mexican bandits after the Pancho Villa raid. “




5. For details of Judd’s discovery of Marfa, I rely on the following NPR piece: “Marfa, Texas: An Unlikely Art Oasis In A Desert Town,” by Neda Ulaby, August 2, 20125:00 AM ET, https://www.npr.org/2012/08/02/156980469/marfa-texas-an-unlikely-art-oasis-in-a-desert-town.


6. Here quoting from Judd’s Wikipedia entry (see footnote 3 above). The Dia Art Foundation, meanwhile, is a nonprofit organization that supports art projects. You can see more about it on Wikipedia, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dia_Art_Foundation, and on its own webpage, here: https://www.diaart.org/





Copyright©2024 Michael Jay Tucker



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