Posted on 01/29/2006 8:32:24 PM PST by woofie
MARFA, Texas— Rolling southeast on Highway 90 from El Paso, the telephone polls blur into the horizon, white antelope tails bob near ranchers' water troughs and one Prada shoe and handbag store blurs by.
The shoe store is the first inkling that Marfa, Texas, isn't like the rest of the small towns that dot the highway to Big Bend.
One part Taos circa 1980, one part hipster New York arena, and one part dusty West Texas town, it's become almost embarrassing for an art aficionado to have not been there.
"(Marfa) has been in Paris Vogue, Dwell, New York Times and every contemporary magazine and newspaper you can think of," said Marfa art gallery owner Ree Willaford. "Anyone who's into art or design and architecture knows about it. Or should."
In the 1970s minimalist art savant Donald Judd made his home on these rolling plains of the high Chihuahuan desert. Unobstructed by the tall buildings, smog and congestion of New York, he was allowed to make his work in quiet solitude.
"That was the point," said Marfa gallery owner and ex-New Mexican, Dennis Dickinson. "Three hours across the Chihuahuan desert slows you down."
Judd was, as the story goes, tired of seeing how art galleries in New York, Los Angeles and other places showed his work. His large minimalist constructions— boxes, ladders and furniture— didn't look right when they were cramped up against gallery walls or poorly displayed in a museum.
So, said Nick Terry of the Chinati Foundation, which oversees the work these days, Judd went in search of a place that he could show his work in, a place that would be large and cool enough to do it justice.
He found Marfa.
With the help of the Dia Foundation of New York, Judd bought 340 acres of a former U.S. Army base.
Desert mecca
It's become an art destination for hipsters. And, like hipsters are want to do, the art elite has brought minimalist art galleries, hip hotels and gourmet restaurants that have started to sprout like the yucca in the desert.
Galleries like Ballroom Marfa, exhibitions 2d Marfa and others are gaining international reputations for important and interesting art shows.
Judd felt at home here, at home to make his groundbreaking art away from, ironically, those same art hipsters.
Even at extra-legal speeds, it's still a three-hour drive from El Paso. Then, all of a sudden, near the hamlet of Valentine, Texas (a town of 200 that's only claim to fame is its postmark), the Prada Marfa blurs by.
It's the perfect introduction to the art world of Marfa.
The replica of a Prada shoe store is an art piece, a site-specific permanent land art project by artists Elmgreen & Dragset. Built in October 2005, the store, of course, has been vandalized. Now repaired, it's set to sit the rest of days on this dusty highway. Prada Marfa was funded by the Art Production Fund and Ballroom Marfa.
Sure, some elements of this whole thing seem bizarre. Really, what do you do with a fake shoe store (that only has left-footed shoes) in the middle of nowhere?
Bright lights, small town
The only thing on the horizon is the mysterious Marfa Lights, a phenomenon that some say are distant car lights, but others say are ghostlike mysterious burning fireballs that have been reported in the area since the late 1800s.
"I never believed in them until I saw one, bright as the sun, run along the fence line," said Boyd Elder, a Marfa local and artist.
Marfa is one of the epicenters of the new art world, an irreverent yet serious art world that embraces projects like the Prada Marfa.
One visit to the Chinati Foundation, which maintain's the old Army base full of work by Judd and his friends, and you'll get it.
Step into the Dan Flavin hallways lit with fluorescent tubes, or the bizarre world of John Chamberlain's crushed cars and you'll understand that this isn't any Canyon Road.
Every October the town fills to the brim, doubling its size to more than 4,000, when the Chinati Foundation hosts its open house. Last year the band Yo La Tengo played at a run-down hotel.
But the new Marfa is at odds with the little town where Coors is still $2 a can at Ray's Bar.
Maybe the Loteria de Marfa says it all.
In the Brown Recluse coffee shop, near the used books and cowboy boots, the poster of the Mexican loteria card game with a Marfa twist shows "El Abogodo," or lawyer, "Un Otro Abogodao," and "El amigo de Abogado," all wearing suits, bolo ties and cowboy boots in the tongue-in-cheek version of the child's game in the local coffee shop.
Some locals don't like the changes.
"Well, there's going to be people who don't like change no matter what's going on," Willaford said.
The changes have made property values go through the roof and caused a stir about carpetbagging hipsters moving into the quaint ranches and adobes around town.
The word "chinazi" is sometimes thrown around.
Hipster hotels, with Santa Fe-priced rooms like mod The Thunderbird have replaced the old-fashioned hotels that used to line the streets of town.
Boots and books
The center of the town's activity seems to be the Marfa Book Co., an art-book store and coffee shop that must be the only place within 300 miles that you can get soy latte. Its modern furniture and bright colors are at odds with the rest of the town's brow and gray buildings. But there are still remnants of the old town. For example, vintage boots for sale at the thrift store Downtown are $12, while a coffee shop is fetching three times that for unshined boots up the street.
Today, two of the highest-profile galleries in Marfa are run by ex-New Mexicans.
Dennis Dickinson owns what could be the most Juddlike gallery in town, exhibitions 2d Marfa, which specializes in minimalist work.
His gallery, an old house that was painted white, has an assortment of simple art and high-dollar furniture that would look at home in SoHo.
"Certainly," Dickinson said, "the bigger numbers are Texans and Americans, but there are quite a number of people from around the world. There was a Japanese woman in (the gallery) a few weeks ago who was doing her dissertation on Judd's furniture."
"The work I sell here," and he sells quite a bit, he said, "is what my old boss would call 'unsalable art.' ''
A lifelong Judd fan, Dickinson once wrote a nasty letter to the Los Angeles County Museum because a Judd sculpture was dusty.
The other is Galleri Urbane, owned by Jason and Ree Willaford, who fled Silver City last year.
"(Silver City) sort of ended up getting worse instead of better, that's how we ended up in Marfa," she said. For the annual Chinati open house the Willafords rented a small gallery space in 2004. The work— much of it by New Mexican artists like Peter Vofheski and Suzanne Sbarge and Jason Willaford— sold.
"We slept in back. We had coolers of food. It was definitely the guerrilla gallery. We sold a lot of work and didn't know we would," she said. "We had a great time and met a lot of great people."
Not long after that, the Willafords moved to Marfa.
"You know it's funny," she said. "It's really good in Marfa."
Gage Hotel, Marathon.
Hmmm. Both Midland and El Paso are less than 200 miles away. They have to have at least one latte bar.
Modern art is all about artist communicating with other artists and ignoring the public.
Art USED to be about artists communicating with other human beings. But like architects, modern artists have to prove that their expensive education makes them smarter than everyone else. Doing so by taking on something truly unique--like making something beautiful that is also original enough so it can withstand the critical brickbats of the New York art set--is too much of a challenge.
So they go for the easy task of making something that's merely different. I can say "OK, I've never seen anything like this before"--but so what? Originality for its own sake is useless. Something both original AND beautiful? Now THAT is the test of a true artist.
I'd have to take a long time to give you some examples of living artists whose works are both uniqe AND beautiful.
Marfa was also a racehorse of the 80s, opr was it the 70s/
Is post 9 a Dan Flavin? His work is there too? I do like his play of color.
I can understand Judd's feeling that his works might not be shown as he envisioned them at most museums. But the work seems a bit repetitious in the images of Marfa that I've seen. It might be a cool experience to see the pieces echoing down the hall, reflecting each other. But I just don't see a deeper meaning in Minimal Art beyond the experience.
Care to enlighten me?
This is what my stepmom says about what's going on in Marfa (so you get a local opinion):
The Prada is not a store. It is a false display window. Sitting in a cow pasture LOL!!! with no safe place to stop or pull off of the Highway 90. It is vandalized about every 2 weeks. Even though there is only left shoes there and all the purses are stripped of all insides and unusable. Very highly published fact but they still keep tearing up the building and taking the showy trash. It between Valentine and Van Horn. 46 miles from Marfa. Only about 30 miles from Van Horn. Weird, very weird the entire thing.
Ballroom Marfa!! HAHA!!! Everyone thought that someone was opening a place to go dancing and drink. Where there would be bands that were not "Mexican country players." Nope it is a gallery. With paintings that look like they were done by drunk monkeys that were not allowed to go to the bathroom until it was all finished.
Lots of people coming out here with much more money than good sense. If they need to make money, they won't. But that is of course only my opinion.
Think Zen and throw in some leftover yoga...
Which? Do you mean the diner scene or one of the others was at the Gage?
Posted too quickly ! I believe the Gage was where some of the cast stayed.
Funny, I don't think of Marfa as near the Mexican border, but I guess in the greater scheme of things, it is. I think of it as "near Alpine."
When you say "near the border," I think of Presidio or Lajitas or Langtry, in that neck of the woods.
Oh, I see. I found a good article this morning while googling around, trying to find out where some of the scenes were shot. It was by a film person, written a few days before the opening of the movie in 1956.
It mentioned the Paisano Hotel in Marfa as the headquarters, but didn't say much of anything about other scenes--just that the Big House was built on a rancher's land and was just half-house, pretty much. Became a fancy barn when the movie production shut down.
I've never been that far out, only to Marathon a few times and Alpine twice, that I can remember (a couple of other times as a kid, which I don't remember). So, I was not among the thousands who got to watch the movie being made on-location. They had grandstands erected and several hundred people got to watch each day as they were shooting. They shot with live, wild sound, which was unheard of at the time. Most of the interior shots were back at Warner Bros. studio lot, though.
When they wrapped up production and showed the uncut film in L.A. for the cast and crew in 1955, James Dean was finally "let loose" and went tearing out, headed to a stock car race he was entered in. Died the next day in the famous car wreck.
I loved when everyone flew in to the little Jett Rink Airport for the hotel opening. I lived at the time just a couple of miles straight down the road from the real "63-shades-of-green" Shamrock Hilton and thought this was all true-to-life and the way it all happened just a few years before, lol. (I was a grade-schooler.)
You're close compared to most...It is close to Alpine. Not too far from Ft. Davis.
But it is close to the border there. And when you look at the map of the county, Marfa is sort of at the edge of things.
I like the area. Hoping next year to get over and visit my Dad who lives about 65 miles away from Alpine.
Other words of wisdom from my stepmother. Now you know she's not looking at it like I might, cause I think if things between Marfa and Ft. Davis and Alpine get better, it'll be good for the people who live there unless they price it out of the kazoo, and I expect if that happened, the limiting factor of how many people could end up there would be water. As it is, El Paso's scrambling for water they would like to take out of that area.
anyway, this is what she told me today:
Marfa is 76 miles from I 10. 250 miles from Midland - Odessa. 190 miles from El Paso. However there is plenty of drive through tourist going to Big Bend. It has been my experience that they are traveling on pinched pennies and not buying art in the galleries.
She may or may not be right.
Anyway, I get much of my inspiration (I"m a writer) from illustration, have more books of book illustrations (SF,fantasy generally) than many artists I know. I asked my friend why illustration is looked down by "artists".
Over the years we have revisited the question, but he frequently comes back to the same answer. "Norman Rockwell was an illustrator, and his subject matter appealed to the average person, who is precisely what many artists DON'T want to be. They want to distinguish themselves, make a scandal."
95% of the contemporary art I own and love is illustration. So you ARE an artist.
But we, the viewer, see that they're sleeping in the open land, under the stars. A very cool moment in a terrific movie. (If you've seen it I have a few words for you: "Your parachute didn't open!")
Well, other than passing through on the way to CA a few times as a very young person, all my experience in that little corner of heaven was on the way from Dallas to Terlingua and on the way back to Dallas from Terlingua, three times.
It was a ritual to go in one way, through Marathon and come out a different way, through Alpine. We'd meet the Houston and San Angelo contingent in Marathon and then there is a special totem to the chili gods in a trailer park on the way into town - I believe it's at Study Butte, but seems like it's earlier than that - that we had to stop and kiss and give offerings to.
After that, coming back out was just a matter of seeing different breath-taking scenery on the way back to Monahans and points east. No one would ever take me to Marfa or go with me if I was driving, although I always begged.
I haven't seen that, but now I guess I'll have to! Thanks--I did read about it in my googling today.
I haven't been there too much myself, but my dad fell in love with the area after going to a star party in the Ft Davis area and moved out there first chance he got.
I kid him that he moved out there cause it's over a hundred miles to the nearest Walmart, a place he used to visit much too often back in Houston and in Irving.
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