I’ve lived in Marfa full time for two years now, so my impressions are different than they once were. But I still remember the shock of my first time driving into town; the sparse vastness of the plains, the dry brown grass, the dry brown trees, the scalding sun, the vacant lots and dry brown mudbrick pile homes, slowly melting back into the earth. The wind and dust. Marfa, though it is delightfully full of village life, is a ghostly town. The population peaked in the 1930s at under 4000 people, and has been steadily declining since, to a present total of around 1700 souls, although, recently, there has been a slight resurgence. The elderly people who grew up here remember what it was like when there were two movie theaters, a department store, car showrooms, and an assortment of grocers. Many of the buildings of our downtown corridor are still here, but the businesses, and their patrons, are gone. The train runs through the center of our town – it is the entire reason Marfa exists – but we’re not significant enough for it to make a stop.
And at the center of Marfa’s ghostly heart is a shrine to the dead.
The story of this shrine goes something like this: at our village’s nadir, in the 1970s, after the cattle ranchers had surrendered to the unrelenting climate, and after the army base had closed, the economy of Marfa bottomed out in depression. The downtown, as I understand it, was mostly shuttered. And then a man of unique talent appeared; disaffected with his life in New York City and seeking space to make his artwork, Donald Judd moved to town. He exhorted his powerful friends on the East Coast to help him purchase the old military base, where he installed the sculptures of his own design, and that of his friends. He purchased many of the buildings in the downtown corridor, preserving, refining, and by all accounts, cherishing them. But then, in 1994 he died, and something strange happened.
If you or I died, our families would be sad. They would have a funeral. They might continue to live in the houses we occupied together, or they might downsize and sell them. They might cherish such arts as we had made, and speak fondly of our memory.
They probably would not turn the entirety of a village downtown into a mausoleum, with a vast and amply compensated staff fussing over which pencil the fallen had placed in which drawer, laboring intently to preserve Judds estate and artworks exactly as he left them. To be clear, I haven’t met anyone who works in these necropolitical temples in whom I don’t find something to admire, in fact, many are friends. It’s just that I find the overarching project to be … unalive. The legacy of Judds ex-lover was arranging the financial consecration of his temple at Chinati. The professions of the children of Judd are, so far as I can tell, professionally being the children of Judd, the duties of which seem primarily to be zealously guarding his name so as to protect it’s continued value of patrimony.
None of this is really about the art, or the dead artists – it’s the money that sets this shrine apart. The adobe of villagers may dissolve into the desert floor, but the aluminum boxes will remain in place as long as the money for their preservation lasts. This is not a phenomenon that is unique to Marfa; of the 332 artists who will “participate” in the upcoming 2024 Venice Biennale, 52% are dead. I believe there are two market forces that have caused this situation: the professionalization of consumption in the form of “art history” informed “art criticism”, and the risk-free certainty that the dead will remain so.
Perhaps we need a stricter definition of contemporary art: it cannot be made by dead people. We certainly need a new value system; this systemic, mass consecration of the fallen is hostile to the living. What’s ironic is that this veneration of the dead would have been deeply unfashionable during the period at which most of the art under discussion here was being produced. The most “radical” part of radicalism is indifference to the past. But our modern culture demands servility to it.
Is Judd’s art good? This does not matter.
Is it true that none of us will ever be as good as He was? Shouldn’t we have the freedom to try?
A quote I have thought about for years comes from the autobiography of Damien Hirst. Discussing his diamond encrusted skull, titled “For the Love of God”, Hirst says, “artists tend to make art with what’s around them. And what was around me was a whole lot of money.” I think about this quote often because, as a heuristic lens, applying it to artists is often revealing. Judd made pristine works based off engineer drawings and virgin materials. My living artist friends and I make a lot of art out of trash. A decade or so ago, we would have been called outsider artists, but I think the wealthy have largely moved away from saying the loud part out loud. What is outsider art outside of? The answer is well known and obvious: money and power.
We make art out of trash because we do not have much money, and because trash is abundant here: because of our remoteness, the costs of removing it are prohibitive. And so, it piles up – corrugated metal roofing, aged gutters, rotted barbecue grills, sunbleached shipping pallets, cars that will probably never be repaired, balky fluorescent light fixtures discarded during LED retrofits… the abundance of good trash is in fact one of the valuable resources available to those who live here.
I make art out of trash because I do not have much money. But I don’t find myself at all disadvantaged by my lack of capital, I feel empowered and challenged: to be more creative, more resourceful, more imaginative. I experience a sense of hedonistic, living vitality by taking what I find, and envisioning how it could be. And so what I have produced, the installation “Eternal Rest”, is made out of trash. I saw 30 very large fluorescent lamp boxes piled up at the dump, and I thought, “those could be so cool and powerful, if they were preserved and celebrated.” I saved them for a year in the shed in front of my apartment (which is also made out of trash) and then I have carefully restored into service as many of them as I could. There are many ways this artwork can be interpreted – ecological and apocalyptical, and also full of hope and resilience –
But above all, I exhort you, viewers –
Celebrate the living! Leave the dead to their eternal rest!