What, you're not into modern art jokes?
This was going to be a long post, full of insights into the ongoing tension between art people (disparagingly called "Chinatis" after the Chianti Foundation) and the regular old folks in Marfa, including a bit of art critique and a slew of lovely pictures, but the free internet I don't even think I'm supposed to have here at the Hotel Paisano in Marfa is teetering on the verge of complete collapse.
So, let's just see if I can get the damn pictures on the damn blog, dammit, Internet!
We started out the freezing day with a half-block walk down the street to the Presidio County Courthouse. It's old... it was here at the of the last century, so my preacher great great grandfather and my dentist great great grandfather presumably did business here.
Great pink building, isn't it? (The building on the right, the Palace, was the town's air-conditioned movie theater - now it's another artist's residence.)
Inside, stately and appropriately carpeted and railinged:
The dome is way taller than anything else in the town, and perhaps the county, so there's a nice view of Marfa and the surrounding flatness punctuated by tall rocks.
We walked around the courthouse, checking the dates on the churches to see which Baptist church had been my great-great-grandfather's, but we didn't have much luck, and the Presidio Couty Museum was closed, so no dice. I hope next time to make more progress.
We did see a reminder of impending Christmas, though!
Then, we did some wandering around town looking at several terrific galleries. It's really a shock how many there are, for such a small town! Blame Donald Judd, the first art guy to come in and start buying up property.
This is great, but it also makes me cringe. And seems like a good time if you hate your neighbors and they have yappy dogs. And you're planning a trip out of town.
After a morning of art, we tried to add to the dadaist feel of the town through our art installation, entitled "Hungry at Squeeze Marfa."
Feeling plugged into the art movement in Marfa, we went to where it all began - the defunct Fort Russell and the Chinati Foundation. Donald Judd was a superfamous minimalist modern artist who moved to Marfa in the 1970s when the space in New York became too stifling for the enormous boxes that were his milieu at the time. Then he bought up like half the town, and a bunch of other artists followed him here, and ta da - Marfa.
The Chinati Foundation has a great place to see art installations. Fort Russell's barracks are still there, and they're slowly filling up with permanent and temporary exhibitions by artists from Judd himself to Dan Flavin (the flourescent tube guy) and down to lesser-known folks.
Just outside the gates is the best thing ever - an installation of dead horses.
No, they're not real. I guess this used to be a thing, armies would create dead horses to spy on each other. They're hollowed out and they play music. Presumably the original ones didn't, but these do.
Anyway, inside.
On our tour, we saw paintings by Olle Baertling,
met Husbear's new favorite artist, John Wesley (here's his jaunty Al Capone),
and saw a room full of line drawings by an Icelandic artist whose name escapes me and who I can't google, reference fragile internets.
We only got to see Judd's boxes from afar - those are covered on the morning tour. With only one day in town, we weren't going to spend it all at the Chinati place.
By far the largest installation we saw was one of Dan Flavin's works, entitled, well... untitled, marfa project. It takes up six full barracks and is thus impossible to photograph. We've seen a lot of his work in modern art museums around the world, but it's tended towards the "one flourescent light tube stuck on a wall" end of his spectrum, so it was fun to see what he'd do with a lot of space.
Mostly, tunnels shaded various colors by light alone.
I liked it, and we quickly lost the rest of our group. It was fun to have the opportunity to see the installation by ourselves, where you can really hear the hum of the lights and play with the shadows without being distracted.
Besides the Chinati Foundation and the courthouse, there was really only one thing I wanted to see in Marfa - and actually, it's 35 miles outside of town, on the west side of Valentine, Texas.
Did you know Marfa rates its own Prada boutique?
Yes, surrounded by more typically Texan advertisements (like this amazing one we spotted and the mr. documented - if you need a bull, I'll get you the phone number),
there is a small box of a store. It's so out of place your eye skips it for a second, refusing to belive what's there in front of you. (For more information, see here.)
Apparently, the retailer is not entirely welcome in this part of the state, and vandalism has repeatedly made its mark. We saw graffiti on one side of it, but some evidence of the anti-capitalist bent of the populace (ha) can be seen on one of the awnings:
Yep, those are real life bullet holes.
Something odd is happening outside of the Prada. Maybe it's because of the lovingly displayed shoes inside, but on the poles of the farm fence snaking around the back of the store, people have started to leave footwear.
(By the way, I've now been chased down to the hotel lobby by the ever-tightening circle of internet, and I don't have the charger, so let's wrap this up.)
Back to the hotel just in time for the lovely end of the evening light. Parts of Giant, James Dean's last movie, were filmed in Marfa. There are signed cast photos stapled (!) to the wall in the lobby of the Paisano.
Dinner, in this town that shuts down by 9? Alice's. Good green chile as salsa, but the rest of the meal... the less said about it the better.
Tomorrow (oh crap, today, apparently, it's past midnight), on the road again. Carlsbad Caverns. Our plan is to stay in Capitan, New Mexico - it's where they found Smokey the Bear! Really. He's buried there. Don't you love campy American travel? I'm refinding my appreciation of it.
I just can't wait to get on the road again...
