Marfa is a meeting of the vast and very small. Small in the sense of community, a created zone where people gather to make sense of the endlessness around them, or at least abide it. The town feels like a midpoint between the Mystery Lights off in the desert, and the McDonald Observatory high in the mountains — a concrete structure set between unanswerable questions.
In mid-October, Jessica Fuentes, Glasstire’s Editor-In-Chief, and myself ventured out to West Texas for the 38th annual Chinati Weekend. I came away thinking about gardening: shaping and fostering a tiny plot of earth, to grow things, including oneself, and to connect to a thing much larger than oneself: an ecosystem.
The entrance to Maintenant gallery acreage east of Marfa
Most often in a museum or gallery I’m captivated by the art. Rarely am I aware of the infrastructure, beyond whatever atmosphere it contributes to the experience, much like a frame around a painting or photograph. It might have been my introduction to Chinati Weekend that set the tone of my trip, beginning with a Thursday sunset visit to Maintenant gallery, which prefers an all-caps version of its name, MAINTENANT, and describes itself as “an art and fighting laboratory with two gallery spaces — one of which also serves as an active boxing gym — set on 25 acres in the High Chihuahuan Desert, two miles east of town.” The turn off I-90 leads to a series of rough gravel roads intersected by train tracks and set at odd angles. Two rows of SUVs lined the road along Maintenant’s acreage. Their drivers parked, passed through the propped-open fence gate, and ambled through a thick layer of dust to get to a gable-topped barn with large doors open at both ends.
Mo Eldridge and Roscoe Mitchell in Mitchell’s exhibition “Congliptious” at Maintenant, Marfa
As artist and Glasstire contributor Mo Eldridge wrote on a recent visit to a show at Hetzler Marfa, a gallery just east of Maintenant, “The paintings are big. The gallery doors are big. The sky outside is big.” Especially at Mainenant, with its wide open barn doors at either end of the main building, the landscape is a visitor to every exhibition. Not as an intruder, but a presence, like dust from outside gathering in the corners. What does it take to tend a place like Maintenant in the still relatively wild environs of the West Texas desert? Not just the mounting of shows, sending word out to draw people in, offering refreshments, feeding the social media feeds and updating the website, paying the bills, and groundskeeping, but tending to the role of gathering and maintaining community, of claiming viable a space for art as a complement to the sublimity of a blazing orange sunset outside.
On the opposite side of town, the orderly rows of orderly brick and cinder block buildings of Fort D.A. Russell, now the 340-acre Chinati Foundation grounds, must have appealed to Donald Judd’s eye. The desert landscape either changes constantly or never changes, or both at the same time, and orderly constructions bend change into a static state. Even just maintaining my little plot of ground in San Antonio means constantly sweeping dust from the sidewalks and wrestling weeds that have never heard of the Anthropocene. Caitlin Murray, Chinati’s Director, has been credited with leading the effort to dust and clean the cobwebs from Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982–1986), which I’m sure shocked the several spiders who’d taken up residence in those many corners. During a Saturday morning champagne toast for all Chinati Weekend comers who fancied an early morning tipple, Murray told the gathering she’d never made it to see the original installation of Fred Sandback’s delicate yarn sculptures in 2001, and wanted to bring them back for herself and new audiences to experience firsthand. Murray’s revival is an act of tending, to Sandback’s legacy — the artist died in 2003 — and to Chinati as a living repository of latent encounters.
The last glass at Chinati Weekend’s champagne toast
This feeling of communal tending, akin to a family reunion, was nearly corrupted by a surprisingly unwelcoming presence. Art lectures are an annual part of Chinati Weekend, thus long-honored art theorist Joshua Decter was invited to expound on Sandback’s sculpture. While the main theme of his talk lent a few illuminating points, I found myself increasingly disturbed by the sense of insularity present in Decter’s overall perspective. Rather than speaking to the audience, he read aloud, and rapidly, almost machine-like, from a prepared text thick with academic concepts and insider language. Then, at an odd moment, he tossed off a casual joke about violating the Chinati rule about not photographing the art, saying “Please don’t send the police, ICE, whatever, the ‘Art ICE,’” drawing tittering from the nearly all-white audience, which suddenly took the shape of a highly privileged, opaque art bubble.
Decter’s seeming disconnection from the all-too present hypermilitarized reality surrounding us, with a major Border Patrol station a mere 5 minutes south of town and the U.S. Mexico border one hour away — even as he highlighted minimalist-era artworks based on “removal,” and “institutional critique,” and Judd’s ethic of upholding “perceived contextual local vernaculars” — was too jarring, in that I don’t think this very real and harmful issue should be met with knowing irony. Needing to de-bubble, I got up and left the beautifully renovated Crowley Theater, restoring myself to the sunny desert afternoon outside.
Even the pebbles have long shadows in Marfa
Family feeling was restored on my walk over to Cactus Liquors, which indeed sells spirits but also inspirits the street with a row of potted plants and herbs for sale along its front walk. On my way out I happened upon a group of gents exiting a car and entering a cutely painted house with odd signs reading “Nowhere” and “Sweethearts only,” and was invited in. The gallery was closed at the moment, said Chris Ramming, proprietor of Club Nowhere, which was currently hosting a group show entitled Birthday Party on the occasion of its first anniversary, but I was welcome in. Chris warmly greeted other visitors who happened on the space a few minutes after me, and took a moment to explain that the gallery’s long hardwood entryway made an ideal six-pin bowling alley, demonstrating how artist Matt Scobey’s oblong wooden sculptures served as perfect bowling pins. He showed me the backyard garden and said they’d be having an informal party that evening if I’d like to stop by, though I declined the invitation, needing to get back to tend to my little pup and traveling companion Leonard.
Club Nowhere house gallery & backyard garden
Judd, Ramming, Murray, Eldridge, Maintenant owners Jeff Matheis and Sabrina Lejeanvre, and others in and around Marfa were and are engaged in a sort of gardening. They are tending, growing in place, drawing others in through generosity, feeding minds, and offering not just experiences but chances for nutritive edification through personal connection.
On my way out of town, feeling renewed, I stopped by my favorite used bookstore on the planet, the little Book Barn on the side of the Marfa Public Library. Inside, Luann, a volunteer, was busily rearranging the shelves, and politely asked where I’m from. Her reaction was similar to those I received all weekend — “I love San Antonio!!” — (I do, too) but then on my way out she mentioned that I should stop in the library’s courtyard garden to take some herbs with me for my ride home, that a touch of rosemary or thyme would make the car smell nice. A public library with a public garden! I duly clipped sprigs of rosemary and basil, and Leonard dozed while I gazed out upon the high desert unfolding before us.
Marfa Public Library volunteer Luann, and the library’s courtyard herb garden
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