This Model World by Anthony Byrt

Author:Anthony Byrt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2016-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Donald Judd 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982–86

As soon as the Foundation opens, I join a tour group and the day unfolds slowly. It’s like a retreat: a semi-slumberous movement through the heat and the dust. It’s silent. You are constantly aware of your own breath. Your guide only speaks when she absolutely needs to. The rest of the time, you’re left to deal with the facts of the things in front of you. Facts like Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982–86, inside two former artillery sheds. At first the steel boxes seem uniform – identical units in neat rows. But each is subtly different from the rest, their internal spaces carved up in different ways. Over time, some of them have moved as the desert’s heat and cold makes their metal ping and contract. Some, our guide tells us, have wandered well away from their original marks. Massive windows flood the room with constantly shifting lines of Texan light. In the distance, you can make out Judd’s concrete boxes, resting in their field of gold.

You move on to text works by Carl Andre: sheets of typewriter paper on which the artist has tapped out words not just for their meaning but for their shape – units of sculpture as well as speech. You journey on into Ilya Kabakov’s imagined communist classrooms, ruined simulations of the schools he was educated in behind the Iron Curtain. You stand in front of John Wesley’s strange, sexy, figurative paintings. And you move around Roni Horn’s long cones made from copper, which, when you stand in just the right spot, disappear into flat discs of light.

But the most important thing, by far, are Dan Flavin’s works. Collectively, they constitute an enormous installation, filling a long run of soldiers’ barracks. In each, Flavin’s intervention is near identical. At the end of each room’s length are passages, with soft glows emanating from behind them. You round the corner and encounter fluorescent tubes slicing on the diagonal – as though saw-teeth have bitten through space with coloured light. The barracks are horseshoe shaped: a small section of building connecting two long spaces. Flavin has set out complementary colours within each, so that the diffused glow from one backgrounds the sharp specificity of the other: glacial blue lines against butter yellow, pink against martian green.

They are the same colours, I realise, that I saw the evening before in the sky.

When the tour is done, I get back in the car and head into Marfa for dinner. It is Friday now, the night after Thanksgiving, and more things are open. I choose another bar, a big barn of a place, wondering if maybe there’ll be some live music later. Instead, there’s a big screen on the stage, playing a film. I have walked into a Big Lebowski marathon. I order a beer and a sandwich from the bartender, and ask how long the movie has been running.

‘This is like the eighth fucking time,’ she says. Then she kicks out a smart-arse local loaded up on too many White Russians.

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