More Songs About Texas and Minimalism October 27, 2006

Donald Judd's Table Object

Via Tyler Green, earlier this year David Byrne—the extraordinary pop musician, best known for helming the Talking Heads—blogged about his trip to Marfa, Texas. Byrne sums the place up:

This town was named after a minor Dostoyevsky character and now it is known primarily for the Marfa Lights—strange aurora borealis like phenomena on [sic] that occur on the edge of town—and the permanent installation of a lot of work by minimalist sculptor Donald Judd.

I'm invariably amused by the astonished reactions of visitors to Marfa and the west Texas landscape, having grown up around mesas and mesquite. Byrne spends the majority of his first post on Marfa talking about the absurdly flat land and his trip to Big Bend National Park. But in his followup post, Byrne tackles Judd:

Judd and many others pushed these ideas to their limits—the "hand" of the artist was eliminated—the work was fabricated by "factories" using industrial technology—the artist merely submitted drawings and approved (or not) the finished piece. The work was outsourced, as we would say today. This way of working was an extension of the notion of "art as idea" that began in the early part of the 20th century and was applied by Warhol (I remember how shocking it seemed to many that AW didn’t actually silk screen some of his own paintings) and by conceptual artists in the 60s whose work consisted simply of written instructions. The surfaces, especially of Judd's pieces, were made by machine, or at least simulated that perfection; the edges razor-sharp, the colors flat or non-existent and the look was inhumanly perfect. There were no fingerprints, smudges or smears. Furthermore, to add to the effect, these works were, and are often are, shown in former industrial spaces—SoHo lofts, white cubes around the world and the spaces in Marfa.

Read more on Judd here. I quibble with Byrne's description of Judd's use of color, which makes it sound as if Judd's colors weren't vivid and central to his works. In fact, color was the aspect of Judd's art that emerged in the Christie's auction, for which Christie's displayed all the sale works in a sunlit Rockefeller Center penthouse gallery (to date, the most complete retrospective Judd's work has seen). And though those pieces were later works, the more diverse Marfa collection—pieces that are nearly all sunlit as well—show his hand with color, too. The crucial factor seems to be the natural lighting, which is a very different treatment than Judd usually sees in museums.

And while it's not strictly Eye Level's purview, it would be a shame to mention Byrne and not mention his excellent thoughts on the difference between New York and Texas musical traditions—be sure to read to the end.

Related Link: Works by Donald Judd in SAAM's collection

• Donald Judd, David Byrne, Tyler Green, Marfa, Smithsonian American Art Museum