Visiting the Chinati Foundation and the Oregon Fair

As a late Gemini, I like to celebrate myself. So for my 40th birthday, I designated a whole month to revelry and merriness. This included a backyard party where I rented turntables for my music head friends to play records, renting a hot springs, and a couple weekend trips, which unintentionally became a fascinating experience in opposites.

The first trip was to Marfa and the Chinati Foundation. Some international friends who are very into “art destinations” met me there and we did the full six hour tour—something I suspect far fewer Marfa tourists do than they let on. It was at least my third time over 20 years and the strongest works—Judd’s majestic 100 milled aluminum boxes, Roni Horn’s positively glowing copper cones, Ilya Kabakov’s haunting soviet schoolhouse, and Robert Irwin’s perfect metaphor of mortality—have the eternal shine of great art. They are always new and monumental. To ask if they got old would be like asking if it was boring to see the Grand Canyon more than once.

However, there is a stultifying pall over the Chinati foundation. It feels almost feudal, people tiptoeing around the imagined stern gaze of a dead patriarch. It’s all so hushed and monastical. The no photo policy seems ridiculous and unnecessary. The designated size of the group tours seems absurdly small. Donald Judd was a hard drinking wild man and self-promoter extraordinaire, it’s hard for me to believe if he had lived longer he would wanted his life’s project turned into a mausoleum. It’s true the Chinati Foundation does open for special events during its free weekend every year and for music festivals and other special occasions. I saw Suzanne Ciani play the Buchla synthesizer on a quadrophonic sound system in the stable; Solange filmed a music video in which Marfa residents could participate in if they wore all white and waited for multiple hours. The point is, there should be much more of this. Would Donald Judd really object to say a Ryuichi Sakamoto residency and concert series at Chinati? or Wim Wenders shooting a Russian Ark style film through the property?

And while we’re on suggestions for the Chinati Foundation, time to drop the Carl Andre room. They can keep his little footpath sculpture between the two Dan Flavin barracks (because who gives a shit? You walk on it.), but his room of typology art should be taken down. There are two good reasons for this—the far more important one is that Andre almost certainly murdered his girlfriend—the brilliant young artist Ana Mendieta—by throwing her out of a window where she fell 33 stories to her death on the roof of a deli. Andre was acquitted of her murder in 1988 and has sailed onwards and upwards to major career retrospectives and canonized acclaim. The second reason is that the work is quite bad, so bad in fact it degrades the rest of the institution. Minimal art relies on the presence of an elegant aura—you must zone out on the grain and texture of the materials and luxuriate in the care and attention that frames them. The text blocks of “PISS”, or “SHIT”, or “FUCK” repeated and typed on manual typewriters take a bit of that mysterious and alluring aura off the other works. This is a man who literally and artistically got away with murder. What a righteous and daring disruption it would be to replace Andre’s typology works with Mendieta’s viscerally arresting and anguished Body Tracks, which would mesh brilliantly with the architecture and surrounding landscape. If Andre objects, let him sue and litigate replacing his perverted marginalia with the masterpiece of the woman he murdered. This would, however, require the foundation admitting that Judd was wrong about something.