Talke Talks – Gigantic minimalism

Howdy from Texas, dear readers,
Have you seen too much of your family in the last few weeks? But instead of sending ours to the desert, my husband and I fled there ourselves: to Marfa, a small Texas town that is considered a hippie art mecca and is located in the Chihuahuan Desert, which is known for the mini dogs of the same name.

Speaking of Mini: In the 70s, the New York minimalism artist Donald Judd came to Marfa and created a kind of artists’ commune there. The town first gained notoriety in the 1920s and 30s when it built a few beautiful buildings in anticipation of the oil boom. Similar to the film “Giants”: A poor hottie (James Dean) comes to a tiny piece of land, finds oil there, and becomes a millionaire. The oil boom didn’t materialize, but this legendary Hollywood film, which also starred Elizabeth Taylor and Rick Hudson, was shot in Marfa, among other places. Art in the desert, a film from 1956 and not even 2000 inhabitants? A good excuse to leave the family behind for a few days between the holidays.

But the road trip got off to a bumpy start. We chugged for over eight hours from Dallas to Marfa, surrounded by wasteland, flatlands, factories, refineries, scrap metal, Jesus and Maga billboards with a speed limit of 75 miles (120 km/h), which is also considered very fast here. When we finally arrived at the historic hotel in Marfa, dedicated to the “Giants” because the crew and actors stayed there during filming, and which we had booked for three nights, the next disappointment followed: just as historic as the building was also the defective heating.

But we came for art! Marfa was supposedly named either after the Marfa in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or after the one in Jules Verne’s The Tsar’s Courier. There was more Russian to see in Donald Judd’s huge museum, the Chinati Foundation, for which we had booked a six-hour (!) tour: Old barracks were converted into showrooms in which you can see mainly minimalist things: huge aluminum cubes and Cement rings, stones arranged in a circle, colorful lights in long empty rooms and a series of pieces of paper marked with delicate pencil marks. But Ilya Kabakov, the Russian conceptual artist, is also represented here with a building in which he stages an abandoned Soviet school: dilapidated and depressing, condemning socialism.

In addition to Judd’s Center, there is another work of art that made Marfa famous and that in turn denounces capitalism: “Prada Marfa”, a fake store in which real accessories from the fashion brand Prada are displayed; a land art installation that is intended to criticize consumption, but actually also celebrates fashion obsession. The Hollywood film was also thought of: gigantic James Dean and Liz Taylor figures made of plywood stand on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. And since there’s no one in the desert, you can shamelessly take selfies with the works of art.

On our last day we headed to Big Bend National Park because I had promised my husband some unsophisticated nature after all the minimal, concept and land art. We hiked again all alone through the barren but somehow beautiful desert landscape until the paranoia caught up with me: What if my husband suddenly died, who would come to my aid?

On the way back we were stopped by border control; Turns out my husband had forgotten his green card. I considered again whether my husband should die (this time not of natural causes), but we learned, so close to the Mexican border, what so-called white privilege was all about and were waved through.

On the drive home we weren’t so lucky: our car tire burst on the highway. Whether it’s Jesus from the billboard, Dostoyevsky’s concept of guilt and punishment, or Mother Nature: we shouldn’t get away with our solo educational journey unpunished.