Realization and perspective

The map of the United States has always looked to me like something I might have drawn when I was nine years old. I would plan in my head an intricate design and give myself a broad canvas on which to realize it. But my imagination would inevitably exceed my patience, and the finished product would start with a painstakingly detailed corner and grow gradually less meticulous as my tolerance for the project eroded in the face of its daunting scope. Similarly, on the U.S. map the states begin small and asymmetrical. But at about the Mississippi the artist’s patience begins running thin, and they start getting bigger and more geometrically familiar, staggered like bricks as if to mask the laziness a simple grid would have implied. Still, some might excuse the designer for choosing plain shapes to reflect the plainness of their content, and large forms to accommodate their vast emptiness.

Thanks to the Rio Grande and the Gulf Coast, Texas was spared the rectangular monotony of most of the western states, but it was still big and empty. Once we got out of the hills, the landscape opened up into miles of rolling ranchland freckled with sagebrush and other hardscrabble vegetation. Barbed wire hemmed in the highway, and every once in a while there would be a gate and an arch with the name of the ranch and, more often than not, the bleached skull of a steer. The sky was overcast and temperamental, as it had been ever since New Orleans, and broad enough that we could see rainstorms miles away, floating through it like jellyfish. When the atmosphere got thick enough, the desert looked just like the ocean.

The town of Marfa, then, was either an island or an oasis. It appeared alongside the highway more or less like the other towns we had passed through—clusters of storefronts and low-lying homes, and filling stations leveraging tourists’ fear of being stranded in the desert into astronomical gas prices. But Marfa was different. The artist Donald Judd had moved to Marfa in the early ’70s, and had become taken with the high desert in the way one can imagine a minimalist would be. In time Judd disciples from New York City followed and repopulated defunct buildings around town, turning them into galleries and studios. Amid the novel aridity of the desert this bohemian subculture demanded certain familiarities, which how I imagine the coffee shop came to be, and the market with organic sweets and pre-mixed smoothies, and the bookstore where the work of droll essayists and leftist muckrakers were displayed prominently. For lunch both full days of our visit we bought falafels and pomegranate soda from a silver trailer camped on the main drag that kept giving us our change in $2 bills and Kennedy half-dollars. We ate them at picnic tables in the company of skinny, bearded twentysomethings and fiftysomethings with braided hair and paint-stained jeans, while Border Patrol lock-up vans and mud-splattered pick-ups driven by Mexican laborers passed on the street. The Border Patrol has a sector headquarters in Marfa, and police monitor it carefully for illegal immigrants and drug traffickers, close as it is to the border. And so just as the hipster culture mixed oddly with the barren backdrop of West Texas, the looming presence of law enforcement blended awkwardly with the free-spirited ethos of the artists’ colony, and the strange energy of the place reflected both contradictions.

Judd, when he was alive, worked out of two hangars on a former air base that at different times had served as weapons laboratories and work camps for German POWs. The site is now run by the Chinati Foundation, a non-profit Judd founded, and a good deal of his work is still on display there. A slender young intern led us on a tour of the grounds. I cannot claim to ever have understood minimalist art as I was meant to, though not for lack of trying. In the past, I have sat on the uncomfortable benches in the MOMA galleries for hours trying to figure out how a formless series of brushstrokes on the corner of a canvas might inform my understanding of the human condition; but more often than not, this process does little more than make me very, very sleepy. Other visitors will see me squinting at a piece with apparent concentration, and politely take detours to avoid distracting me from what must appear to be a life-altering communion with the art and artist. They wouldn’t likely bother if they knew what I was actually doing was trying to gauge just how inescusable it would be for me to curl up on the bench and take a nap.

Despite my nearly flawless record as a Philistine, one of the Chinati exhibitions did strike me. It was a series of hollow boxes made of milled aluminum, each about three feet tall and four feet long, spaced evenly across the length of one of the hangars. While their exterior dimensions were all equal, the slabs that bisected their interiors were all different. These slabs would create shelves, angles, and compartments within the boxes in ways that confused the eye at first. Often, I would have to concentrate very hard or walk around a box to see it from a different angle in order to figure out the actual positions of the slabs that occupied it. Even then it was difficult; the light streaming in from the wall-length windows would play off the surface of the metal, obscuring certain angles while creating the illusion of false ones.

At one point, Ben called me over to a row of boxes. “Check this out,” he said, crouching and gesturing for me to do the same. “When you look at it from this perspective, you can see across the tops of all these boxes, and they all look the same…” He stood up slowly. “…but when your perspective changes, you begin to see how they’re all different.”

I turned this concept over in my mind several times. Each of the boxes had a definite design; the interior slabs connected to the frames at specific, measurable angles. Thus, each piece could be demonstrated to have specific properties and proportions. However, when Ben stood up and I stayed crouching, he saw unique boxes and I saw identical ones. Even if I also stood and saw the distinctions, out eyes would see a slightly different series of boxes, based on the remaining difference of our unique perspectives (for two pairs of eyes cannot occupy the same space), as well as whatever variances exist between how our eyes receive the images before us, how they relay those images to our brains, and how our brains interpret those images. You could, of course, show us diagrams of each box, and there is little chance we would disagree on the facts of their dimensions. However, a diagram is just a diagram. The truth of the box lies in its realized form, and that truth is different to each person who stands over it, brow furrowed in concentration, trying to figure out the angles—or maybe just pretending to.

The map that I have studied my whole life—that series of shapes that start out tiny and idiosyncratic and grow larger and more uniform as they move west—can tell me standard facts about my country’s proportions and properties. But it is entirely likely that I learned more about America from Donald Judd’s aluminum boxes than that map ever taught me. The impressions I have gleaned and documented over the past five weeks are studies of the map’s realized form. I cannot call them true, but I can call them mine. And that will have to do.

Posted from Subway, I-45 W Exit 89, New Mexico.