![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Chinati Foundation/Donald Judd
May. 23rd, 2008 09:51 amWhen I was in Marfa, I also saw mesmerizing sculptures by Donald Judd at the Chinati Foundation. If you follow the link (and I hope you do -- it's is a write up with pictures from a tour guide of the whole morning tour I took), scroll down to get to some beautiful photos of the aluminum boxes in the airplane hangar (especially, I think, the two detail photos of boxes) -- they were unforgettable.
When I'd seen images of Donald Judd's work before, or heard a little bit about it, it had seemed kind of cerebral and cold to me, but the aluminum boxes in the airplane hangar and barracks were unforgettable, and anything but cold. The site is an old military base, and the hangar had been, among other things, a workplace for German POWs during World World II: there were still warnings written in German on the wall. The walls are now windows, and the rows of glimmering, mediative, silvery boxes are in conversation with the grasses blowing outside, the mountains in the distances, concrete Judd sculptures out in the field, the other barracks, and, on the morning I was there, a small herd of pronghorn antelope that came up to graze right at the windows. The boxes stretch in long rows, and they make depths and shapes and angles with the intense west Texas sunlight. The play between light, surface and landscape feels something like a conversation (or maybe at places a dance), but also very much outside the realm of words. As the people in the tour began to move among the boxes, they made faint reflections on the surfaces, and so a subdued image of a pair of legs in jeans, or the full bodies people moving slowly down the rows, looking, became part of the piece, too. There was one short stretch in the second barracks, with a far, flat-topped, blue mountain framed between two boxes, and, then, from one of them, the light pouring through in a low, concentrated triangular shape that seemed like the stuff of haloes in old paintings, or just pure thought, or, more what it was, clear light that had been drawn in in a way that let me look right at it, and and I had been let in to do that. It was like that deep, beautiful, open concentration that sometimes comes in meditation or intense work or extreme feeling or prayer. I could have stood there all day.
When I'd seen images of Donald Judd's work before, or heard a little bit about it, it had seemed kind of cerebral and cold to me, but the aluminum boxes in the airplane hangar and barracks were unforgettable, and anything but cold. The site is an old military base, and the hangar had been, among other things, a workplace for German POWs during World World II: there were still warnings written in German on the wall. The walls are now windows, and the rows of glimmering, mediative, silvery boxes are in conversation with the grasses blowing outside, the mountains in the distances, concrete Judd sculptures out in the field, the other barracks, and, on the morning I was there, a small herd of pronghorn antelope that came up to graze right at the windows. The boxes stretch in long rows, and they make depths and shapes and angles with the intense west Texas sunlight. The play between light, surface and landscape feels something like a conversation (or maybe at places a dance), but also very much outside the realm of words. As the people in the tour began to move among the boxes, they made faint reflections on the surfaces, and so a subdued image of a pair of legs in jeans, or the full bodies people moving slowly down the rows, looking, became part of the piece, too. There was one short stretch in the second barracks, with a far, flat-topped, blue mountain framed between two boxes, and, then, from one of them, the light pouring through in a low, concentrated triangular shape that seemed like the stuff of haloes in old paintings, or just pure thought, or, more what it was, clear light that had been drawn in in a way that let me look right at it, and and I had been let in to do that. It was like that deep, beautiful, open concentration that sometimes comes in meditation or intense work or extreme feeling or prayer. I could have stood there all day.
