As many times as I've been through Marfa, I'm still surprised that it is there at all. Hurtling down US 17 due south from Pecos, my wife and I were surrounded by territory so bleak and lifeless that back in the day, legend has it, the area even ran the Apaches off. It's so barren that when I saw a large ocotillo tree at about mile marker 120, I nearly ran off the road.
Suddenly, we were somehow in the mountains — always a startling apprehension in Texas — and just as quickly, a small green sign appeared, announcing "Marfa, pop. 2,121," and then we halted at the town's one and only stoplight. Marfa seemed very much like any other wheezing, old west Texas–desert burg: small adobe cottages, some well kept, others dilapidated; a couple of small trailer parks; storefronts along a main drag, some empty, some not; a lovingly restored but somehow lonely-looking Victorian courthouse. A lot of churches.
But on closer inspection, Marfa — about a three-hour drive from the El Paso and Midland airports — has a much bigger surprise in store than its mere existence. Indeed, it could be said that Marfa leads a double life. On the one hand, it's a dusty former-ranching, former-oil, former-military town that is 70 percent Hispanic and whose largest industry is serving as a bedroom community for officers who patrol the Mexican border, sixty miles away. But it has also become art tourism's most unlikely boomtown, featuring half a dozen art galleries, a bookstore/coffee bar, a couple of handsomely restored hotels and a good stab at an upscale restaurant. The town also has plans for everything from a Mediterranean restaurant to an indoor/outdoor shopping plaza with a music club and chichi shops.
And if you're thinking that this is just one more Texas town that has decided to capitalize on its quaintness by slapping up a few antiques stores and putting together a historic-home tour, think again. The art scene in Marfa is still modest, but it's the real thing, so much so that some have called it "the new Santa Fe."
That may or may not prove to be hyperbole, but there's no question that the arts scene here takes itself seriously. At Ballroom Marfa, a large converted dance hall that specializes in "big concept" presentations, we thoroughly enjoyed its exhibition of sculpture, video and performance art entitled "Treading Water," a rumination on the region's most precious natural resource. As cofounder and executive director Fairfax Dorn, a Texas native who gained experience in New York's art world before coming back home, told me, "We're not trying to create anything too mass-market here. We're trying to present things that are new and different and relevant."
To that end, the conceptualist Agnes Denes filled one large room with four Plexiglas pyramids, one filled with tap water, another with polluted water from the Rio Grande, the third with motor oil and the last left empty, focusing on the liquids that have shaped this region. The Israeli artist Sigalit Landau put together a mesmerizing video loop of a wound-up string of 500 watermelons slowly unfurling on the surface of the Dead Sea. Just the week before, Dorn said, they'd had an opening gala at which 100 people surveyed the installation while five musicians "played" water-filled conch shells by blowing into them. If it seemed self-consciously edgy, at least it was edgy, and, unlike most of the art I've seen in Santa Fe, Taos and Carmel lately, it was utterly uncommercial.
That spirit is in keeping with the philosophy of the late Donald Judd, the eccentric minimalist sculptor who is generally considered the progenitor of this improbable arts scene. Indeed, you can't talk to anyone about Marfa without Judd's name coming up almost as soon as the fact that the movie Giant was shot in these parts. It was he who "discovered" this dying little desert town back in the 1970s and decided that an abandoned military base occupying 340 acres on its edge was the perfect spot for an "anti-museum" for his industrial-sized sculpture.
Judd loved the light and the loneliness of the place, and he called his anti-museum Chinati, an Aztec word that means "raven" and is also the name of the nearby mountain range. The next morning, as I walked through Chinati, I was reminded that Marfa and the museum complex are a match made in heaven: an expansive, hard-angled, minimal environment for a sculptor who created expansive, hard-angled, minimalist pieces, such as the concrete megaliths that are strewn around the grounds here like bunkers in the Iraqi desert.
But what started all the buzz when Chinati opened in 1986 are the 100 shimmering, milled-aluminum boxes set with obsessive-compulsive precision inside two former munitions depots, which in turn have been outfitted with huge windows and curved ceilings to integrate the special Marfa sunlight into the drama. I have been through this vast exhibit twice and will gladly amble through it again, because, depending on where you're standing and what time of day it is, the shiny boxes, each of them exactly 41" x 51" x 72", constantly shift color. And because Judd was an optical illusionist, he made small variations in each (a front panel is missing on one, half a front panel is missing on another, one is on a pedestal) that produce a dizzying fun-house effect that has the visitor unsure of what he's actually seeing—which is, according to some people, the entire point of art.
This is not the cushy, hermetically sealed museum experience to which we've all become accustomed. The elements are always close at Chinati: the brilliant sun, hot on your neck; the sand and dun-colored shapes of the surrounding mountains etched against the singularly blue sky like computer graphics on a plasma screen; a small horned toad skittering underfoot or an antelope grazing near one of Judd's concrete bunkers. All serve as backdrops to or elements in Judd's installations; in fact, it's hard to imagine this stuff anywhere else. Even the huge installation of fluorescent sculpture created by Judd's good friend Dan Flavin and housed here in six U-shaped barracks connects seamlessly with the vivid hues and hard edges of the terrain. Exploring Chinati is as much about ecotourism as it is about the arts.
And a surprising number of tourists have made the trek. According to Chinati associate director Rob Weiner, attendance is up to at least 10,000 a year, and museum and university groups from as far away as Stockholm jet in to the small airport north of town to see it. Celebrities ranging from Mick Jagger to Dan Rather to Martha Stewart have trudged its baked, cracking soil. Young artists have migrated to the town, some lured by an artist-in-residence program at Chinati, whose alumni include Erwin Redl (who created a light sculpture for the Whitney Museum Biennial) as well as a writers-in-residence program sponsored by the Lannan Foundation of Santa Fe. Artists who now call Marfa home include sculptor Mary Shaffer, a part-time resident whose works have been shown at the Metropolitan Museum, in New York; political cartoonist Gary Oliver; poet Chris Cessac; and soon, New York artist Michael Phelan, among many others. And Chinati is branching out. The Judd Foundation, located downtown, houses a collection of sculptures of smashed and welded automobile pieces — some whimsical, others violent — by John Chamberlain, another friend of Judd's. In addition to its annual fall open house (to be held this year in early October), which has become an international event, Chinati joined with Ballroom and Lannan in 2004 to present a series of stage productions and film screenings of works by Andre Gregory, an artist and director who's rumored to be looking for property in town himself.
Once Chinati was on the map of the arts cognoscenti, a kind of slow-burn synergy revived the entire town, attracting second-home shoppers and urban expatriates who, the arts scene aside, are attracted to Marfa's temperate climate (attributable to its 4,800-foot elevation), its quaintness and the opportunity to flex entrepreneurial muscle in fanciful ways. Houston attorney Tim Crowley and his wife, Lynn, old friends of Judd's, moved to town in 1997 mainly for the clear air, but Tim soon found himself buying run-down Deco buildings along Highland Avenue, the main drag, and restoring them "because I enjoyed the process." They include the Marfa Book Co., an amply stocked bookstore with a coffee bar at the far end of Highland that has become an informal gathering place for locals and tourists alike. As with the sight of abstract art amid the ocotillo and the prairie dogs, the tourist can't help but savor the delicious irony of artists sitting around with ranchers, both sipping caffe latte and shooting the bull.
When Texans began buying old adobe fixer-uppers, word got out to the coasts, and inevitably, New Yorkers and Los Angelenos — ever in search of the Next Big Thing, especially a well-priced Next Big Thing — began snapping up run-down adobes for as little as $100,000 and rehabbing them, leading no less an authority than the New York Times to describe the trend as "the great Marfa land boom." A lot of locals still find that a stretch, but there's no question that real-estate values in the little town have spiked.
"I'm busier than I've ever been," real-estate agent and third-generation Marfan Valda Livingston said while giving me the nickel tour of the place. And, indeed, on every other block, she was able to point out a home that was bought and restored by someone from New York or L.A. that could now be sold for at least twice its purchase price.
Livingston loves the business, but like a lot of other Marfans, she's keeping a wary eye on the pace and substance of the boom here. Some are already grousing. "The town is getting much too sophisticated," one young artist told the New York Times. In reality, the little town doesn't seem to have gotten ahead of itself yet — and seems constitutionally disinclined to. But at what point does the juxtaposition of the modern and sophisticated with the rustic and simple that is at the heart of Marfa's allure lose its ironic punch?
Crowley isn't especially worried. "All the publicity has people thinking that we're all about the glitterati and all that," he says. "But this is still a little town with no pharmacy and no dry cleaners. I'll bet you that on the day I die it won't have more than 3,000 residents."
"What's unique about Marfa," adds Chinati's Weiner, "is that even though it's become an arts town, it's still part ranching town, part border-patrol town. That's its character, and it won't change."
I hope they're right. Driving high in the Davis Mountains the next morning to take a long hike under a blindingly blue sky, I was reminded that nature has always had the loudest voice in what goes on out here, especially regarding the excesses of man, and that probably means that Marfa will remain something of a surprise. As Livingston observed, "No matter how many stories they write, if you're not planning to be here, you're not going to wind up here."
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