Contraband comes in different shapes and sizes and down on the border, between Texas and Mexico – a porous and narrow crossing over the barely flowing Rio Grande – there’s plenty of opportunity for it to be transported, whether of the human or pharmaceutical kind.
Trafficking desperate people from all over South America, backpacking marijuana or methamphetamine by shallow steps or dashing across the water in a 4 x 4 with a cargo of heroin or cocaine – these are the industries that thrive here, feeding off the hopes and dreams of the poor folk, who either live in or have travelled up to the Northern Mexican region of Chihuahua, seeking a new life over the “Big River”.
“Contrabando” – there’s even a movie set by that name – a ghost town that became the setting for the Roy Clark film “Uphill all the Way”, when it was constructed in 1985, as we found after taking the 80-mile run down from Alpine to Terlingua then heading west on the old Farm Road through Big Bend Ranch State Park.
Located 9.5 miles west of Lajitas and consisting of an original adobe building called ‘La Casita’, with several later additions, the Contrabando site has been used as a set for nine other movies including John Sayles’s “Lone Star” of 1996 and “Dead Man’s Walk” and “Streets of Laredo”, which were part of the “Lonesome Dove” mini-series, based on a novel by Larry McMurtry. In September 2008, heavy rains over the border in Ojinaga and the ensuing release of water from local inundation control structures, caused widespread flooding resulting in damage to the movie set. But it’s still there today, a tourist attraction perched precariously on the edge of the river.
However, the real action down here at the frontier is not of the movie-making kind but, rather, it’s the constant struggle by Border Control to chase down and apprehend the human mules and cartel-organised incursions into sovereign US territory that are the order of every day and night.
The Big Bend Sector of US Homeland Security covers over 165,000 square miles encompassing over 118 counties in Texas and Oklahoma and is responsible for the largest geographical area of any sector in the Southwest with agents being responsible for over 510 miles of river border. Since 2006, additional agents have been assigned to this area and Border Patrol has massively stepped up its recruitment efforts, increasing the number of agents nationwide from 12,000 to 20,000. But while they have always patrolled the southernmost regions of Brewster County – with a population of 9,300 people, it is one of the nine counties that comprise the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas and is the largest county in the State – most were assigned until recently to the northern towns of Alpine and Marathon. But today, they patrol closer to the Rio Grande in remote places like Terlingua – “Before, we had to sit and wait for illegal traffickers to come to us,” a spokesperson had said, “Now we can catch them a little quicker, or get behind them.”
This has lead to some “crabby” local attitudes to the patrols as the roadside stops can be tedious and intrusive in their questioning and searches. We were stopped just 5 miles from Marfa, a good 60 miles up from the crossing at Presidio, but the young guard was pleasant enough and he recognised that my English accent and UK Drive’s Licence guaranteed our probity !
It appears that many residents feel safer here with more agents on the ground, scanning for drug traffickers, but some, who have lived for decades in these isolated areas, see all the added security as overkill in what they believe is a relatively safe region. The only populated border cities of any size for hundreds of miles around are Presidio and Ojinaga, and together those communities number fewer than 30,000 people. The rugged landscape here – jagged mountains and brutal desert line on both sides of the Rio Grande – keeps the drug trafficking significantly lower than in other border areas and, while the Marfa Sector agents have made a number of arrests, these are drastically lower than their counterparts in, for example, Tucson, Arizona, the busiest border sector. So, the Big Bend area’s isolation and forebidding terrain have limited the drug cartels’ ability to infiltrate from the Mexican lands across the river into Brewster County, though some still manage to make it across.
“These counties have been significant drug corridors, but because we’re so huge and spread out, a lot of activity goes unnoticed,” a County Judge said, “We still have traffic, but nothing like the levels of other areas.”
Most of the new Border Patrol agents come from all corners of the United States, some having recently returned from their experiences in the alien worlds of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the residents feel that they are often unfamiliar with the laid-back flow of rural country living. Veteran agents – the ones that people have come to know as neighbours – grew up in the area, mostly in towns like Alpine, Marfa and Fort Davis, and they are active members of their communities. The larger towns are also accustomed to seeing agents tootling around in their white SUVs, touring area schools, eating at local restaurants and coaching little league baseball games. But in far-flung border outposts like Terlingua, the new agents don’t quite fit in.
Some locals feel that the new agents have not made sufficient effort to ingratiate themselves with the community and Border Patrol agents have been known to destroy gates and cattle guards on ranches, although they are legally allowed to patrol private ranch land within 25 miles of the river.
“The government hired so many so fast that they don’t have the etiquette or bedside manner of country life,” one rancher said, “There’s a different way you talk to ranchers and people who live here and make their living in small town communities.”
One agent, a Marfa native who is a supervisor in this sector, said that it takes time and commitment to get used to life out this way and it took him four years to memorize the landmarks and to navigate the threatening desert and mountains, and he still doesn’t know every nook and cranny. But many of the new agents and their families still find the sector’s remoteness and isolation challenging.
You can get to Marfa in a number of different ways but however you do it, it’s a long way from anywhere. You can fly to Midland/Odessa in the north or to El Paso in the west and then get a car to carry you the rest of the way, 200 miles in either case. Or you can get a train to Alpine and then hire a time-car for the sedate 25 mile journey down TX-67. But because we’d chosen to sojourn in San Antonio during Thanksgiving and were now burdened with an extra suitcase stuffed with everything that we’d accumulated during the past 60 odd days of travelling, we took the long road, Interstate-10, to make the 492 mile trek to the town that, once just another Texan cattle town, has become a magnet for hipsters from the metropolises to the East and West or for the simply curious from Texas and its adjoining states who’ve heard that something is happening here, though they’re not sure quite what it is !
By way of illustrating the attraction, I heard about a painting by an artist from New York, who also has property in Marfa, that recently sold for $26 million. “Apocalypse Now,” a 1988 painting by Christopher Wool, was sold at a Christie’s auction house sale of post-war and contemporary art that had taken place in November in New York. But, according to reports, Wool himself would receive nothing from the sale, rather a New York art dealer had bought the work on behalf of a client, the seller being reported as a former member of the Guggenheim Museum’s board of directors who had pulled the work from a current exhibit of Wool’s art at the museum. Wool’s consolation would be that his “art cred” would continue to soar.
Wool was an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa in 2006 and, soon after, he purchased a home and a workspace in the town with his wife, who is also an artist. But, curiously, “Apocalypse Now” features the words – SELL THE HOUSE, SELL THE CAR, SELL THE KIDS – from a famous line in Francis Ford Coppola’s film “Apocalypse Now”, based on the Joseph Conrad novel, “Heart of Darkness.” Which makes you wonder just where Mr Wool’s ideas are coming from !?
But this story begins to elucidate what Marfa has become known for today, namely the Chinati Foundation, or “La Fundación Chinati”, which is the museum of contemporary art established in the town after Minimalist artist, Donald Judd, began to buy up large chunks of property after he had made his first visit in 1971 and had then moved himself and his family from New York to Marfa as a full-time resident in 1977. Construction and installation at the site began in 1979 with initial assistance from the Dia Art Foundation and the Chinati Foundation opened to the public in 1986 as an independent, non-profit, publicly-funded institution.
And it was the Chinati Foundation and its collection of work that was one of the principal reasons why we had decided to make Marfa our last resort in our epic journey !
But first I had my own encounter with Texan Law Enforcement on the way down from San Antonio. The journey was uneventful to begin with, as the traffic was flowing freely on the Interstate and we were making good time. Even though I noticed, at one point, across the carriageway heading in the opposite direction, that a vehicle had been stopped by what looked like an unmarked police car, there were no signs of patrol cars on our side and, on the very smooth, flat and true road our KIA Hybrid hire-car eased its way past the slower traffic.
Until, that is, I obviously went through some form of radar, and I saw, in my rear-view mirror, red and blue lights flashing way back on the far horizon. I thought at first it was police answering some other call but eventually the lawman caught up with me and I pulled over. It was an old guy, a State Trooper, who must have been woken from his dozing by the bleeping radar and who had eventually tracked me down but, after taking my UK licence to check, he just issued me with a warning, which I had to sign for. He said I’d been doing 94mph, which seemed quite generous to me, but I claimed that I’d been observing the 80mph limit. British pragmatism and phlegm won the day yet again !
After that we made two refreshment stops, one in the town of Sonora where we had a cup of coffee in a Dairy Queen that was patronised by some of the largest and most obese specimens of American manhood that we’d so far witnessed and the other in Fort Stockton where we stopped at a Mexican diner, Pepitos Café, for lunch. It was about 14.30 by now, the diner was pretty full, and the waitresses seemed to be particularly harassed in their work as they were being directed by a middle-aged man, who sat at the cash till watching like a hawk monitoring them as they tried to keep up with the demands of the clientele. But the food was alright and not too expensive so it plugged the gap and gave me a little bit of time to reflect on my dealings with the Trooper back up the road.
After leaving Fort Stockton we soon got onto the US67, which I drove down at a noticeably more steady speed, reaching Alpine and then on towards Marfa, where, having settled into The Paisano Hotel, we headed off to the nearby Crowley Theater, just around the corner and down South Austin Street to hear the artist, Roni Horn, give a performance of her monologue “Saying Water”, hosted in coordination with the Marfa Book Company’s exhibition, “Still Water (The River Thames, For Example)” which was on display at the bookstore. Horn’s work “Things that Happen Again (For a Here and a There)”, is also on permanent view at the Chinati Foundation.
The performance was free and the theatre gradually filled up with what appeared to be Marfa’s intelligentsia and visiting hipsters and there was much greeting going on before a figure who had been sitting on a bench in the shadows at the side of the auditorium made their way to a seat at a spot-lit desk in the darkened space at the front of the audience. I must admit that it was only when Ms Horn opened her mouth to speak the opening lines that I realised it was her, as her masculine-looking attire and cropped hair had made it difficult to be sure that this was the female who would be performing tonight !
“In a waiting room in a doctor’s office some years ago, I overheard a mother talking about how her kids were afraid of it. If they couldn’t see into it, they wouldn’t go into it … The opacity of the world dissipates in water. Black water cannot dissipate the opacity of the world. Confused ? Lost ? Large expanses of water are like deserts: no landmarks, no differences. If you don’t know where you are can you know who you are ? Just tumult everywhere endlessly, tumult modulating into another tumult all over and without end. The change is so constant so pervasive so relentless, that identity, place, scale – all measure lessen, weaken, eventually disappear. The more time you spend around this water, the more faint your memories of measure become. Water is a mysterious combination of the mysterious and the material. Imagine something that impinged on by everything, in contact with everything remains to this day mostly transparent – even crystal clear when taken in small enough quantities. Water is transparence derived from the presence of everything. Water is transparence derived from the presence of everything – that is water sifted down, filtered out through the planet Earth – Earth, aquifer that clarifies and realises purity … All things converge in a single identity: water. Water is utopic substance. Among water. Isn’t water a plural from ? How could it ever be singular, even in one river ?”
And so it went on, an intriguing and provocative piece, if long and in places deliberately repetitive, but she delivered it well sometimes pausing for effect, to gather herself, to take a sip of water or occasionally to make the briefest of hesitations. Remembering a conversation with cowboy, Ray, back in a diner in Tatum, New Mexico, about the several-year drought that had been blighting the ranges and ranches, it was a very apt and appropriate subject for this part of the country let alone for the wider world at large.
The following morning we needed to get some washing done and visited the Tumbleweed Laundry, located, again, in Austin Street just before you get to the Crowley Theatre.
The Tumbleweed prides itself as “the finest laundromat in all of West Texas” and the big front loading washers and very large dryers, each machine having his/her own name, is certainly an unusual facility in Marfa. They provide free Wi-Fi and there is a café attached, in an adjoining space, where ice cream and coffee is available for purchase.
In the café I came across a somewhat bizarre installation, “Yo Calvin” which consisted of a number of cryptic notes and messages to “Calvin”, posted across the three walls, and which had been linked together by strands of string. Apparently, the perpetrator just appeared “out of the blue”, as it were, and new messages just got posted up before anyone realised.
The young girl running the laundrette this day said that she didn’t know who was doing the installation, but she had been living in Alabama and had only moved back here recently, so didn’t know too much about the mysterious intruder. She told me that she had moved back to her hometown as she “didn’t like all the trees in Alabama”, whereas here, while there were still some trees, you could see for miles !
Later during our visit to Marfa, on another visit to the launderette, I found that the artist who had been promulgating the “Yo Calvin” story had tidied up the display and put most of the messages in to small envelopes. She also revealed her identity as Megan Belmer, born in 1987, who announced that she had been a student at the Art Institute of Chicago for a “little while” but who was now living here in Marfa.
We finished at the Laundrette and found somewhere to get breakfast at the “Boyz 2 Men” Taco trailer run by a character named David Beebe. The trailer is located in the parking lot of Padres bar/club, and had its seating right outside, in warm autumnal sunshine.
The food was quite good and I had scrambled egg but I didn’t need any of the “chup” offered by the young man taking the orders. When he explained that this was “Ketchup” I commended him on his abbreviation and he made some remark about shortening the language being one of his talents. A little while later two girls came along, one of whom gave a lurid description of her recent ordeal getting treatment in a hospital in Houston and between them they gave us a short lesson in how young Americans were mangling the Queen’s language, if not forging one completely of their own !
Local information has it that “Boyz 2 Men” is located at “trailerland” – a reference, I suppose to the number of ancient Airstreams that are parked on the lot at the corner – serving up daily specials on Saturdays and Sundays and Mr. Beebe has an “online journal of things that are worthy of recording”. On the introduction to the journal, he says that he is interested in “cooking, Airstream trailers, old Chevrolet trucks, Roller Derby, Recycling, The Big Bend region, Marfa, Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, Oldies Rock and Roll, Spanish, Paris, New York, Houston Astros, Rockets & Texans, electrical work, and a lot of other stuff.” He has also started showing films on Saturday nights at his make-shift outdoor theatre.
Later the same day I visited the Lost Horse Saloon on East San Antonio Street and learnt that David Beebe and his band had played in the bar the night before where there was still some of their amplification and a pedal steel guitar on the low stage. I was told that some of the equipment had already been taken away by members of the band, as they were playing in Terlingua that evening, but they would still have to collect the rest of it. The young woman working behind the bar said that it had been a raucous evening with a mixed crowd, including locals and cowboys, and that there had been plenty of Texas two-step danced. The band had played pretty much non-stop from 20.00 until 11.00 and, in spite of his exertions, David Beebe must have got up early this morning to do the cooking at “Boyz 2 Men”.
I took a few pictures over the road opposite the trailer and when I came back was on my way to have a look at Padres – one of Marfa’s best live music venues – where I intended to attend a gig in the evening when another customer of “Boyz 2 Men”, standing near the trailer having a cup of coffee, spoke to me about Padres being closed and, with this opening, we got into a conversation. He turned out to be an interesting character by the name of Glen, with an interesting backstory.
Glen’s journey in the contemporary art world has been a long and varied one, starting at Dayton’s “Gallery 12” in Minneapolis when department stores were different to how they are today. Dayton’s was one of the mid-west’s most successful department stores and in the mid-1960’s they were also one of the foremost galleries of the contemporary art world, introducing America to Joseph Beuys and showcasing works by Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Lichtenstein just a few floors above homewear and the shoe department. And Glen bought one of Warhol’s “Marilyn” prints for $120 dollars on his Dayton’s charge card !
When the Dayton Gallery 12 closed in 1974, Glen began dealing art from his own home, building the beginnings of a vast network of artists, collectors and musicians that continues to grow to this day. At first there was no money in art, it was just smart people who were friends that helped each other and one such friend would end up running his own gallery, showing work by Glen and other artists. Around this time, Glen also helped some local bands, playing guitar for transplanted blues musician, Lazy Bill Lucas.
By 1976 Glen had become a partner with a fellow collector and had opened his own Gallery in the warehouse district of Minneapolis, the first gallery in that part of town and one which he ran like Dayton’s – because that was all he knew. Other galleries would take 20 or 30 different pieces on consignment while he was taking ads out in Artform, buying wine for the openings, and inadvertently raising the bar for the art scene in Minneapolis. Being at the centre of a burgeoning artistic scene was an incredible thing and Glen recalls this special era as an infectious one.
Like all good things, the gallery didn’t last long and, by 1981, he was working as a corporate art consultant, travelling the world and acquiring pieces for some of America’s largest corporations as it was a trend for the major companies to have a collection of artworks, another merit badge for them. He was flying all over the world – to art-market places such as Milan and Düsseldorf – and living in apartments in Manhattan that no one else used. And while the commodification and commerce of art was increasing, Glen was still trying to push the envelope in terms of content.
A few years later, Glen left the corporate consulting world and, as he found himself at a crossroads not having had to make a real decision for almost 20 years – having just ridden the wave – he now had a decision to make as to whether to go either to New York or to Los Angeles to continue to climb the ladder. But he chose Minnesota instead, going back home, buying a house out in the country and getting a real estate license. But it didn’t go exactly as he had planned as he tried to sell rural real estate during the farm crises and he soon found himself with a collection of odd jobs – delivering mushrooms from the farms to the cities, teaching art classes at local colleges, and starting a country-western band. It was during this time that Glen was also first introduced to the beading process that would become the main focus of his artistic practice for the next two decades when a friend of a friend, who mostly lived in a teepee in the Black Hills, came to crash at his house and he made Glen a guitar strap from elk hide and taught him an old Lakota style of beading called ‘lazy stitch’, a common form of Sioux beading that, while simple, is extremely time consuming. Some of Glen’s larger pieces contain 11,000 beads, all individually selected and threaded to make a continual, flowing pattern, but Glen says that anyone could do this if they had the patience, though very few people do. The discipline of the bead work spoke to a place in Glen’s life that enjoyed simplicity and peace and, in 1991, shortly after beginning to bead, he joined a Benedictine monastery and was a monk for six years. When pressed as to whether he had an overarching motivation or spiritual calling, Glen recalls that, as Wittgenstien said, ‘if you ask why, you’re looking for a cause or justification.’ He had neither, he just did it.
During his time in the monastery, Glen continued his bead work and his first exhibition, “Following A Rule”, took place in 1994 and included several lazy stitch pieces. He described the show as “… art about the difference between explanation and understanding” but, just as suddenly and inexplicably as Glen had entered monastic life, he departed from it. When asked if he felt whether he had achieved any sort of spiritual epiphany that led to his departure he replies, “No. No. No. No. No. I just left. I was just ready to go.”
Returning to Minneapolis, now very much changed from the artistic scene of the late 60’s, Glen was welcomed back as an artist and musician. “It’s weird ’cause I don’t claim to be an artist or a guitar player or anything. It’s just different stuff I do.” These different things that he did still had a vital place in the close-knit community of the Minneapolis art scene, including a new country band that consisted of singers Page Burkam and Jack Torrey, of “The Cactus Blossoms”.
Soon Glen sought to escape the harsh Minnesota winters by traveling through the southwest in his restored Toyota Chinook, a customized camper that he also uses as his studio, and he eventually made his way to West Texas and set up shop in Marfa. The show “Blinky, We Hardly Knew Ya” was his first in the town and came quite unexpectedly. “I never look for shows. They just kind of happen. It’s a real treat and the whole thing is stuff I’ve made since I’ve been here.” The show was a nod to German abstract painter, Peter Schwarze, who adopted the moniker of a famous American mafia capo, Blinky Palermo, and painted the 1976 series “To the People of New York City”, which influenced Glen a great deal.
Glen’s bead work is rich and precise and the colours shimmer off the hides with the level of skill necessary to make them immediately evident. “It’s like blues or country music. You’ve got 12 bars. I really just enjoy restricted forms.” Glen’s work still reflects his organic spiritual inclinations and, while no longer in the monastery, he still attends church regularly and looks at his beading as another form of prayer. “It’s calming. When things get fucked up I just keep beading and it comes together.” While he has created detailed landscapes and intricate pattern work in the past, his pieces offer a simple and earth tone palette. One set of pieces is entitled “The Four Seasons”, a group of four small works with shifting, complementary colours. “I made Winter and Summer first before I knew what was happening” he explained, “Then I said ‘Aw fuck!’ and I’ve been beading for three days straight. I finished at 9.30 this morning and came and hung them up.”
Glen’s contributions to the contemporary art world have been eclectic and enduring, his greatest being that he is simply still involved and in such a vital way. In a town like Marfa, Texas, where the two aspects of the art world – grassroots local artists & international jetsetters – are in such close proximity, Glen is a modest man who has seen enough changes in each to exist in both.
We spoke about Rauschenberg with whom he had worked on a couple of exhibitions in Minneapolis and about taking up the guitar again after a hiatus because of our lack of conviction in our own ability, but that now we were both ready and thinking about starting again. He recommended Billy Joe Shavers and The Cactus Blossoms as musicians to listen to.
I told Glen that I would be visiting the Judd works the following day, Sunday, and he mentioned a “Valerie” whom he said was an excellent guide and would probably be doing the tour tomorrow. I took a couple of pictures of him and got his email contact.
After this long conversation, we returned to The Paisano from where I took off to reconnoître what Marfa had to offer by way of Art, other than that made and collected by Donald Judd.
I started at the Ayn Gallery where I saw some of the worst paintings that I’d come across in a long while. These were 18 works by a German artist, Maria Zerres, her monumental elegy, “September Eleven”, completed between November 2001 and February 2002 in the wake of the tragic events of 11 September 2001 in New York City where the artist has lived and worked for many years. Zerres has said that she was deeply affected by the violent destruction of New York’s twin towers and has described the towers’ office light as a sort of beacon for her life as she walked with her children at night in the area around her apartment. But, even allowing for the horror of what she was depicting, which I assume she felt she could only approach through a kind of dumn simplicity, the paintings were awful !
Then in the room next door there was a selection from Andy Warhol’s largest and most comprehensive series, “The Last Supper”. Commissioned in 1984 by gallerist, Alexandre Iolas, Warhol created more than 100 paintings and works on paper based on Leonardo da Vinci’s painting which is housed in the the refectory of the Convent of the Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. The works on show here were characteristic of Andy’s tongue-in-cheek pop culture references, that is, they were simplistic, line-drawn cartoon images – another disappointing, over-blown exhibition.
After this, I decided to go for a beer, which I found in the Lost Horse Saloon. I was the only customer, other than a cowboy sitting at the bar, and I wandered around with my Shiner beer looking at the cow skulls and the obligatory Texas Longhorns’ horns mounted above the bar. They also had two pairs of decorated cowboys chaps hanging on a wall next to the pool table and a beaten-up old upright piano, a relic perhaps of some earlier time. The barmaid said that she had just relocated to Marfa from the east, that is from New York, and really liked the lifestyle that she’d found down here.
There was due to be a poker tournament taking place in the saloon later but I wasn’t going to wait for that to start and I left and walked up East San Antonio Street towards the traffic lights and went into “fieldwork/marfa”, an International Research Program, run jointly by Les Beaux-Arts de Nantes and HEAD-Genève. The programme has residences for artists and I spoke with the young man who was looking after the gallery and sweeping up seemingly in preparation for the installation of a new exhibition. He said that he had himself studied in Nantes and I told him about an English artist friend of mine who had also spent time there undertaking post-graduate study.
There was some photographic work and documentation by someone named Elisa Larvego which caught my attention which was based on the artist’s investigations of a specific community on the Mexico-United States border and this warranted further investigation.
In 2011, Elisa Larvego, who is based in Geneva, was invited to take up the artist-in-residence position for three months at “fieldwork/marfa” and she soon became interested in a nearby village on the US side of the border by the name of Candelaria, with about one hundred inhabitants, including almost sixty children, located where the road stops in the Chihuahuan Desert. It is situated across the Rio Grande from San Antonio del Bravo in Mexico, but there is no direct transport link between the two villages.
In the 1990’s, the American government closed down the school in Candelaria, officially for financial reasons while, on the Mexican side, there is no school or school bus, as the dirt road linking the village to the only town in the area, Ojinaga, is very bad.
The only possibility for the children to receive an education in Mexico would be for them to move to a town in the region, but most of the families have land in San Antonio del Bravo and don’t want to leave their village. So, the children have to travel three and a half hours every day by bus to attend the school in Presidio, the frontier town that we’d visited down on the border, in the US. Most of the menfolk live in San Antonio del Bravo and, at weekends, the residents leave Candelaria to join their families on the Mexican side.
In the 1990’s, the inhabitants clubbed together to construct a footbridge, creating a permanent link between the two villages but passing from one country to the other was still illegal, although it was tolerated by the US government until 2008, when the bridge was destroyed by the authorities. Inhabitants wishing to cross the frontier legally then had a five-hour drive to reach a village only a matter of feet and yards away as the crow flies.
In 1920, in order to reduce erosion in the Rio Grande valley, which posed problems for the US government, the American authorities introduced the salt cedar, a kind of tamarisk, a species of tree from North Africa. Given that the river delineates the boundary, the constantly-shifting river bed of the Rio Grande also meant that the frontier kept changing so the salt cedars were intended to stabilize the river bed and so establish a clearly-defined boundary. After their introduction, the authorities noticed that the trees were enormous water consumers and a highly invasive variety as this tree species secretes salt into the ground, hence its name. It was discovered that this characteristic inhibits all other sorts of trees or plants from growing in proximity to a salt cedar and the region gradually dried out and the salt cedar soon became the only variety of tree left in the valley.
In 2010, the American government tried to eradicate the salt cedars by introducing a species of beetle from Tunisia and the trees do appear to have died since the arrival of the insects, but the latter have also wiped out another sort of tamarisk, a tall, evergreen variety, not invasive or destructive like the salt cedar, which was planted to provide shade near houses and ranches. These trees were much appreciated in this desert region and their disappearance is problematic for the valley’s inhabitants. The other negative consequence of the introduction of the beetles is the creation of a forest of dead trees that often catches fire in the spring, sometimes five times a month.
The cause of these fires is still a mystery but, according to the region’s American inhabitants, they are accidentally started by local farmers on the Mexican side, where there are no regulations. However, some Candelaria residents think that the fires might be deliberately lit by American border patrols to prevent Mexicans from hiding in this dead forest. It is rare that the firefighters come to extinguish these frequent fires as Candelaria is too isolated and so the valley has become known as “the forgotten valley”.
So, a bridge there had recently been destroyed and this was mentioned to Elisa by one of the inhabitants and it aroused her curiosity. She went to Candelaria and was surprised to find just a small hamlet, a kind of ghost village, where there was no café and no shop and where she sensed that it would be difficult to meet the people living there. But, as she was leaving, she happened to pass the school bus coming back from Presidio and she realised that the children made this long journey every day. Later, she learnt from press cuttings that the school in Candelaria had been closed down without justification in 1998 by the US government and she came to understand that the families were divided between the village of San Antonio del Bravo in Mexico and Candelaria in the US, so that the children could receive an education and she was very interested in this separation of a family unit by a boundary, for it gave her the chance to observe closely how territory can determine identity.
The division also leads to territorialisation by gender – the men stay in Mexico to farm their land and tend to their animals, while the women spend the week in the United States to enable the children to go to school. This relationship between the inhabitants and their context – geographical, political and environmental – has interested Elisa for many years and she has already studied this connection in several of her previous projects.
Now this frontier between the “first” and the “third” world is a very real and highly militarised border, crystallizing the absurd inequality between human beings and, over and above the political geography, Elisa’s work deals with the spatial practices that develop there, in the form of tactics and games, in everyday life.
The Mexico-United States border has featured in many photographic or film documentaries, yet the Candelaria region doesn’t tally with the generally accepted idea of this highly-guarded frontier with its walls stretching for miles. It is not a migration transit point but a kind of vacuum, an area abandoned by the authorities. Crossing the frontier doesn’t lead to the other, the unknown or the stranger, but to a familiar place, another home. It was the uniqueness of this context that made Elisa want to start work on this region.
After her first encounter with Candelaria, she felt that this project should focus on a child’s viewpoint and she didn’t want to carry out interviews, but rather let the images speak for themselves by following a child around in their daily life, between their journeys to and from school, their life in Candelaria and their return trips to San Antonio.
In due course, she came into contact with Pilar Avila who lived in Candelaria until the school was closed down and who had subsequently gone to live in Marfa so that her children didn’t have to make the journey by bus every day. She had a house in Candelaria where she suggested Elisa could stay and, while there, she invited her to meet her family and so Elisa met Clarisa, a seven-year old girl who quickly captivated her by her open temperament and she decided to focus her project on her. The girl quickly introduced her to her circle of friends and neighbours and she was therefore able to follow her around as she played, either in the riverbed or in the village of Candelaria. Elisa soon found the childrens’ games fascinating, as they added a new dimension to the place. By transforming the border into a playground and by introducing a touch of lightness through their constant laughter, the children highlighted, through playing tag or fearing the arrival of the police, the dangers inherent in this river channel, where any presence is forbidden. These moments brought two different worlds together and made them interact, the almost dreamlike one of play and the very real world of border illegality.
Clarisa’s family, composed solely of women on the American side of the boundary, generously introduced Elisa to the life of the village and the private world of their family unit and meeting this family gave her a gradual understanding of these inhabitants’ unique situation, living divided between two countries. In fact, she was able to forge ties of confidence with them by spending time living there and by building up a relationship with each of the women.
Clarisa lives with her great aunt, Antonia, and she shares a bedroom with her mother, Adriana, her aunt, Lupita, and sometimes her grandmother, Clara, and Elisa’s attachment to these three generations of women grew out of the evenings that she shared with them. It was also this attachment that primarily led her to carry out this project, inspiring her to relate their singular living conditions in both still and moving images.
Elisa mainly worked with the moving image when dealing with people, whereas her interest in the location was expressed through photography. The only photographs she took of the families were at their request but this separation between media usage came about naturally as she wanted to follow Clarisa in movement and not freeze her in a certain time and place and video gradually allowed her to enter the life of the young girl, at the same time evoking her environment.
The photographic work developed little by little, through hearing the story of the introduction of the tamarisk trees and, after having witnessed some of the fires, Elisa asked around about their possible origin. The replies, like the history of these trees, seemed to crystallise the conflict situation in this region. This also established another type of connection between the environment and its inhabitants – not just people being determined by their context, but also a transformation of place as a result of human beings and their conflicts.
The photographs enabled her to record the state of the lands ravaged by fire after the event but they also allowed her to document the traces of the conflict in this environment, such as the remains of the footbridge or the cables suspended above the Rio Grande. However, she also filmed these spaces to show the violence of the fires and their ongoing progression, as well as to situate Clarisa in the context of this vast desert landscape.
Elisa visited Candelaria at two different times of the year which enabled her to see the village in two different lights as there are only two seasons in the region – winter and spring – and everything – the vegetation, the light and the pace of life of the inhabitants – changes from one to the other.
In Winter, the landscape appears almost black and white with short evenings, while Spring brings colours and a brightness which lasts until late into the night.
She first discovered Candelaria in the winter, then returned there in the spring, which meant that she could observe how Clarisa’s life changes with the seasons – in Winter, she goes back home early, around six o’clock, when the sun goes down, and rejoins Adriana, Lupita, Clara and Antonia around the stove while, in Spring, she stays out until half past nine, playing with other village children near the only streetlight. In Winter, the atmosphere in the house is more taciturn but, in Spring, sounds and words fill the spaces and the women in Clarisa’s family confide freely. If Elisa hadn’t visited on two occasions, she would never have discovered these two aspects of the same place and of a single life, which has allowed her to reinforce the connection between Clarisa’s environment and her daily life.
Elisa feels that, through this project, she has discovered that it is possible to live divided between two countries – in this case, the United States and Mexico – by illegally crossing the border every week and she was astounded by this, as she’d never imagined that such a “non-zone” could exist on this now mythical frontier. She was also struck by the fact that this separation of the families is due to the parents’ desire to give their children an education and, indeed, these mothers sacrifice a significant amount of their conjugal and social life during the time their children are at school, in the hope of giving them a better future. The work has strengthened Elisa’s conviction of the importance of the link between a place and its inhabitants for it was the first time she’d been able to observe such a relationship to a territory in the people living there and the way in which this relationship shapes their lives according to the geographical reality of these fragmented areas. It was also the first time that she’d observed the repercussions of a political and social situation on an environment.
The issues associated with borders, along with environmental concerns, seem to lie at the centre of our problems in the world at large today and it is not surprising that young artists, such as Elisa, feel compelled to address such subjects in their artistic expression. It was such a refreshing discovery to come across her work which only served to show up even more the simplemindedness of what I’d seen earlier in the Ayn Gallery.
In the Marfa Ballroom, another gallery, as part of an exhibition entitled “Comic Future”, I saw work by the artists, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy.
“Comic Future” featured work by several artists who “employ the language of various and discordant approaches such as abstraction and figuration to twist representation of their immediate environment thereby imbricating a skewed, often apocalyptic vision of the future”. Showcasing works from the 1960s through to 2013, the exhibition surveyed political satire and cultural commentary through art movements ranging from capitalist realism to contemporary pop art. The works included early drawings by Sigmar Polke, collage by Walead Beshty, painting by Carroll Dunham and Peter Saul, alongside newer works by Dana Schutz, Sue Williams, Michael Williams and Erik Parker and sculpture by Aaron Curry, Liz Craft and Mike Kelley. A Ballroom-commissioned site-specific wall installation by Arturo Herrera completed the show.
Drawing from the art-historical lineage of cubism, cartoons, figurative painting and gestural abstraction, and appropriating subjects from mythology, advertising, print culture and consumerism, “Comic Future” was as much about the breakdown of the human condition as about the absurdities which define the perils of human evolution.
I was particularly interested in seeing the work of Mike Kelley’s, an American artist, whose death in 2012, in an apparent suicide in South Pasadena, California, rather shocked people in the art world.
Kelley’s work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance and video and he often worked collaboratively and had produced projects with artists Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler and John Miller.
Kelley is widely regarded as one of the most influential and prolific post-Pop contemporary artists whose work mined American popular culture and incorporated cultural references and everyday objects like plush toys, exploring themes of class relations, contemporary sexuality, repressed memory, systems of religion and politics, and, ultimately, transcendence. He has been described as “one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion.”
Shortly after news of his death broke, a spontaneous memorial was built to him in an abandoned carport near his studio in the Highland Park section of Los Angeles where mourners were invited, via an anonymous Facebook page, to “help rebuild MORE LOVE HOURS THAN CAN EVER BE REPAID AND THE WAGES OF SIN (1987), by contributing stuffed fabric toys, afghans, dried corn, wax candles … building an altar of unabashed sentimentality.” The memorial was active throughout February 2012 and was dismantled in early March 2012, with the contents given to the Mike Kelley Foundation.
Kelley’s works in the Marfa Ballroon show were sculptures from his “Kandor” series made in the period 1999-2011. “Kandor” refers to the capital of Krypton, the home planet of DC Comics hero Superman, who believed he was the sole survivor of his doomed planet until he discovered that Kandor had been miniaturized by an archenemy. Colourful and delicate, yet eerily oozing sculptures made from luscious looking and brightly-hued hand-made glass, these works depicted the fantasy city.
McCarthy’s work, “Painter” of 1995, was a humorous and ironic, spoof movie documentary of a “painter,” pacing and unsettled, who enters a room muttering to himself as if he were crazy. The opening scene of the 50-minute video saw McCarthy playing the main character who wears a giant nose, a blonde wig, and a hospital gown. He has massive hands and elephantine ears but only a few objects fill the set – oversized, Oldenburg-esque tubes of paint, a table, and a floor-to-ceiling blank canvas. Occasionally, as if in an attempt to address the audience, McCarthy voiced animalistic grunts between intelligible statements such as, “Try to listen, try not to think, try to see things my way.”
McCarthy’s caricature of an artist resembled devices variously used to attract the attention of children and he seemed to be setting up the content of an instructional video on how to paint, but was unable to perform this task as the character digressed into schizophrenic breakdowns. After placing his hands on his head in dismay, the character spun in circles, endlessly repeating “De Kooning, De Kooning, De Kooning”. He tried to paint, but ultimately created nothing more than a mess of materials, covering the room and the canvas. Finally, the painter muttered to himself, “Don’t try, you can’t do it anymore, Don’t think about those people out there.”
McCarthy’s work often seeks to undermine the idea of “the myth of artistic greatness” and attacks the perception of the heroic male artist – enuff said !
Marfa Ballroom has also been involved in contributing to the financing of the creation of another satirical artwork in the area, this one being “Prada Marfa”, a permanently installed sculpture by artists Elmgreen and Dragset, which is situated 1.4 miles from Valentine, just off U.S. Route 90, about 37 miles northwest of Marfa. The installation was inaugurated in October 2005, the artists calling the work a “pop architectural land art project.” The sculpture cost $80,000 and was intended to never be repaired, so that it might slowly degrade back into the natural landscape but this plan was deviated from when, three days after the sculpture was completed, vandals graffitied the exterior and broke into the building stealing handbags and shoes.
Designed to resemble a Prada store, the building is made of adobe bricks, plaster, paint, glass pane, aluminum frame, MDF, and carpet. The installation’s door is nonfunctional and, on the front of the structure, there are two large windows displaying actual Prada wares, shoes and handbags, picked out and provided by Miuccia Prada herself from her fall/winter 2005 collection – Prada allowed Elmgreen and Dragset to use the Prada trademark for the work having already collaborated with Elmgreen and Dragset in 2001 when the artists attached signage to the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York City with the “false” message “Opening soon – PRADA”.
As “Prada Marfa” is located relatively close to the Chinati Foundation, the minimalism of Prada’s usual displays are mimicked in this work and play off the kind of work that Donald Judd was known for as an artist.
The Texas Department of Transportation is currently discussing the fate of the installation now that it considers it a billboard that does not fit permitted specifications, but no finalization has been made regarding the installation and its location.
The next gallery along East San Antonio Street that I came to was “Marfa Contemporary”, opened in 2012, the first regional extension of the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, a nonprofit organization which is dedicated to encouraging creative expression in all its forms through education and exhibitions. Shows at Marfa Contemporary are free to the public year-round and feature recent works by regional, national and international artists and classes and workshops for children and adults are also offered throughout the year at minimal cost.
The gallery shares a location with the “Pizza Foundation”, adding yet another layer to the multi-faceted, innovative space – pizza being the American cultural equalizer for the class system and, thus, helping the gallery to place middle-America at the fore in an art world that has always been dominated by the East and West coasts. The interior space, designed by Oklahoma City-based architect Rand Elliott, adheres to the architectural makeup of Marfa, showcasing cracks and bare brick in a way that adds texture and substance to what otherwise might have emerged as a sterile setting,
The work on show at the back of the Pizza area had some delicate, machine-cut, embroidery-like work in an exhibition titled “Walking, Eating, Sleeping” by an artist named Laurie Flick whose ideas explore the intersection of technology and creativity. Apparently, the artist herself adopts a daily regimen of self-tracking that measures her activities and body and, in so doing, she has shaped a vocabulary of pattern used to construct her intricately hand-built works and installations. Her quantifiable patterns – like her heart rate, the duration of her sleep or her body weight – are some of the metrics that inspire her colourful and complex works.
I crossed Highland Ave and went into the Marfa and Presidio County Museum, housed in the Humphris House, an 1880s adobe home, which had displays about the history of Marfa and the surrounding area.
There was a well-dressed lady sitting in the entrance hall and, when I commented on how warm she had got it inside, she proceeded to tell me about the Ice Storm that had occurred the weekend before which had caused widespread power outages across the Big Bend area and the South West, an unusual occurrence not seen here for a long time.
In the Museum rooms I started by looking at the Paleoindian Period – ca. 9500 to 6500 BC. Little is known about the groups of peoples that entered the Big Bend area at this time but current theories are based on archaeological research in the Great Plains and Lower Pecos region which indicate that the groups were small in number and nomadic and that they were hunters and gatherers who sought after and followed giant bison, mammoths, mastodons and camels as well as smaller animals such as deer and turtles. They gathered seasonal plants for food and medicinal purposes and their main hunting tools were the hand-held spear and an “ataltl” or dart-thrower, a device which greatly increased the distance and throwing force of the dart and which allowed the hunter to stay a safe distance away from large, dangerous game. The groups lived primarily in open campsites using temporary, makeshift shelters and they made stone, bone and wooden implements such as spear and dart points, stone choppers and scrapers, travelling great distances to find specific kinds of raw stone for making tools
Then I moved onto the Archaic Period – 6500 BC to 700 AD – a time of hunters and gatherers with an increasing reliance on plants for food. These were nomadic peoples, who became more territorial due to changes in climate and the availability of needed resources. Climatic changes from a wetter to a drier environment made food and water resources more scarce and forced more diversity in diet and there was hunting of bison, deer, rabbit, turkey and many other animals, the main hunting tools continuing to include the handheld spear and “ataltl” along with a boomerang shaped stick – a rabbit stick – that was used to hunt small animals. New tools were made and used to process plant foods and these tools included the “mano” and “metate”, mortar and pestle – both used to grind seeds, nuts and roots into a kind of flour – stone knives, scrapers and choppers. Fibres were extracted from sotol, lechuquilla and yucca and were used to make sandles, mats, baskets, netting and cordage. The peoples lived in temporary, makeshift shelters in open campsites as well as in rock shelters and caves and rock art began to appear in the form of pictographs – painted images – and petroglyphs – carvings – on cave walls and large boulders.
After this came the Late Prehistoric Period – ca. 700 to 1535 AD – in which the bow and arrow were introduced and eventually replaced the “ataltl”. People hunted bison, deer, rabbit, turkey and other small game and engaged in fishing as well to produce an additional source of food. In the Big Bend area, along the Rio Grande and Rio Conchos, the “La Junta” cultures became semi-sedentary agriculturalists and villages composed of pit houses were built.
The “La Junta” cultures began using river floodwaters for temporary farming and grew crops such as corn and beans with ceramics becoming commonplace in these semi-sedentary cultures since domestic crops could be stored. Trade continued to be important in the lives of the West Texas peoples and probably involved some agricultural products grown by the semi-sedentary groups. Trade networks established in the Late Archaic period increased and included traded items such as seashells from the West Coast.
Finally, I reached the Early Historic Period – ca. 1535 to 1800 AD – when the arrival of European explorers, initially the Spanish “entradas”, radically altered the lives of the Native Americans in the Big Bend.
“Presidios”, or forts, and missions were established in the area, the “presidios” being garrisoned fortresses where soldiers attempted to maintain order among the neighbouring Native Americans and which provided protection for colonialists and missionaries. The missions were built near to the “presidios” and had the religious conversion and assimilation of the Native Americans as their goal.
During this period, several waves of intruding Native Americans from the Plains – initially the Apaches and Comanches – wreaked havoc on the native inhabitants of the Big Bend area as the introduction of the horse by Europeans allowed greater mobility for the Native Americans. The horse enabled rapid southward movement of Apache groups into the Trans-Pecos area thus facilitating raids on local Native Americans and settlers. Iron, also introduced to North America by the Europeans was highly sought after by Native Americans who used it to produce iron arrow points, which rapidly replaced points of stone.
There were some arrow heads from the Clovis people (9200 BC), the Toyah (1400-Historic) and the Plainview (8150 BC) on display.
The museum moved on to show the development by the Europeans after 1800 with many objects and artefacts from the ranching and cowboy community until I reached some interesting documentary photographs of life in Presidio County by Francis (Frank) Duncan.
Duncan was born in Missouri in 1878 but, as a child, he and his parents lived in California and Texas where his father attempted to grow wheat. His efforts, however, were stymied by ranchers who said the land was made only for grazing livestock.
After the death of his parents, Duncan returned to Missouri to live with his grandparents on their farm but he was involved in a train collision in which he suffered a head injury and was declared dead by three doctors. But while the undertaker was preparing him for burial, Duncan woke up and later fully recovered !
He trained as a photographer, returned to Texas to work and then decided to “go up into Canada fishing.” An avid outdoorsman and hunter, he arrived in Salmon Arm, near to Kamloops in British Columbia, in 1913, and opened a photography studio above a store. He was a widower at the time and sent for his daughter, Kathleen, whom a family, the Reilly’s, took care of while Duncan tried to make a living.
To supplement his studio work, Duncan sold subscriptions to the local newspaper, the “Observer”, and he bartered exchanges for his catches of fish. The “Salmon Arm Observer” notes that Duncan was an experienced photographer when he arrived in the area who had specialized in railroad and newspaper photography and who had worked throughout Canada, the United States and Mexico. The “Observer” commissioned him to take photographs of all parts of the Shuswap, a local lake and, in June 1914, the editors noted that Mr. Duncan had a hydroplane that he used on Shuswap Lake.
Duncan later worked in Klamath Falls, Oregon, before moving again to Texas where he made homes in Presidio, Terlingua and, finally, in Marfa, in 1916. According to “The Big Bend Sentinel”, Duncan considered himself a mining prospector first and a photographer second.
He tried to get a piece of the action when mining was big in Terlingua and Shafter, asking to prospect, but was denied access by the local ranchers who discouraged prospecting. Then, as a back up, he offered to take portraits of the ranchers’ families and of the landscapes on their ranches. As one of the earliest photographers in the Big Bend area, Duncan’s motto was – ‘I make faces for a living’ and his black and white portfolio rivals that of the area’s other pioneer photographer, the late W.D. Smithers of Alpine. Both photographers chronicled the US army presence in the Big Bend area in the early 20th Century and they photographed events and places on the border, landscapes in Far West Texas and the local communities while making portraits of the area’s pioneers and residents. Duncan photographed the life and times of Marfa and Camp Marfa, later Fort D.A. Russell, but also wandered with his camera throughout Far West Texas, documenting the ranching and mining industries.
Duncan perfected the use of the panoramic camera, which took extra-wide angle photos and prints from these photographs were between three feet and four feet wide but, at the same time, quite narrow. Many photographs of Camp Marfa and Fort D.A. Russell are in this format. The Marfa Presidio County Museum houses 2,200 of Duncan’s glass and film negatives from the region.
Duncan loved hunting, fishing and the outdoors and he died in July 1970 at Big Bend at the age of 91. During his lifetime, he sold and gave away many prints and negatives and his collection was donated to the Marfa Public Library and later to the Marfa and Presidio County Museum, after acquisition from a party other than Duncan himself by the Marfa High School’s Junior Historians club, having been found in the basement of a Marfa house where it was deteriorating.
In the hallway of the museum I came upon a cache of photos of the making of the movie for which Marfa is most well-known – before Don Judd’s arrival – its only other claim to fame – “Giant” directed by George Stevens of 1955. Stevens shot “Giant” substantially around Marfa, notably at Reata, with its stars – James Dean, of course, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson but also the very young Dennis Hopper, Sal Mineo and Carroll Baker.
Dean, Taylor and Hudson stayed at The Paisano hotel, where we ourselves were also staying, with their rooms located on the first (second, in US terminology) floor and the hotel makes a big play of the fact with a small room, just off the entrance hall, dedicated to the film with souvenirs, DVDs and photos for sale.
I got talking to the lady attendant in the Museum, a locally-born woman named Bertha, who, as a child, remembered seeing Elizabeth Taylor perform a faint 27 times on the film set one day when a steer’s forehead is cut open and the brains pour out onto her plate for dinner – that, to her, was professional acting showing great fortitude, as Liz continued to try to get the best take ! But she said that Liz was not very approachable, unlikely Jimmy Dean, who was a charmer, always smiling.
We talked a bit about Don Judd’s coming to Marfa and whether there had been resentment by the locals at his buying up so much property and she said some felt like that while others accepted that the farms were closing and that the old ways and businesses had had their day.
I thanked her and moved on to the Marfa Bookstore where they had an exhibition of Roni Horn’s large annotated water photographs, an interesting corollary to her reading that we’d attended on our first evening. In the bookshop, I made a note of several book titles on the drug wars being fought around Juarez and bought two CDs, one by Terry Allen and another by “The Cactus Blossoms”, recommended earlier in the day by Glen, the beadist.
Marfa doesn’t look like any of the surrounding towns in Far West Texas and outsiders come to soak up the diverse culture of this former ranching town, now that it has become an art oasis in the desert, a town more cosmopolitan than any older resident could have imagined. For example, the nationally distributed “Smithsonian Magazine” listed Marfa as No. 8 among “The Top 20 Best Small Towns in America” in a recent issue.
“It’s just a flyspeck in the flat, hot, dusty cattle country of southwest Texas – closer to Chihuahua than Manhattan but Marfa is cooking”, the magazine suggested, “thanks to an influx of creative types from way downtown – filmmakers, indie rock bands and others who have brought such outré installations as Prada Marfa, a faux couture shop in the middle of nowhere.”
They say that the mentality of the community has shifted and that the town nowadays has become more progressive and willing to look at new possibilities. But there is definitely a gap between the old Marfa and the new Marfa and a good many people in the established community feel like the town has been overrun with a different kind of people, people with worldly ideas, people with open minds to different kinds of lifestyles and that has caused a kind of friction.
Some resentment has to do with money, the disparity between newcomers and older families with modest means and deep roots in Marfa with the “creative people” being a bit louder and more flamboyant than the locals. But, it has been said that, without them, the whole community would have folded and collapsed and, generally, Marfa must be better off with the new direction that it has taken.
And the person responsible for this transformation is the now-deceased New York sculptor and critic Donald Judd who started Marfa’s journey into the future as an arts colony in the 1970s when he bought and restored various properties in Marfa.
Judd’s work still attracts visitors from across the world to the two Foundations, the Donald Judd and the Chinati, with the latter running a museum and sculpture park on that used to be the Army camp on the southern outskirts of Marfa and I made my way, in due course, to the Chinati, located on Cavalry Road, not far out to the south of town.
It was a Sunday morning and I was due to go on the 10.30 tour but, while I was waiting, the tour group leaving at 10.00 was getting ready to start, so I asked if I could join them. This was a fortuitous decision because the tour guide was Valerie Arber, a local artist and the wife of the printmaker, Robert Arber, who has a print studio in town. Valerie’s name had cropped up in my conversation with Glen the day before and she proved to be very knowledge about Judd whom, she said, she had met socially about four times while he was still alive after she and Robert had moved to Marfa in 1998.
The museum’s collection is housed in fifteen buildings spread over a campus of 340 acres, located, as is Marfa, in the arid, high Chihuahuan desert. The full tour takes four hours – two in the morning and another two after a break for lunch – and viewing the collection requires spending significant amounts of time in the sun outdoors and travelling distances from 0.5 mile to 1.5 miles on terrain that often includes uneven, thorny, or rock-covered ground. So, they ask you to dress comfortably and sensibly for the climate and landscape and open-toed shoes and sandals are not recommended ! Chinati can be challenging for people who have difficulty walking, so my travelling companion was unable to undertake even the shorter Selections tour.
At the centre of the Chinati Foundation’s permanent collection are the 100 untitled works in mill aluminum by Judd which he installed in two former artillery sheds and this is where Valerie took us to commence the tour.
The size and scale of the buildings determined the nature of the installation, and Judd adapted the buildings specifically for this purpose. He replaced derelict garage doors with long walls of continuous squared and quartered windows which flood the spaces with light and he also added a vaulted roof in galvanized iron on top of the original flat roof, thus doubling the buildings’ height, with the semi-circular ends of the roof vaults made of glass.
Each of the 100 works has the same outer dimensions – 41 x 51 x 72 inches – although the interior is unique in every piece. The Lippincott Company of Connecticut fabricated the works, which were installed over a four-year period from 1982 through to 1986 with funding for the project provided by the Dia Art Foundation.
In the late 1970s, Judd acquired the former fort, Fort D.A. Russell, and began converting the buildings in order to house permanent large-scale art installations. Originally conceived to include works by himself and his friends, John Chamberlain and Dan Flavin, the museum was later expanded to include works by Carl Andre, Ingolfur Arnarrson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ilya Kabakov, Roni Horn, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, David Rabinowitch, and John Wesley. The museum opened to the public in 1986 as the Chinati Foundation.
Fort D. A. Russell is the name given to the military installation that was operational from 1911 to 1946, its namesake being David Allen Russell, a Civil War general who was killed at the Battle of Opequon in September 1864. In 1911 it was established as Camp Albert, a base for cavalry and air reconnaissance units sent to protect West Texas from Mexican bandits after a raid by Pancho Villa.
The base was expanded and renamed Camp Marfa during World War I and, in the interwar years, it became the headquarters for the Marfa Command, which replaced the Big Bend District. In 1924, a patrol called the Mounted Watchmen was established to deter aliens from crossing the Rio Grande until, in 1930, the base was renamed Fort D. A. Russell. The name had been used on a previous military base in Wyoming but it became available when that post was renamed Fort Francis E. Warren. The base was briefly abandoned during the Great Depression and, in January 1933, the Army closed the post but reactivated it in 1935 as the home base of the Seventy-seventh Field Artillery.
During World War II, the post was expanded and used as an air base, a base for a WAC unit, a training facility for chemical mortar battalions, and a base for troops guarding the US-Mexican border. The Marfa Army Airfield was constructed nearby and was used as a pilot training facility and German prisoners of war were also housed in a camp on the base.
In 1945, shortly after the end of World War II, the fort was closed during America’s demobilization and, in October 1946, it was transferred to the Corps of Engineers. The Texas National Guard assumed control shortly afterward but, in 1949, most of the base’s land was divided up and sold to local citizens.
At the start of the tour you are told not to take any photographs and I must say that, although the temptation was there to whip out the iPhone, this rule seemed to be strictly observed by the group that I was in. In any case, a young man was employed to spend his day incarcerated here as backup to Valerie who later in the tour declared that she was authorised to pounce on any offender who might desecrate any item of work by so much as breathing on it !
I asked a few questions as we went along and was curious about whether insects penetrated the building, as I had seen one fly buzzing in a window where there were gaps in the old, original frames. Apparently they do have problems from time to time and lizards from the desert have got in and, in particular, there was at least one spot of acidic bat shit which had despoiled the surface of one piece. Purity of original surface was paramount for Judd even though he was happy to leave milling marks on some of the surfaces ! But he wouldn’t have been pleased by this violation !
Some of the Aluminium panel joints were not as tight and accurate as some of the others, which were better, and Valerie thought that this might have resulted from the variations in temperature that occurred over time, from very hot to cold. The Foundation has to undertake conservation which is costly, especially now that they have to generate their own funds as the DIA money stopped when Judd chose to sever that relationship.
Judd wrote an essay about the Artillery Sheds which first appeared in “Donald Judd, Architektur”, Westfälischen Kunstverein Münster, 1989, and which I found useful in considering the works –
“The Chinati Foundation is primarily Fort D. A. Russell, but also includes the building for John Chamberlain’s work in the center of Marfa and two square miles of land on the Rio Grande for a very large work of mine made of adobe. Most of Fort Russell was a ruin. Other than the two artillery sheds and later the Arena, I was against buying it. It had been an army base, which is not so good. Most buildings were without roofs, there was trash everywhere and the land was damaged. Some of the barracks had been turned into kitsch apartments with compatible landscaping. Military landscape overlain with a landscape of consumer kitsch is hard to defeat. At any rate the artillery sheds were concrete and solid, although they leaked.
The buildings, purchased in ’79, and the works of art that they contain were planned together as much as possible. The size and nature of the buildings were given. This determined the size and the scale of the works. This then determined that there be continuous windows and the size of their divisions. The windows replaced the derelict garage doors closing the long sides. A sub-division of nine parts, for example, would be too complicated in itself and as bars in front of the works of art, smaller to larger inside, rather than larger outside as part of the facade to smaller inside as part of the sub-division of the interior. The windows are quartered and are made of clear anodized extruded aluminum channel and re-enforced glass. One window of each building slides open, which isn’t enough, but the sliding windows were much more expensive. The long parallel planes of the glass facade enclose a long flat space containing the long rows of pieces. The given axis of a building is through its length, but the main axis is through the wide glass facade, through the wide shallow space inside and through the other glass facade. Instead of being long buildings, they become wide and shallow buildings, facing at right angles to their length.
As I mentioned, the flat roofs leaked. In ’84 the one hundred mill aluminum pieces in the two buildings were nearly complete and needed greater protection. Since patching the flat roof had been futile, and since insulation was needed, and for architecture, I planned a second roof. In Valentine nearby, thirty miles, there was a large metal storage building, one curve from the ground to the ground, with very deep and broad corrugations, obviously structure itself. Similar vaults were built as the roofs of the two artillery sheds. The height of the curve of the vault is the same as the height of the building. Each building became twice as high, with one long rectangular space below, and one long circular space above. The ends of the vaults were meant to be glass, but were temporarily covered with corrugated iron. With the ends open, the enclosed lengthwise volume is tremendous. This dark and voluminous lengthwise axis is above and congruent with the flat, broad, glass, crosswise axis. The buildings need some furniture and some use for the small enclosed space that is within each one”.
We moved on to another block which had “Chinati Thirteener”, designed by Carl Andre for the courtyard of Chinati’s temporary gallery. It consists of 13 strips of hot-rolled steel plates, each 12 x 36 inches, laid out in equal distances on a surface of gravel. These lines mark the rectangular area in loose relation to the vertical posts running along the porch. An interesting aspect is the alteration of smooth steel surfaces and rough gravel and the distinction between them has been enhanced over time, as the steel plates have entirely rusted and show an even greater contrast to the pebbles than they originally did. The piece was first installed at Chinati in 2010 and is the newest addition to Chinati’s permanent collection.
In a couple of places the plates overlapped so it seemed not to have been perfectly designed for the space but some in the group were happy to be allowed to walk on the plates. I suggested that there is a division between those of us, the OCD people, who have a rage to see the work retained in order, and the others who want to participate, as Andre himself encouraged, in walking on the work. I mentioned an Andre piece in Tate Modern that was disrupted and all over the floor when I last saw it, a real disruption of the original, planned, ordered form. But, I guess that Carl could live with that.
Inside this block there were some of Judd’s prints, some lithographs and woodcuts and some basic screenprints. This exhibition, “Donald Judd : Prints”, is the first comprehensive exhibition of his prints in an American museum, the works, 70 in all, dating from 1960 to 1993.
In particular there was a series of lithographs that had been completed by Valerie’s husband, Robert, after Judd’s death, printed, she told us, on some rather inferior quality paper that Judd had acquired while on a trip in the Far East. Valerie told us about Judd’s preference for using oil paint colour for his cadmium red which had caused Robert some difficulties. Judd’s sense of colour didn’t seem to me to be particularly subtle or developed but later, back in the entrance office, I came across a book on Josef Albers, whom Judd had written articles about and read Albers’s brief riposte to what he perceived as a criticism of his theories by Judd.
Judd assigned Albers a prime place in his search for a way past Abstract Expressionism, particularly for the German artist’s use of colour and of rectangular variants, which Judd explored in his final series of works, as he thought that Albers had overturned the traditional conception that colour is either a harmoniously composed totality or symbolically allusive. Judd, likewise, rejected traditional colour usage in his wall pieces, stressing instead their self-reflexivity and “uncanny materiality.”
Judd began as a painter but, in 1960, he moved away from the figurative tradition and started to develop his own characteristic, abstract paintings that were, in turn, superseded by three-dimensional objects a few years later. The prints in this exhibition followed that development and echoed concerns of both the paintings and the objects.
There are two particularly active phases of note – the early sixties – represented in the exhibition by eight prints in the central wing – and the period between the mid-eighties and the artist’s death in 1994. In the first years, the prints were conceived as single sheets, but by the late 1960s, most of them were done in series – typically 10 or more sheets – and occasionally as pairs. Such sequences made it possible to elaborate on ideas such as the division of the pictorial space, for example, of the rectangle of the sheet of paper.
The curved lines of the first prints, circa 1960, are close to Judd’s paintings in that the paint is applied thickly – in some cases, also on the back and front – evoking the paintings’ rough and palpable surfaces. The prints also show Judd’s interest in straight lines that regularly divide the pictorial space. Space and spacing became relevant concerns during these years and remained at the core of Judd’s entire work through the rest of his life.
The second of Judd’s notable printmaking periods began in 1986 and these works can be considered analogous to Judd’s three-dimensional objects in that an inner volume and outer frame are each distinguished and transferred onto flat paper. This motive remains prevalent and becomes varied by proportional divisions – halves, thirds, fourths and so on – along with horizontal and vertical divisions of increasingly complex line systems and colour schemes. Thinner and thicker lines make grids of narrower and wider distances and of similar or contrasting colours in relation to the underlying base. The possibilities are numerous and demonstrate the rich potential of such few elements when they become combined. Judd’s preferred medium was woodcut, which he used right from the beginning – all of the prints are woodcut, except a pair of lithographs and a set of screen prints.
Valerie explained the technical rôle that Robert Arber had played in the execution of these works and it was clear that he had carried out the routing of the wood in the large areas of the prints.
The exhibition also included a wall-work consisting of two recesses in green Plexiglass and various pieces of furniture which exemplified the closeness of Judd’s formulations across different media.
We moved on to the six U-shaped blockhouses that contain Dan Flavin’s large-scale works in coloured fluorescent light. This was initiated in the early 1980s, although the final plans were not completed until 1996. The work was inaugurated at the museum’s annual Open House in October 2000 but Flavin, who passed away in late November 1996, never got to see them “in situ”. Valerie told me that, as she understood it, Flavin had made few trips to Marfa, not being a great flyer !
Two parallel tilted corridors had been constructed at the connecting arms of each U-shaped building and these corridors contain light barriers that are placed either in the centre or at the end of each corridor. The barriers consist of eight-foot-long fluorescent light fixtures, occupying the entire height and width of the corridor. The tubes are installed with space between them, allowing a view through the barrier. Each fixture holds two differently coloured bulbs shining in opposite directions. The barriers in the six buildings utilize four colours – pink, green, yellow, and blue. The first two buildings use pink and green, the next two yellow and blue, and the last two buildings bring all four colours together. Two windows at the end of each long arm of the “U” allow daylight to enter the building and permit a view into the vast landscape.
This work by Flavin was, to me, even more impressive than the 100 untitled Judd works that we had just passed through and were some of the best pieces of Art that I’ve seen in a long, long time. I particularly liked the set in block four, two sets of full frontal blue and yellow which put me in mind of some of the colour effects attained by Rothko, with similar “spiritual” qualities that his work also seems to me to possess, although I doubt whether the artist would have concurred with my response !
Judd wrote in ‘Specific Objects’ that Flavin “appropriated the results of industrial production” in his use of fluorescent lights and this resonates with Judd’s own use of aluminium and concrete, among other materials that he employed. Judd outlined the potential of what he termed “the new three-dimensional work” in this 1965 essay in which he predicted that, “…it will be larger than painting and much larger than sculpture, which, compared to painting, is fairly particular, much nearer to what is usually called a form, having a certain kind of form.” His rejection of illusionism and his embrace of its alternative – that is, of geometry – is everywhere at Chinati and the extraordinary breadth of art on display is a testament to Judd’s vision for the place.
In support of his work and ideas, Judd often invoked David Hume’s empiricism and the principle that only what one can feel or experience can be verified. For him, the material – only the matter itself – was important and everything else begins, and comes, from this. At Chinati you are very conscious of the emphasis on the material and scale of work and of the space that it occupies.
During this part of the visit I spoke with a man in the group who came from New York and who was particularly taken with Flavin’s work. He told me that he’d been an art student at Hunter College and that Ad Reinhardt had been one of his tutors. He had tried to make it as an artist in NY but had now given up painting, somewhat disillusioned not to have been more successful. I asked him what Reinhardt had been like as a teacher and he told me that, on one occasion, he had seen him demolish the confidence of one of the young female students in the class who had a great talent for making good-looking representational work about which Reinhradt had commented “that is a prize winning painting” meaning it would win accolades at a county show but “don’t do that kind of work here”. At this criticism, the student had burst into floods of tears !
The New Yorker also spoke about Flavin’s work which put him in mind of the phrase “Veils of Maya” with which I was unfamiliar, although I’m fairly certain that he wasn’t referring to the American deathcore band of that name, formed in Chicago in 2004, who are considered to be a contributor in the “djent” scene – where “Djent” is a style of heavy metal music that developed as a spinoff of traditional progressive metal, the word being an onomatopoeia for the distinctive high-gain, distorted palm-muted guitar sound used. The name of the band is derived from the Hindu illusion, Maya, and they originally made use of multiple guitar players, but, since 2007, have reduced down to only one guitarist.
While, in the Hindu religion, “The Veils of Maya” refers to the way in which we view life through a series of distorting veils that prevent us from seeing “actual reality”, I think what the New Yorker was referring to was the literal appearance of the lighting arrays and their effect upon him. He certainly seemed to have been emotionally affected by the experience.
We moved on to a delapidated building which had been deliberately left in that condition by Ilya Kabakov, the Soviet-born American conceptual artist, born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, who worked for thirty years in Moscow, from the 1950s until the late 1980s, but who now lives and works on Long Island, New York.
He had created “School No.6” at Chinati in 1993 as a gift to the Foundation and the work occupies an entire building that is subdivided into rooms reminiscent of an abandoned schoolhouse from the former Soviet Union. The spaces are filled with faded posters, flags, and emblems where everything is broken, boarded-up, and neglected. Bookcases and desks with Russian notebooks and memorabilia scattered throughout the disordered classrooms tell an elliptical story about another place and time. The walls are painted an institutional green, which is peeling. In the centre of the building is a courtyard overgrown with grass and weeds. In faded red, glass-enclosed vitrines, Kabakov’s poetic writing recounts the stories and recollections of the students’ past experience in the school.
The courtyard was, to me, like Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard but without the cherries, rather cactus flowers, in its semi-abandoned state. I told Valerie about an earlier work of Kabakov and his wife that had been installed in the old Ikon Gallery in Birmingham but which had contained that distinctive smell of Russian paint which was missing here, an omission, I felt, on Kabakov’s part as it is so reminiscent of the old soviet houses.
We were coming to the end of the morning session but, for the final part, we had to go back into town to see the installation of John Chamberlain’s 22 sculptures in painted and chromium-plated steel which are located in the former Marfa Wool and Mohair Building in the centre of Marfa. The building was architecturally adapted by Donald Judd and installed by himself and Chamberlain together. Some of the exhibited works – for example, “Falfurrias”, “Glasscock-Notrees” and “Panna Normanna” – are from a group of ten sculptures constructed on a ranch near Amarillo, Texas, between 1972 and 1975, and are loosely named after towns and counties throughout the state. The works were purchased by the Dia Art Foundation and given to the Chinati Foundation in 1986.
After we’d gone downtown in our own cars we assembled and went in to have a viewing which also included a scratchy film that Chamberlain had made in the 1960s, “The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez,” filmed in Mexico with Warhol regulars, Taylor Mead and Ultra Violet. Judd considered Chamberlain to be one of the greatest artists of his time, and, as early as 1962, wrote admiringly of his new works made from the coloured and chromium steel of salvaged cars. The Chinati Foundation’s John Chamberlain Building is now the largest and most permanent installation of the artist’s work to be found anywhere in the world.
I had lunch in a Swiss-run café just around the corner from the Hotel Paisano where I had a rather bland hummus – no lemon juice or paprika – with pitta bread !
Towards the end of my lunch the guy who had been setting up to perform a gig in Padres the previous evening – which I didn’t stay for – came into the café and I asked him how it had gone. He told me that his name was Dave and that the gig had gone well although he didn’t start until 23.00, too late for me ! We had an interesting conversation and he told me that the band of which he was the Bass player, “The War on Drugs”, would be going off on a tour to Australia once he’d got back to his home in Philadelphia. He had once played in my hometown in the UK and was kind enough to give me his email address so that I could keep in contact for any future appearance that he might make in England, He was currently on a one-man tour – under his solo name of “Nightlands” – which had taken him across to California and back, promoting his latest album.
On returning to Chinati we resumed the tour and saw work by the remaining artists who’s work make up the collection – Icelandic artist Ingólfur Arnarrson’s series of 36 graphite drawings on paper mounted directly onto the wall in one long sequence, Roni Horn’s “Things That Happen Again: For a Here and a There, 1986-1991” consisting of two identical truncated cones, 35 inches long, tapering from a diameter of 17 inches to 12 inches, made from solid copper and, in the John Wesley Gallery, a former horse stable situated near the last of the six Dan Flavin buildings, a collection of paintings and works on paper, which represent Wesley’s singular style incorporating a limited colour palette – pastel blues and pinks dominate – a bold graphic clarity, and a sly humor, often tinged with eroticism. This collection included a work, “Louis Brandeis in his later years”, which bore a remarkable resemblance to Franz Kafka and Wesley’s work reminded me of Patrick Caulfield’s in its simplification, contour line and flat colour.
Outside there was a work by Richard Long, “Sea Lava Circles”, of 1988, installed by Judd himself, on a concrete platform formerly used as a tennis court. The work is made from volcanic rock collected by the artist in Iceland and contains three equally spaced concentric circles of stones, each stone touching the next.
Nearby we were also able to see the “Monument to the Last Horse”, of 1991, by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, who were longtime friends of Judd. During a visit to Chinati in 1987, Judd pointed out a crumbling concrete marker on the grounds of the former fort that indicated the grave of Louie, the last cavalry horse, who was laid to rest in 1932. As a gift to the museum, Oldenburg and van Bruggen created their version of an equestrian sculpture in 1991. It represents an alternative monument to Louie and a sly reference to the former military history of the site. It is inscribed, as was the former marker, with the phrase “Animo et Fide” or “spirited and faithful.”
We went into The Arena which was built in the 1930s as a gymnasium for the soldiers but, after fort was closed in 1946, the gym floor had been torn up for the wood, and sand was laid to provide an indoor arena for horses. In the mid 1980s, Judd restored the building, which was largely dilapidated but he left the long strips of concrete that had originally supported the wooden floor, and filled the intervening spaces with gravel. For practical considerations, Judd poured a large concrete area by the kitchen at the south end, and a smaller area at the north end of the building’s interior and these two areas comprise half of the total area of the building. Judd also added a sleeping loft and designed the outer courtyard, which includes areas for eating, bathing, and a barbecue. There are two works by David Rabinowitch installed in this building.
We went into the central complex of the fort, “Building 98”, which is home to the iconic World War II German POW Murals, painted by Rommel’s Afrika Korps officers in the state dining room and the base library with some commands in German painted on the walls. The building served as the Bachelor Officer Quarters and as an entertainment centre for Westpoint officers during World War I and the Mexican Revolution. Since 2002, the International Woman’s Foundation has established itself here as a centre for mature woman artists and for healthy aging.
We finished by seeing some work by Robert Irwin, an installation of fluorescent tubes with four settings. For a couple of years there has been talk about the possibility of creating a permanent Robert Irwin installation at Chinati and the Foundation is now moving forward on this.
I was unable to get down to the field at the bottom of the site running parallel to the road where the concrete blocks are located since I didn’t have time and would not be able to access them over the next two days as Chinati is closed until Wednesday and you can only get at them from within the gates. These 15 untitled works in concrete, created by Judd between 1980 and 1984 run along the border of the Chinati property and were the first works to be installed at the museum. The individual units that comprise each work have the same measurements – 2.5 x 2.5 x 5 metres – and are made from concrete slabs that are each 25 centimeters thick. Funding for the project was, again, provided by the Dia Art Foundation. Interestingly, the 100 Untitled works in the two main hangers are measured in “Imperial” measure while the concrete blocks on the field are sized in metric, Judd adopting whichever system was appropriate to the requirements of the manufacturer or the stated/given dimensions of the materials that he chose to use.
There were foundations for the concrete blocks but they seemed to vary in the correctness of the levelling of the ground as they ran over their one kilometre span. I was later told that Judd had had problems with various contractors and that they had been unable to work to the tolerances and accuracies that he had required.
At the end of the visit all of the tour party thanked Valerie who had been an excellent guide, or “docent” as the Americans like to term this function, being highly informative throughout the whole morning and afternoon and never failing to respond to our comments and questions.
I drove back into town and I went with my travelling companion three blocks along West El Paso Street to visit “La Mansana de Chinati”, Donald Judd’s residence and studio, informally known as “The Block,” which is administered by the Donald Judd Foundation, located across from the Godbold feedmill plant and the site of some of the artist’s first large-scale architectural projects. The official name is “Manzana de Chinati” – “manzana” meaning apple in Spanish.
We were given an entertaining guided tour by an acerbic but genial character by the name of Eugene, who, after some later research, turned out to be Eugene Binder, the owner of a gallery in Marfa. The visit began promptly at 4.30pm when Eugene closed the gate to the property and sat us down under a Judd-designed awning-cum-gazebo, constructed from 2″ x 12″ black wood, which had foliage growing up it, where he gave us a potted history of Judd’s life and career.
Don Judd was born in 1928 in Excelsior Springs, Missouri and, at the time of the Koren War, he had passed through the southwest on a troop train on his way to serve in the conflict as a soldier-engineer, writing a letter home to his mom telling her how much he liked this part of the US. After the war, he had come back to the East and had gradually established himself in the art world in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s after which time he became one of the big names in American Art of the period.
But he became disillusioned with life in New York and had started to take trips out here with his wife and young children as they spent their summers living in the area. At first, they had lived out in one of the adobe villages but had bought “La Mansana” and started to wall it off, in so doing upsetting some of the locals who had been using the yard as a shortcut to take their cattle to the nearby railhead.
Judd had married dancer Julie Finch in 1964 and they had two children together, a son, Flavin Starbuck Judd and a daughter, Rainer Yingling Judd.
In interview, Rainer has referred to her father as shy, soft, soft-spoken and “very twinkly in the eyes,” but she has also acknowledged that he was, by many accounts, a somewhat prickly man – no more so, perhaps, than the average artist – but no less so. “He had a temper, so he would get very hurt. He would react as if he’d been betrayed,” she concedes. “I don’t know if he could forgive a grudge”.
In 1976, Rainer’s parents split up and her mother, Julie, a choreographer and community activist, returned to New York. As an opening gambit in a custody battle that took several years to settle, Don spirited his children to Marfa, the alternative home and studio in the West that would grow into a sprawling compound. For Rainer, it was idyllic, and she became, on her own admission, either by temperament or by default, a classic tomboy, saying that “A large chunk of my childhood was spent sunburned in boy’s clothes.” Indeed, a picture of her from the time shows a little girl with long blonde hair, wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a big straw hat, standing with her older brother on the edge of a dusty yard.
Over the years, she and her father fostered the kind of bond that forms between headstrong fathers and their daughters. “The more distance I have, the more I realize how rare it was and how close it was, and that is a testament to his courage in his opening up to his kid,” she has said. “For some reason, I don’t know why, I feel like the father-daughter relationship is one of the most world-changing relationships. My dad was radical in his field, radical in the art he was making, radical in the way he lived, but in so many ways a conservative man “.
After a highly successful career which included major retrospectives at Tate Modern in London, at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf and at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, and the acquisition of homes in Manhattan, Marfa and Kussnacht am Rigi in Switzerland, Judd died, quite suddenly, in Manhattan of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1994.
Apparently, at the time of his death, he was in considerable debt and his estate was in disarray. He left each of his children a small sum of cash – “He just did not feel responsible for supporting us,” Rainer has said. Getting her father’s estate sorted out has taken almost 20 years, but it hasn’t taken up all of Rainer’s life. She graduated from New York University’s film school, has had small parts in some Hollywood movies, made a few short films and a feature film. She splits her time between Manhattan and Hudson, New York, where she writes and draws and, in 2011, she had a show of photographs at a Hudson gallery. She has directed a music video with an animator from the Polyphonic Spree and Is deep into an oral history of her father’s life and work.
The visit to “La Mansana” took approximately 90 minutes and we were in a group of 6 people with two other couples, one from New York, who lived in Manhattan, and the other consisting of a young Asian-American woman, who had recently relocated to Austin, working for Dell Computers, and who had her own start-up, and her boyfriend, a German guy from Stuttgart, who had been in the States for eleven years but who lived out East somewhere, possibly in North Carolina.
The guided visit provided us with access to Judd’s three main studios, which are permanently installed with his early work, and to his personal library, which houses his collection of over 13,000 books.
The studios are pretty much “retrospective” spaces, places where Judd could look back at his earlier works and re-review them as, apparently, he didn’t regard them as completely finished. The artworks form one of the collections at his residence, and they represent the breadth of his output and of his materials as, over the course of his career, Judd worked with galvanised iron, wood, coloured plexi-glass, stainless steel, lacquer on aluminium and wood, oil on wood, enamel, brass, copper, unpainted plywood, concrete, and hot-rolled steel.
The other collection is his library, with its extensive range of books on a number of subjects which represent his early interests and academic concerns as well as the way in which his intellectual life and ideas developed and expanded over the years. The library is divided into two large rooms and ordered chronologically by subject, from standard texts in philosophy through topics as diverse as Astronomy and the Universe, to English Renaissance poetry, not forgetting his extensive collection of exhibition catalogues of both his friends’ work and other diverse developments in Art since the 1960s. I was interested to see that he had a copy of Charles Harrison’s book on the British conceptual art group, Art & Language, but not, apparently, of Joseph Kosuth’s “Art After Philosophy and After : Collected Writings, 1966-90”, which I regarded as a significant omission given that Kosuth’s essay – the title of the book – must be considered as a seminal text for post-minimal art investigations.
Thanks to Eugene we were able to get a good insight into what Judd had tried to achieve in Marfa and gained a better understanding of his taste for both the visual art of his time and for Native American Art and Design – having accumulated some beautiful rugs and other artefacts – as well as for the occasional swig of whiskey !
Judd’s house – “La Mansana” – isn’t a conventional dwelling and he lived in his studios and library, during daylight hours, as much as in the converted army quarters that form the domestic habitation, one of many buildings that make up a kind of compound in the centre of town, a fortress-like complex, surrounded by a nine-foot adobe wall. These buildings are set into an outdoor space that might be characterised as a courtyard and although the house itself is not usually open to the public, our tour guide allowed us to walk though since we were only a small group. We were therefore able to see Judd’s collected textiles – lots of Scottish tartans and Native American blankets and rugs – and the three knight-in-shining-armour puppets that hang in the stairwell that led up to his bedroom. He also made his own furniture and it seems that he entertained quite a lot, even after his divorce, and the kitchen bore witness to his culinary occupation with its small collection of wine bottles, simply abandoned in their rack since his death.
As one might expect, the buildings are spare, inside and out, and most of the rooms, including the two-building library, include a bed, which stands simply, somewhere in whichever large space that we visited. Apparently, he could sleep in these rooms if he wished or he could live in them as they were not just gallery spaces, but an extension of his home.
In some ways, the house has much in common with the studio spaces which are located inside an adobe enclosure that Judd designed and had built – tall, rough walls that surround the buildings producing a somewhat spookily obscure and removed property which stands in contrast to the vast spaces of the country that surround the town.
One of the greatest minimalist artists, Judd, constructed his living spaces in the same meticulously balanced manner as his art and, if there is a building on one side of “La Manzana”, there is another building of the same size standing on the other, maintaining the symmetry. Likewise the gardens and walls – the elements may not be identical, but objects or spaces of the same size are built on either side of the complex.
At the end of the visit I said to Eugene that I thought that the measure of someone’s life was the way in which their ideas resonated into the future, not the artefacts that they’d surrounded themselves with during their lifetime, so, with Judd, it would very much a question of whether his ideas and philosophy on Art would be re-evaluated and influence what was to come. To my great surprise, Eugene, whose responses to questions and comments had been a bit laconic throughout the tour, concurred with me !
Overall, after my visit to both of the Foundations, Judd seemed to me like a person with an almost obsessive condition in his demand for symmetry in the layout of the buildings, as well as in his work and, for example, at Chinati, I came out of the 100 Mill pieces feeling that his was a “denatured” art amidst a very varied nature. But, nevertheless, he was clearly a very cultured and well-read individual who had an understanding of philosophical thought relevant to his concerns, had a wide range of reading interests and had tried to carve out for himself and his family a different kind of life and awareness here in Marfa, away from the trivialities and the hurly-burly of his existence back in New York.
Marfa is set in a desert landscape which has its own unique qualities, with big skies that seem to encompass completely one’s field of vision, with a sense of limitless space reaching from one side of the horizon to the other and far into a limitless distance, with cloud formations which change from one moment to the next and, with this in mind, we became aware that the town that is known as the place where “Giant” was filmed and which has become a major venue for viewing contemporary art, has another attraction in the form of the mysterious lights which many people have experienced dancing in the desert on the outskirts of town.
The viewing point for the phenomenon of the Marfa Lights, also known as the Marfa “Ghost Lights”, is back up the road towards Alpine at the side of US Route 67, 9 miles east of the town. They have gained some fame as onlookers have ascribed them to paranormal phenomena such as ghosts, UFOs, or Will-o’-the-wisp. However, research suggests that most, if not all, are atmospheric reflections of automobile headlights and campfires.
The first published account of the lights appeared in the July 1957 issue of “Coronet Magazine”, the earliest source for anecdotal claims that the lights date back to the 19th century. Reports often describe brightly glowing spheres floating above the ground, or sometimes high in the air. Colours are usually described as white, yellow, orange or red, but green and blue are sometimes reported. The balls are said to hover at about shoulder height, or to move laterally at low speeds, or sometimes to shoot around rapidly in any direction. They often appear in pairs or groups, according to reports, to divide into pairs or to merge, to disappear and reappear, and sometimes to move in seemingly regular patterns. Their sizes are typically said to resemble soccer balls or basketballs.
Sightings are reported occasionally and unpredictably, perhaps 10 to 20 times a year, and there have been no reliable reports of daytime sightings.
According to the people who claim to have seen the lights, they may appear at any time of night, typically south of US Route 90 and east of US Route 67, in unpredictable directions and distances. They can persist from a fraction of a second to several hours and they appear in all seasons of the year and in any weather, seemingly uninfluenced by such factors. They sometimes have been observed during late dusk and early dawn, when the landscape is dimly illuminated.
The state of Texas notes the lights on its travel maps and Marfa has erected a “viewing platform”, with the Chamber of Commerce promoting the lights with a weekend-long “Marfa Lights Festival” held annually in the city’s downtown.
Most people discount paranormal sources for the lights, attributing them to mistaken sightings of ordinary night-time lights, such as distant vehicle lights, ranch lights, or astronomical objects. Critics also note that the designated Viewing Platform is located at the site of the Marfa Army Airfield, where tens of thousands of personnel were stationed between 1942 and 1947, training American and Allied pilots. This massive field was then used for years as a regional airport, with daily airline service and between Marfa Army Airfield and its satellite fields – each constantly patrolled by sentries – it is considered unlikely that any actual phenomena would have remained unobserved and unmentioned.
The dominant explanation is that the lights are a sort of mirage caused by sharp temperature gradients between cold and warm layers of air as Marfa is located at an altitude of 4,688 feet above sea level, and temperature differentials of 50–60 degrees Fahrenheit between high and low temperature are quite common.
Studies have also shown that car lights to the southwest, along US67 between Marfa and Presidio, can be seen from the Viewing Platform and that it is these lights that look mysterious to many visitors. It has been shown that automobile headlights are very visible over great distances, and the Marfa lights observations are considered to be such lights and atmospheric reflections of known sources of these lights.
Unfortunately, there were no lights the evening that we made a visit to the Viewing Platform but, in spite of the dazzle and glare from the speeding passing traffic, we had a superb view of the night sky – we’d never seen so many stars before – such a denseness including a magnificent view of the Milky Way looming large overhead.
But the next morning, as I was taking a walk around Marfa, I got into a conversation with a guy named Mark, who was painting the wall around a garden with a spray gun and, as we got to talking about this method, and as he encouraged me to have a try, he told me about his experiences of the Marfa Lights, how his father had had close encounters with them and that he had seen them the previous evening when we saw nothing !
He was really pleased when I told him that I was English and he said that I was the first English person he’d ever me and that, although he was of Hispanic heritage through his father, his mother and grandmother’s bloodline was English, the family name on that side being Robinson. He also had Irish in there somewhere but the family hadn’t traced their roots.
I told him about our trip down to Terlingua and our impression of the Rio Grande and he said that he had worked for Border Control – as a painter and decorator, I presumed – and that he wouldn’t himself risk going across to Mexico and he suggested taking a trip out to the west of Marfa, to the Chinati Mountains area, where the landscape was better than around Terlingua.
Two other encounters stand out from our time in Marfa.
Firstly, one morning we started the day at what is said to be the best breakfast joint in town – “Buns N’ Roses” – located on Highway 90, across from the Cemetery on the western edge of town on the road to Valentine and Van Horn. It’s a hanger made out of aluminium sheets which looks like a farmyard barn on the outside but, inside, it was warm and welcoming, with locals and regulars enjoying their Sunday morning breakfast. I had two fried eggs, sunny side up, two strips of bacon and country potatoes with an English breakfast tea ! Although the girl who served us was a bit taciturn, I later spoke to a tall guy who looked as if he was helping out but who told me that it was his wife who ran the place and that he, as a metalworker, had erected the building about eighteen months ago on land that stood at the front of his other business.
The brainchild of Marfa residents Janika Gilly and her mother, Etta “Debbie” Sproul-Parrott, “Buns & Roses” is both a bakery and flower shop. The name, Janika says, was the idea of a Fort Davis friend of the family and the flower shop part of the business opened successfully on Valentine’s Day to a big showing of support, selling out all of their roses by the close of the day. The food service serves a light breakfast and lunch which includes breakfast tacos, waffles, bagels, muffins, hot and cold sandwiches, quesadillas, soups and salads while the bakery dishes out fresh-glazed doughnuts, cinnamon rolls, kolaches and other baked goods and pastries. Janika’s brother Jerik and his fiancée, Natalie Ramirez, staff the bakery.
The other meeting of note was with Valerie Arber and her partner, the renowned printmaker, Robert, when we paid a visit to their gallery and studio, not too far down the street from The Paisano on East El Paso Street.
Robert Arber studied lithography at the famous Tamarind Studio which started in Los Angeles but is now based in Albuquerque. He is regarded as a Master Printer who has produced limited edition lithographs and woodcuts for numerous, internationally known artists including Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Prince, Al Taylor and David Rabinowitch.
Arber & Son Editions, publishers and printers, was founded in 1976 by Robert, after he had earned both his BFA and MA in printmaking from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and following study with Garo Antreasian, the co-founder of the Tamarind Institute. In 1990, Robert was awarded the prestigious Tamarind Master Printer certificate in recognition of his abilities. The firm has done contract printing for the Chinati Foundation, IC Editions, and Brooke Alexander, as well as publishing its own editions. Robert considers printmaking as “a dance between a technician and an artist where sometimes the artist leads, and sometimes the technician.”
Valerie showed us the showcase area just behind the front-room gallery which contained their on-going work, The 30 x 30cm Project, which was begun in 2003 as a collaboration between Arber & Son Editions and visiting artists-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation. The name of the project reflects the physical dimensions of the pages on which the artists work. The techniques employed for each edition vary from lithography and relief printing to digital prints and each of the boxed works consists of six to nine prints with the editions being limited to forty numbered copies contained in Socle Archival boxes hand-built by the studio. So far, eight volumes have been published.
The prints in Volume Two – by Emi Winter – were particularly impressive and skillful. Consisting of a suite of six, multicoloured relief prints which display the artist’s signature use of colour, they take their inspiration from both natural and cultural sources. While in residence at Chinati in 2001, the artist took Polaroid photographs of the variously hued light cast by Dan Flavin’s fluorescent sculptures and details of Judd’s one hundred aluminum boxes and these became the basis for the series of blended ink relief prints.
The production of such prints is technically daunting, involving the seamless gradation of colours during a single roll over the plate and obtaining consistent editions required a high level of printing skill and patience. The distribution of colour and surface consistency of the prints are so meticulously even that it is difficult not to mistake them for digital inkjet images.
Winter was not educated in abstract art, much less minimalism, and came to her style through the persistent observation of details. Her work reflects both the colours of her Oaxacan heritage – that is, Mexican – and a willingness to investigate challenging techniques.
In relation to any misunderstanding regarding the method used, Robert Arber has said that –
“It takes significant skill to know which keystrokes to use to obtain the desired digital end results, but those results are for the most part soulless. The process Emi Winter and I used is not a machine-based process, rather human-based. Each color is mixed with a spatula on a table top, subtle color nuances of hue, value and saturation are seen first hand with no electronic translations …
Users of (digital) technique have grappled with what to call digital prints – Iris Prints, Giclee, Piezographs, Carbon Prints, Pigment Prints, or InkJet. Advancements have been made in hardware, software and the ink formulae but there is little difference in all of these processes. There is a beauty to be seen in some inkjet prints but for the most part they don’t survive second looks.
Recently I viewed a black/white photo exhibition in which the artist foolishly put beautiful silver prints in the same exhibition with inkjet prints. The depth and glow of the silver nitrate prints were completely missing in what appeared to be professionally printed, large format, inkjet outputs. There is of course a place in the fine art world for inkjet printing … but … it is just another tool”.
The Arber printmaking studio is in a small, old movie theatre and the lobby area acts as a showroom for Valerie’s own artwork and for the 30 x 30cm Project. Where the seats were is where Robert keeps his presses and they live in the projection booth upstairs.
Valerie took us through to the very large space at the back where Robert has his presses, one a very big German press for plate and woodblock printing and the other, a stone litho press which was bought by Judd to print his own series on and which is now on extended loan to Robert from the Chinati Foundation, who own it. They still have the screws in the wall which held the Judd series, not knowing what to put in their place, and they had some large, framed work by other artists, for example David Rabinowitch.
While we were talking with Valerie, Robert came in from their garden where he had been building a greenhouse and, although he was a bit reticent at first, he became more talkative when we got onto the subject of his ownership of a number of motorcycles, several of which were here in the studio, including the British makes, Triumph, BSA and Matchless for which he had recently acquired a Swallow sidecar. He also had a BMW and he didn’t have any complimentary remarks to make about Harley-Davidson, as he said, it’s a WWII creation which hasn’t kept pace with Japanese technological development. I told him about my conversation with a Police Motorcyclist at the Veterans’ Day Parade in Santa Fe who told me about the Police Service buying Kawasakis as a result of their earlier Harleys overheating and this only served to confirm his doubtful view of this iconic American brand. I also told him about the sad demise of the British motorcycle industry, located as it had been in Coventry, and of the Motorcycle museum at Meriden, in the centre of England, which had burnt down not so long ago.
I asked him where he found the time to garden, repair, maintain and ride his bikes and, at the same time, fit in the job of printing and he said that he had neither a TV nor a Cell phone ! He said that he had a number of projects/series that he needed to get on with and would be fully occupied in the weeks and months ahead. I also asked him about whether he produced any artwork of his own to which he replied that, unlike his fellow students at Tamarind, who had hoped to go on to produce their own work and who had been disappointed at their lack of success, he had realized at an early stage that he just wasn’t good enough and that there were, in any case, many more who were better than him, so he concentrated on being a good technician. As regards himself drawing on any of the artists’ work he said that he would never do that although there had been one occasion when he had to print for a certain Navajo artist – obviously R.C.Gorman – where a certain amount of “filling in” had been necessary, as Gorman tended to sketch out the basics of an image and leave it to his assistants to do the rest.
Valerie herself studied in Sweden and at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where she was awarded a B.F.A. in Drawing. She has had solo exhibitions in Marfa, as Guest artist at the Tamarind Institute and in other galleries in Albuquerque, Basel and Bangkok, as well as in other Selected Exhibitions in Dallas, San Antonio and Santa Fe.
As we departed, to thank Valerie for allowing us make a visit to the studio, I gave her a little present, a book by a local man which described his growing up in Marfa and the Fort D.A. Russell Army base. This was “The Marfa Sketch Pad” by William K. Thornsburg, a piece of autobiographical writing which had, on its front cover, one of the Grafitti images from the Fort. As one of the Chinati Foundation’s tour guides, Valerie had expressed an interest in anything to do with the Fort’s earlier incarnation as a military base so this seemed like an appropriate gift for me to pass on to her. Incidentally, Mr Thornsburg has also written a book on the subject of the Marfa Lights “The Marfa Lights : A close encounter”.
Marfa and the area of Presidio County has been the setting for a number of movies and it was to Terlingua, in Wim Wenders’ movie “Paris, Texas”, that the character of Travis, played by Harry Dean Stanton, after mysteriously wandering out of the desert, was brought to see a German physician to be treated as an amnesiac. When Travis is unable – or unwilling – to speak or respond to questions, the doctor finds a phone number on him, and he calls the Los Angeles number, and reaches Travis’ brother, Walt, who agrees to come to pick him up. Thereafter, Travis attempts to revive his relationship with his brother, and with his seven-year-old son, and to track down his former wife – played by Natassja Kinski – who has abandoned the family.
We made our own way to Terlingua by way of US90, stopping at the “Bread and Breakfast” café on Holland Avenue in Alpine, the main one-way street heading east. It had a sign in the window that said “Hippies use the back door” but, inside, everything was “cool” with plenty of locals sitting drinking copious cups of coffee and filling themselves up with oatmeal with raisins and bacon and eggs or cakes and pastries and buns.
We sat at the end of a large table where, at the other end, there was a group of elderly locals and it turned out that one of them was the mayor of the town, a man of Asian ethnicity, who has recently been experiencing some difficulties in his post, having seen a petition seeking a special election to recall him being filed.
Apparently, he has been accused by former councilmen of ethics violations, of trying to shield the former city manager from questions about the use of city funds, of overstepping the authority of his office by putting the finance director on paid leave, of using so-called anonymous letters to evaluate city personnel, and, in an issue not related to his current tenure in office, of not paying his hotel/motel tax, years ago. Whatever his troubles, he seemed relaxed about it all as he sat enjoying what Bread and Breakfast had to offer, as we ourselves did !
We drove off and turned right onto the 118 which takes you south towards the border with Mexico. The mountain views on either side were great, hazy and blue in the far distance, and I just had to stop several times to take pictures.
On the way we saw a couple of groups of Javelinas, one close to the road – a family consisting of a mother with her brood.
The animal commonly known as the Javelina is a “collared peccary”, which can be found as far south as Argentina and as far north as Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. These are members of the even-toed, hoofed mammal order of “Artiodactyla” and are often mistaken for pigs, but they are in a different family with several differences between the two animals.
Javelinas thrive in a variety of habitats and are able to adapt easily to different areas within their territory. A herbivore – a plant eater – and a frugivore – a fruit eater – the Javelina consumes tubers, rhizomes, bulbs, acorns, grass, green shoots of annuals, stems of prickly pears, lupines, mesquite beans, lechuguilla as well as a wide variety of fruits. They are also opportunistic and take animal matter as food when it is easily available or accidentally ingest it while foraging for other things. Succulent prickly pear pads make it possible for the Javelina to survive until rainfall provides additional new annual food plants but Javelinas will drink from water sources when they are available.
Coyotes, bobcats, black bears, and mountain lions prey on the Javelinas and, on average, they live for about seven and a half years in the wild with herd size ranging from five to twenty seven animals.
A typical day for a javelina in the Big Bend area begins at daylight when the herd gets up from its bedding site and feeds until mid-morning. As the day heats up the javelinas seek shelter in cooler canyons, caves, and areas of dense shrub and they will feed again in the late afternoon until dark. Feeding time increases in cooler months and resting time increases in the summer when Javelinas may even feed at night during the hottest months. After feeding, the herd will bed down under rocky overhangs, in caves, and in shallow depressions with heavy brush cover and they will huddle together in a group for warmth and protection.
Javelina hides were shipped east and to Europe for gloves and hairbrushes in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s and were used as barter in many trading posts along the US-Mexico border but, since the 1940’s, the Javelinas have been considered to be sporting game animals in Texas providing a source of income for landowners and for the State in terms of the hunter’s fee. In Big Bend National Park the Javelinas are protected and are often seen in the campgrounds feeding and being known to raid coolers and picnic tables when they are left unattended.
Seeing Javelinas is common in Big Bend so the groups that we came across were not an unusual sight but we saw no others as we carried on down to the township of Study Butte and followed the road round to Terlingua – a mining town which still has traces of its former existence.
The discovery of cinnabar, from which the metal mercury is extracted, in the mid-1880s brought miners to the area, creating a city of 2,000 people. But only remnants of mining today are a ghost town of the Howard Perry-owned Chisos Mining Company and several nearby capped and abandoned mines, most notably the Rainbow, the 248, the Study Butte and the California Hill, where, in the vicinity of the latter, the mineral “terlinguaite” was first found.
Apparently, the cinnabar was known to Native Americans, who prized its brilliant red colour for body pigment and various Mexican and American prospectors reportedly found cinnabar at Terlingua in the 1880s, but the remoteness and the hostile Indians deterred mining at first.
A man named Jack Dawson reportedly produced the first mercury from Terlingua in 1888, but the district got off to a slow start and it was not until the mid-1890s that the Terlingua finds began to be publicized in newspapers and mining industry magazines so that, by 1900, there were four mining companies operating at Terlingua.
Due to its proximity to Big Bend National Park, today Terlingua is mostly a tourist destination for park visitors who come to do rafting on the Rio Grande, mountain biking, camping, hiking, and motorcycling which are some of the outdoor activities favoured by tourists. But it’s also become a kind of redoubt for latter-day hippies who set up home here either in adobe-style buildings or old trailers.
On the first Saturday of November, over 10,000 “chiliheads” convene here for two annual chili cookoffs – the Chili Appreciation Society International and the Frank X. Tolbert/Wick Fowler World Chili Championships.
In the late 1970s the Chili Cook-Off sponsored a “Mexican Fence-Climbing Contest” to spoof the US Government’s planned reinforcement of the chain-link fence separating El Paso from Ciudad Juárez and San Ysidro in California from Tijuana in Mexico. The fence that the “chili heads” used was constructed by illegal, alien Mexican workers who laboured annually for the Cook-Off organizers at five dollars per day plus meals and rustic lodging. Among the founders of the first chili cookoff, in 1967, was car manufacturer Carroll Shelby, designer of The Mustang, who owned a 220,000-acre ranch nearby.
We drove up to and parked in front of The Terlingua Trading Company which is housed in the old company store of the Chisos Mining Company, The Trading Company is the spiritual descendant of the old Trading Post operated by Rex Ivey for the trappers, settlers, and cowboys along the Rio Grande and his son, Bill, and his family, carry on the tradition as the owners and proprietors.
We went inside to find a shop full of goods of various kinds – ceramics, blankets, t-shirts and general souvenirs to name but some. They say that what they are really famous for is “sittin’ on the front porch, especially at sunset. Some people talk. Some listen. Some play the guitar and sing. Then – little by little – it gets dark. Admittedly that may not sound all that exciting, but folks come from all over, time and time again”.
I got talking to the young black-bearded, long-haired young man at the till who had a lot to tell us about living in Terlingua and travelling over to Mexico.
He was from Texas and had studied at Bend in Oregon before doing his post-graduate studies in Santa Fe and he had driven the route that we had taken on our journey from Seattle. He had bought some land in Terlingua about eighteen years ago and had gradually built his own adobe house here. He said that he frequently made trips across the border for general shopping and that Mexico was safe if you didn’t go longing for trouble. He usually drove to Presidio then crossed the border to Ojinaga as, from there, you can get a fast bus to Chihuahua and then a cheap flight to Mexico City.
He also told me about the geology of the area, the rows of distinct rock forms – the white limestone from an earlier period which covers the floor of the town and the later, darker volcanic-produced rock forms of the mountains in the distance.
A recent article on the town that I came across says that, “Today there’s a newly established population in Terlingua, a collection of loners, artists, eccentrics, and outcasts – maligned individualists who have fashioned their own crude American Dream in the anonymity of this remote corner of the Chihuahuan Desert. They comprise a neglected niche in America, outside of the infrastructure. Here in their ghost town, less is more. Anyone who lives in a one room cabin without water and electricity fits right in. People live in cars, caves, tepees, tents and shacks made out of car tires. The only unwelcome guest is progress, though its trespasses have become noticeable even here. The Starlight Theater is the tourists’ and the locals’ hangout, a restaurant and bar where disparate members of society rub elbows. Progress has not changed many buildings, however. The local radio station KYOT 100.1 FM has taken over the abandoned local hotel. The old church also now hosts yoga classes. A now defunct restaurant is the crisis center for the town, and it doubles as a social gathering destination for many about once a month, with homemade food and music and much conversation. The old school has been replaced by a new modern one a few miles away. With no more children and laughter, the original building stands year after year, braving the elements. There is no telling what the future holds for this ghost town. It has become, very slowly, an outsiders’ destination. Summers are rough though. The heat is brutal. The economy, and local incomes, drop considerably. Winter brings back tourists and a welcome flow of money to sustain the community for the rest of the year. Terlingua is strong, its members hold tight to each other.”
For my own interests, Terlingua is also the place where Butch Hancock, one of Lubbock’s Flatlanders, has made his home and he has been known to play the Starlight and frequent the Trading Post.
We bought a badge, a dream catcher and a t-shirt and, while my travelling companion sat in the shade on the storefront porch, I walked around the immediate vicinity taking some photos of the old mine building ruins and the church. It had become very warm so this Englishman didn’t last long in the midday sun !
We took the shop assistant’s advice and skipped going east to Big Bend National Park and, instead, went west towards the Big Bend Ranch State Park and to Presidio, about a fifty-mile drive over an up-and-down, mountain-lined road following the course of the Rio Grande which forms the border here with Mexico.
The River Road is known as Farm to Market 170 and it took us to the Barton Warnock Visitors Centre where we bought another badge to go with the collection and then on, just down the road, to the resort community of Lajitas. The town – the entire town – was purchased in 2003, and it appears that most, if not all of the town, is now operated by the Lajitas Golf Resort and Spa. It’s a nice resort but it feels uncomfortably phony with even a Wild West “Main Street” that isn’t real, just motel rooms.
As the bakery was closed, under directions from the sign outside, we went into the hotel and managed to get some pastries and drinks. We were served by a pleasantly enthusiastic young woman who later told me that she’d come down from Maine, for her about a ten-day drive with stops, and that she spent the season here, living in Terlingua where she’d found a sympathetic environment. She preferred it here to Marfa. She’d run an art gallery back in Maine – working in a gallery in Isleford Dock – but hadn’t really taken to the hipster crowd in Marfa. She recommended Isleford as a place to visit if you ever went to New England !
We drove on and stopped briefly at the Contrabando Movie Set and further on, briefly, to see the Closed Canyon from the road, then on with the long drive to Redford. There were a number of roadworks going on and I was driving sedately today, trying to avoid attracting State Trooper attention, and this was having a very beneficial effect on our petrol consumption which seemed amazingly low.
We passed many flood gauge markers but most of the beds were bone dry although the Rio Grande, a narrow stream compared to my vision of it being a wide waterway, was running well with its green water. The border here seems hardly a border at all and it would seem possible to get across quite easily. But the traffic of illegal immigrants seems to go on closer to the cities and although we didn’t see much evidence of Border Control on the road their vehicles started to appear as we got close to Presidio, the border crossing.
As we approached Presidio, on the outskirts, we passed Fort Leaton State Historical site, the original adobe structure here being a private residence dating back to the early 19th century. It was purchased in 1848 by Benjamin Leaton, who adapted it as a fortress and Fort Leaton was the Presidio County original seat of government. Through murders, financial difficulties and abandonment, the structure changed hands numerous times until it was deeded to the state of Texas.
Benjamin Leaton was a trader, freight hauler along the Chihuahua Trail, and a bounty hunter paid by various local governments in Mexico for each scalp taken from an indigenous person. He also traded munitions to the Apache and Comanche for any stolen cattle they brought him. When Presidio County was established in 1850, Fort Leaton was its first seat of government. Leaton died in 1851 and his widow married Edward Hall who continued operating the freight business from the fort. Hall became financially indebted to Leaton’s scalp hunting partner John Burgess but he defaulted on his debt to Burgess in 1864, and was murdered. Burgess took over the fort, and was in turn murdered by Leaton’s son in 1875. The Burgess family remained in the fort until they abandoned it in 1926 and the fort was purchased by the Marfa State Bank and a private citizen in the 1930s and donated to Presidio County. An attempt at restoration was begun, but adequate financing never materialized. The site was then purchased by a private citizen and donated to the state of Texas. In 1968, the site was designated Fort Leaton State Historic Site and it opened to the public in 1978 as a Texas State Historic Site having been added to the National Register of Historic Places listings in Presidio County in June 1973
We drove into Presidio and down the Main Street, O’Reilly Street, until it joined with the US67, Chihushua-Hermisilio, which leads to the very heavily developed and monitored border crossing point to Ojinaga. As usual, my travelling companion was somewhat paranoid about getting too close to the border and, as I executed an expert U-turn 200 yards from the checkpoint, she thought that we would be immediately pursued by machine gun-toting Border Control guards who would apprehend us and subject us to a thorough body search and endless hours of interrogation, using Guantanamo techniques. I’m afraid that she was, yet again, disappointed !
We went back to the café, the only one, that we’d passed on the way in, “El Patio”, which offered hot tasting bean soup, a reasonable salad bar with fresh lettuce, tomatoes and beet root, and a decent fish – catfish – with tartare sauce and a baked potato. For some unexplained reason, other than the preference of the owner, the café had a number of images of and a wooden sculpture tableaux dedicated to Don Quixote ! The service was friendly with the place being patronised by local hispanics, who were speaking mainly in Spanish.
We drove out to the 67, The Texas Mountain Trail, heading north and stopped several times to take photos of a stunning sunset, the best that we’d seen in our entire journey.
The road to Marfa was a good one, about 60 miles, and we quickly passed through the ghost town of Shafter with a stated population of 11 people. It was named in honour of General William Shafter, who at one point commanded the nearby – relatively speaking – Fort Davis. In the early 1900s, six silver mines were in operation near Shafter but, when the mines closed, the town died. It was later the location for several scenes in the 1971 movie “The Andromeda Strain”, the 1971 science-fiction film, based on the novel by Michael Crichton, published in 1969. The film is about a team of scientists who investigate a deadly organism of extraterrestrial origin that causes rapid, fatal blood clotting. Directed by Robert Wise, the film starred Arthur Hill, James Olson, Kate Reid, and David Wayne, with special effects designed by Douglas Trumbull. In recent years, at least one silver mine, “La Mina Grande”, has been reopened by Aurcana Corporation in Shafter.
In August 2006, two movie production units filmed in Marfa – “There Will Be Blood”, an adaptation of the Upton Sinclair novel “Oil !”, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, and the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel “No Country for Old Men” starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and Woody Harrelson.
Larry Clark’s 2012 film “Marfa Girl” was filmed exclusively in Marfa and, also, “Far Marfa”, written and directed by Cory Van Dyke, made its debut in 2012. Additionally, various musical artists have filmed music videos in the town, including Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Between the Buried and Me, and Diamond Rings while, in 2008, Marfa held the first annual Marfa Film Festival, which lasted for a five day period in the month of May.
But no visit to Far West Texas, and to Marfa in particular, is complete without recognition of George Stevens making “Giant” here in 1955 and an acknowledgement of the place that James Dean has in the psyche and culture of post-WWII America.
Based on Edna Ferber’s epic novel of the same name, “Giant” is the story of a young girl from the East, Leslie Lynnton, who marries a West Texan, Jordan “Bick” Benedict, and learns to live with heat, wind, barbecued calves’ heads, over-the-top wealth and the oppression of the people who lived on the land before it became Texas – the Mexicans who worked the enormous ranches for pennies.
“We’re the white Americans, we’re the big men, we eat the beef and drink the bourbon, we don’t take siestas, we don’t feel the sun, the heat or the cold, the wind or the rain, we’re Texans”, Ferber wrote, “So they drank gallons of coffee and stayed awake while the Mexican-Americans quietly rested in the shade, their hats pulled down over their eyes … ”
But “Giant” is also the tale of Jett Rink – the character that James Dean played in his third and final film – inspired partly by the extraordinary rags-to-riches life story of the wildcatter oil tycoon, Glenn Herbert McCarthy, whom author Edna Ferber met when she was a guest at his Shamrock Hotel, known as the Shamrock Hilton after 1955, in Houston, the fictional Emperador Hotel in both the book and the film.
At the start of the film, Jordan “Bick” Benedict – Rock Hudson – head of a wealthy Texas ranching family, travels to Maryland to buy “War Winds”, a horse that he is planning to put out to stud. When he arrives, he meets and falls instantly in love with socialite Leslie Lynnton – Elizabeth Taylor – who, mutually smitten, breaks off her engagement to Sir David Karfrey – Rod Taylor – and marries Bick.
They return to Texas to start their life together on the family ranch, Reata, where Bick’s sister, Luz Benedict – Mercedes McCambridge – runs the household. But Luz resents Leslie’s presence and attempts to intimidate her.
Jett is employed by Luz who defends him when Bick wants to dismiss this cocky and independent-minded young man who is immediately infatuated with Leslie upon first meeting her, saying, “You sure do look pretty, Miss Leslie. Pert nigh good enough to eat !”
When riding Leslie’s beloved horse, “War Winds”, Luz expresses her hostility for Leslie by cruelly digging in her spurs but, after the horse bucks her off, Luz suffers a bad fall and dies from her injuries. In her will, Jett is bequeathed land on the Benedict ranch but, when Bick tries to buy back the land, Jett refuses to sell. Although he had hopes of finding his fortune by leaving Texas, Jett makes the land his home and names it “Little Reata”.
Leslie and Bick have twins, Jordan “Jordy” Benedict III – Dennis Hopper – and Judy Benedict – Fran Bennett – and, later, have a daughter who they name Luz Benedict II -Carroll Baker.
In due course, Jett becomes rich overnight when he discovers traces of oil in a footprint of Leslie’s after she pays a visit to Little Reata. He drills in the same spot and hits a gusher and, drenched in oil, he drives to the Benedict front yard and proclaims to the family and their guests that he will be richer than the Benedicts.
“Everybody thought I had a duster. Y’all thought ol’ Spindletop Burke and Burnett was all the oil there was, didn’t ya? Well, I’m here to tell you that it ain’t, boy ! It’s here, and there ain’t a dang thing you gonna do about it ! My well came in big, so big, Bick and there’s more down there and there’s bigger wells. I’m rich, Bick. I’m a rich ‘un. I’m a rich boy. Me, I’m gonna have more money than you ever thought you could have – you and all the rest of you stinkin’ sons of … Benedicts !”
In the years preceding World War II, Jett’s oil drilling company prospers, but determined to continue to be a cattle rancher like his forefathers, Bick rejects several offers to drill for oil on Reata.
Tensions in Bick’s and Leslie’s household revolve around their children and Bick insists that Jordy must succeed him and run the ranch, as his father and grandfather had done before him – but Jordy wants to become a doctor. Leslie wants Judy to attend finishing school in Switzerland, but Judy loves the ranch and wants to study animal husbandry at Texas Tech, in Lubbock. Both children succeed in pursuing their own vocations and, when WWII breaks out, Jett tries to persuade Bick to allow oil production on his land to help the war effort.
Realizing that his children will not take over the ranch when he retires, in a meeting with Jett, in which each others’ drinking problem is apparent, Bick agrees. Luz II, now in her teens, has taken a shine to Jett and starts flirting with him, the start of an association which, in due course, will lead to Jett, more or less, proposing marriage to her.
Once oil production starts on the ranch, the wealthy Benedict family becomes even wealthier, as evidenced by the installation of a new swimming pool next to the house but, after the war, the Benedict-Rink rivalry continues, coming to a head when the Benedicts discover that Luz II and the much older Jett have been dating.
At a huge party given by Jett to launch his new hotel, The Emperador, which the Benedicts fly down to attend, Jordy’s Mexican-American wife, Juana – Elsa Cárdenas – is racially insulted by hotel staff, effectively on Jett’s orders not to serve any hispanics. An irate Jordy goes into the party to confront Jett and tries to start a fight with him but Jett’s minders hold Jordy while Jett punches him repeatedly and then has Jordy thrown out. Bick is outraged by this, the culmination of their long-held enmity, and challenges Jett to a fight. Drunk and almost incoherent, Jett leads the way to a wine storage room but, seeing that Jett is in no fit state to defend himself, Bick lowers his fists and says “You’re not even worth hitting … You’re all through,” after which he topples Jett’s wine cellar shelves like a row of dominoes.
The Benedicts leave and Jett, completely drunk, takes his seat of honour but passes out at the table. All the guests leave and, shortly after, Luz II sees him recovering from his drunken stupor, talking to an empty room, and disclosing that his sexual interest in her was an attempt to vicariously possess her mother !
The next day, the Benedicts are driving down a road back to Reata and stop at a diner where the racist owner, Sarge, insults Juana and her and Jordy’s son, Jordan IV. When the owner goes on to eject an old Mexican man and his family from the diner, Bick tells Sarge to stop and this leads to a fight that Bick loses, getting heavily battered, though he puts up a good defence. The family members are proud of him for standing up to the burly owner and later, back at the ranch, Bick and Leslie watch their two grandchildren, of different ethnic backgrounds, playing together and reflect on their life. Leslie tells Bick that she respects his new understanding of the concerns of the local people, unlike his wealthy forebears, and says that, after all, she considers their version of the Benedict family a success.
The movie is an epic portrayal of a powerful Texas ranching family challenged by changing times and the coming of big oil but a major subplot concerns the racism of white Texans and the social segregation of Mexican Americans which they enforced. In early segments of the film, Bick and his sister, Luz, treat the Mexicans who work on their ranch condescendingly, which upsets the more socially conscious Leslie, but Bick eventually comes to realize the moral indefensibility of his racism and, in the climactic scene at the roadside diner, although he loses the fistfight to the racist owner, he earns Leslie’s respect for defending the human rights of his brown-skinned daughter-in-law and grandson.
Another subplot involves Leslie’s own striving for women’s equal rights as she defies the patriarchal social order, asserting herself and expressing her own opinions when the men talk. She protests being expected to suppress her beliefs in deference to Bick’s and this conflict leads to their temporary separation.
In coming to Marfa, I had anticipated being able to visit the remains of the set of the “Reata” mansion, the Benedict ranch which, I had read, still stood out on the remote, dry plains on the road to Valentine – a partial frame made up of bits of wood and plaster, held together with rusty nails, surrounding the base of a towering frame – but, during my conversation with Bertha in the museum, she had told me that, fifty years on, the flimsy remains had finally been blown away by the desert winds.
Edna Ferber’s novel did for Texas what “Gone with the Wind” had done for the old South – it gave everyone a chance to get “up close and personal” with one of most colourful and unique regions of the United States – Texas – in an honest and straightforward fashion that weathers the test of time. But, although the central character in the story is Leslie, played by Liz Taylor who turns in an authoratitive performance, the epic drama that is “Giant” is legendary today for the foremost of reasons, namely that James Dean instilled a magnetic presence into the persona of Jett Rink in what was to be the last time that he would be seen on a movie screen. So, any consideration of the movie would not be complete until you’ve taken on board the story of Dean’s death and its impact on the culture of ’50s America.
For James Dean is the legendary hero with a legendary story – “live fast, die young” – and for over half a century, his image has captured the world with his casual style, unflinching look and his rebel attitude. He defined the essence of “cool” when “cool” was only just beginning to seep into the consciousness of teenage America and his star continues to shine brightly, even today, not least here in the South-west.
Jimmy Dean was born in 1931 in Marion, Indiana, but he and his family moved to Santa Monica, California and he attended school in a neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The family spent several years in the city, and, by all accounts, Dean, as a youth, was very close to his mother who, according to one account, was “the only person capable of understanding him”.
In 1938, she was suddenly struck with acute stomach pains, began to lose weight quickly and died of uterine cancer when Jimmy was only nine years old. Unable to care for his son, his father sent him to live with his sister and her husband on a farm in Indiana where he was raised by his aunt and uncle in a farmhouse near to the city of Fairmount attending the local High School.
He was raised in a Quaker background and he sought the counsel and friendship of a Methodist pastor, who seemed to have had a formative influence upon him, especially upon his future interests in bullfighting, car racing, and the theatre. According to one source, Jimmy had an intimate relationship with the pastor, which began in his senior year of high school and which endured for many years.
Some have claimed that this was a sexual relationship and, in 2011, it was reported that he once told Elizabeth Taylor that he was sexually abused by a minister two years after his mother’s death. Other reports of Jimmy’s life suggest that he was either sexually abused by the pastor when a child or had a consensual sexual relationship with him as a teenager.
Whatever, this story has only served to fuel the speculation about his apparently ambivalent sexuality and, today, he is often considered an icon because of his “experimental” take on life. There have been several claims and assertions that he had sexual relationships with both men and women but, when questioned about his sexual orientation, he is reported to have said, “No, I am not a homosexual. But, I’m also not going to go through life with one hand tied behind my back.”
One of his closest friends, his first biographer, published a revealing update of his first book, in which, after years of successfully dodging the question as to whether he and Jimmy were sexually involved, he finally stated that they had experimented, describing the difficult circumstances of their involvement and dealing frankly with some of Jimmy’s other reported gay relationships.
Some have suggested that any gay activity that he might have been involved in was strictly “for trade”, that is, as a means of advancing his career, while others believe that he was certainly bisexual.
In high school, Dean’s overall performance was mediocre but he was a popular student, playing on the baseball and basketball teams and studying drama. After graduating from High School in 1949, he moved back to California to live with his father and stepmother, enrolling in Santa Monica College and majoring in pre-law. He transferred to UCLA for one semester but changed his major to drama, which resulted in estrangement from his father. While at UCLA, he was picked from a pool of 350 actors to play the rôle of Malcolm in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and, in January 1951, he dropped out of UCLA to pursue a full-time career as an actor.
His first appearance was in a Pepsi Cola television commercial and he had three walk-on roles in movies. He also worked as a parking lot attendant at CBS Studios, during which time he met a radio director for an advertising agency, who offered him professional help and guidance in his chosen career, as well as a place to stay.
In October 1951, following advice from various people, he moved to New York City where he worked as a stunt tester for a game show and also appeared in episodes of several CBS television series.
He then gained admission to the legendary Actors Studio to study method acting under Lee Strasberg and, proud of this accomplishment, he referred to the Studio in a letter to his family in 1952 as “The greatest school of the theater. It houses great people like Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Arthur Kennedy, Mildred Dunnock … Very few get into it … It is the best thing that can happen to an actor. I am one of the youngest to belong.”
His career picked up and he performed in episodes of some early 1950s television shows and, in one early role, for a CBS series, he portrayed the type of disaffected youth he would later immortalize in “Rebel Without a Cause.”
In 1953, the director Elia Kazan was looking for a substantive actor to play the emotionally complex role of ‘Cal Trask’ in an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel “East of Eden” which deals with the story of the Trask and Hamilton families over the course of three generations, focusing especially on the lives of the latter two generations in Salinas Valley, California, from the mid-19th century through the 1910s.
In contrast to the book, the film script dealt predominantly with the character of Cal Trask who, though he initially seems more aloof and emotionally troubled than his twin brother, Aron, is soon seen to be more worldly, business savvy, and even sagacious than their pious and constantly disapproving father, played by Raymond Massey. Cal is bothered by the mystery of their supposedly dead mother, and discovers that she is still alive and a brothel-keeping ‘madame’.
Before casting Cal, Elia Kazan said that he wanted “a Brando” for the role and Dean was suggested even though he was a relatively unknown young actor at the time. He met with Steinbeck who did not like the moody, complex young man personally, but thought him perfect for the part and, having been cast in the rôle, he left New York City in April 1954 and headed for Los Angeles to begin shooting.
Much of Jimmy’s performance in the film is unscripted, including his dance in the bean field and his foetal-like posturing while riding on top of a train boxcar, after searching out his mother in nearby Monterey. The most famous improvisation of the film occurs when Cal’s father rejects his gift of $5,000, money Cal earned by speculating in beans prior to World War I, when, instead of running away from his father as the script called for, Dean instinctively turned to Massey and in a gesture of extreme emotion, lunged forward and grabbed him in a full embrace, crying. Kazan kept this cut and Massey’s shocked reaction in the film.
His performance in the film foreshadowed his rôle as Jim Stark in “Rebel Without A Cause” as both characters are angst-ridden protagonists and misunderstood outcasts, desperately craving approval from a father figure.
He quickly followed up his role in “East of Eden” with a starring role in “Rebel Without a Cause”, a film that would prove to be hugely popular among teenagers. The film, directed by Nicholas Ray, has been cited as an accurate representation of teenage angst and co-starred the two doomed teen-actors, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, as well as Dennis Hopper.
I have to say that “East of Eden” is my favourite James Dean film, a story which really stretched his acting talent, a far deeper subject than either of the subsequent, other two movies.
As he only made 3 feature films, with two of them not even released at the time of his death, he was not rich or famous, when he died and, for the last three months of his life, he was living in Sherman Oaks, a neighbourhood in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, in a log cabin style home, with his cat, a gift from Elizabeth Taylor. It has been claimed that the house was owned by the maître d’ of the restaurant, now torn down, where he had his last supper,
On the morning of 30 September 1955, Jimmy picked up a new Porsche Spyder that he had recently purchased at Competition Motors on Vine Street in Hollywood. It was being serviced there before a race that was to take place in Salinas and, according to legend, Alec Guinness saw Jimmy in this Porsche and told him that he would be dead in a week if he continued to drive it.
While waiting for his car to be completed, he strolled over to the Hollywood Ranch Market, on Vine St. and Fountain, about a block away, and ate a donut after which, as the Spyder had less than the required mileage to make it eligible to race, he opted to drive the car up to Salinas himself so that he could become used to being in and driving the vehicle. Riding along with him was an employee of Competition Motors who was also Jimmy’s mechanic, Rolf Wutherich.
Before leaving to drive north, Jimmy filled up his car at a gas station on Ventura Boulevard which is still there, though now it is a florist. Coincidentally, this is said to be the gas station where the Manson Family stopped to make sure the blood was washed off their bodies after the killing of Sharon Tate and four other people.
At 3.30pm, Jimmy was pulled over for speeding by a California Highway Patrolman just south of Bakersfield and given a citation for doing 65mph in a 55mph zone. This would be the last time that Jimmy would ever sign his name.
After receiving the speeding citation, he turned left onto Route 166/33, a known shortcut for sports car drivers going to Salinas and called “the racer’s road”, to avoid going through Bakersfield’s slow 25 mph downtown district.
This took him directly to Blackwells Corner at CA Route 466 where he stopped briefly for refreshments and met up with some fellow racers who were also on their way to the Salinas road races.
A short time after continuing on his course, at 5.55pm, near a town called Cholame, a local Cal-Poly 23-year old student by the name of Donald Turnupseed was heading home from the opposite direction in his 1950 Ford Tudor, when he made the infamous left turn that would take the movie star’s life, making Jimmy immortal and giving Turnupseed a notoriety for the rest of his life, though he always said, “I didn’t see him, by God, I really didn’t see him”
The story, in a strong sense, defines the phrase, “Being in the wrong place at the wrong time”, but on a spectacular level.
Turnupseed didn’t see Jimmy and, although Jimmy did see him and made an attempt to swerve out of the way, the impact was unavoidable. The Ford broad-sided the Spyder and Jimmy’s car landed near a telephone pole, 15 feet off the road where there is now a plaque commemorating where his car came to rest.
Jimmy’s passenger, Rolf Wutherich, was thrown from the car but lived while Jimmy was rushed in an ambulance to Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival, having suffered a broken neck and other internal injuries.
He was taken to Kuehl’s Funeral Home in Paso Robles, where he was embalmed by the owner, and made presentable. The left-side of his face was set in the soft cushions of the casket, and so hidden while the relatively undamaged right-side was displayed. A black hearse took Jimmy’s body down Highway 101 to Los Angeles International Airport from where it was shipped back to Indiana and buried in Fairmount’s Park Cemetery at a funeral attended by 3000 people – more than the entire population of Fairmount. Jimmy’s high school friends were pallbearers and Liz Taylor sent flowers.
Jimmy’s tombstone has been stolen stolen three times, the last theft having taken place in July 1998 though it was retrieved by a Deputy in September of the same year.
Turnupseed grew up in a little town nearby called Tulare and attended the local Union High School. He spent some time in the Navy, and spent nearly his entire life in this area.
After the accident, Turnupseed, with the minor injury of a scratched nose, was told by a California Highway Patrol officer to hitchhike home and, after an inquest was held, the crash was ruled to have been an accident. Turnupseed would probably have been cited at the scene for an illegal left turn and perhaps other negligence-related charges, such as failure to signal, failure to see safe movement, and unsafe speed but, because the crash involved a fatality, an inquest was held. Jimmy was probably speeding – though not the high speed that some have suggested – most likely at 60-70mph because the Porsche he was driving was so low to the ground, but, at that time of day, Turnupseed probably didn’t realize what hit him – or that he had hit – until it was too late. Police ruled that the colour of Jimmy’s Porsche combined with the twilight hour, camouflaged his car, hiding it in the light from Turnupseed’s vision.
Turnupseed never spoke publicly about the accident but some correspondence from him was auctioned off in later years, in which he addressed the accident in some writing to a friend from the Navy –
“I am certainly sorry you have not heard from me before now but I have had quite a bit of excitement in the last year. Or so, first starting back to school then the affair with Dean, Bought another car & a house so I am just now getting time to get my breath. I am enclosing some shots of mine & Dean cars. I had my ford fixed like we had planned on the ship. A 3/8 by merk engine. I salvag the manifold and carbs are all that were left. A brand new set of Offenhouser heads gone, a (H) & M magneto run down the throught of a new eagel cam. But thank God I got out of it in one piece. But that is in the past and as I have said in poker games on the ship that was yesterday.”
Turnupseed inherited his father’s electrical business and built it into a multi million-dollar company and, in some parts of California, it has been quite common to see a utility truck sporting the name so closely associated with James Dean’s demise. Turnupseed married twice, was widowed once and had 3 children, 1 stepson and 5 grandchildren. In late 1993, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and succumbed to the disease in July 1995 in his home in Tulare, without ever discussing the accident publicly. He was 63 years old and was buried in the Tulare District Cemetery, next to his first wife and his parents.
Dean’s passenger, his mechanic, Rolf Wuetherich, escaped with several injuries including a broken jaw but he died in 1981, ironically, in a road traffic accident in Germany.
After the accident, the cars were towed to a garage behind the Jack Ranch Café, a few hundred yards from the accident scene but the garage is long gone today. The location of Jimmy’s car car is unknown, and, in 2005, a reward was offered to find it, although a piece of it has been auctioned off in recent times, as well as a pair of Jimmy’s trousers !
A certain Mr Uri Geller claims to own a spoon that belonged to Jimmy Dean, the spoon supposedly being carried by Dean in the accident !
Today Jimmy Dean’s image peers out from every souvenir shop that you come across but the man who was a significant factor in the accident is probably only known to the death ghouls who inhabit the various websites that continue to maintain the lifeline of the legend’s story and of his demise.
The highway where the crash occurred has changed quite significantly over the years, the original road being no longer used, though still visible nearby.
Located a short distance away from the crash site is a sculpture made of concrete and stainless steel surrounding a tree outside the Cholame “post office” and the Café. This is the James Dean Memorial which was made in Japan in 1977, the project having been created by a certain Seita Ohnishi. The location of the actual crash site, the intersection of Highways 41 and 46 was dedicated the James Dean Memorial Highway in September 2005. An interesting “Dean factoid” is that one of the ambulance drivers who picked Jimmy up on that evening, later put his own initials in the steps on the side of the building.
The “post office” is little more than a few mailboxes, and the Jack Ranch Café is a typical “greasy spoon” which has several pictures and art which showcase the actor hanging all over the walls. The memorial has several plaques next to it and visitors have thrown coins onto it.
Further East down Highway 46, close to the small town of Lost Hills, where the highway intersects Highway 33, on the southwest corner of the intersection, is Blackwells Corner General Store which is known as “James Dean’s Last Stop”. There are two wooden signs on the outside – one a tall version of Jimmy on the eastern side of the store pointing the way to the entrance, and the other, a memorial sign of his head and shoulders which commemorates him and his last stop. The interior of the general store is a fifties diner, containing a variety of James Dean art and a great deal of fifties memorabilia and pictures available for sale, along with the regular items that you would expect to find in a highway general store.
In a bizarre twist of fate, in September 1955, two weeks before the accident, Jimmy filmed a thirty-second commercial for the National Highway Safety Committee stating at the end of the commercial, “Take it easy driving. The life you might save might be mine.”
James Dean’s success in Hollywood afforded him the luxury of indulging in a love of race cars and he had a liking for Porsches, his first being a Speedster convertible and, when the opportunity arose to purchase the new, performance-driven 550 Spyder, he relished the upgrade. This car in which he was to die, was one of only ninety Porsche 550 Spyders and he nicknamed the car “Little Bastard”, after that epithet that was given to him by his language coach.
Straight away, he set out to put his own unique mark on the racer and called on George Barris, known as “King of the Kustomizers” – he later built the original “Batmobile” and the Munster “Koach” – to get to work on the Spyder and, under Jimmy’s guidance, Barris added custom tartan covered seats and the large “130” racing number on the doors, hood and engine cover.
In addition, the now infamous “Little Bastard” badge was applied by another LA auto-legend, master pinstriper and customizer, Dean Jeffries, who had a shop next to George Barris. From the outset, when they saw the Spyder, friends had told Jimmy that the car was trouble and the “possessed” Porsche did not fail to live up to it’s name as, after the crash, it seems to have continued to exercise a “curse” over those who came into contact with it.
Following the tragic accident, Barris, the master car customizer, bought the wreck for $2,500 and, when it arrived at the garage, the Porsche slipped and fell onto one of the mechanics unloading it, breaking both of his legs.
While Barris had bad feelings about the car when he first saw it, his suspicions were confirmed during a race at the Pomona Fair Grounds in October 1956 where two physicians were both racing cars that had parts from the “Little Bastard.” One died when his car, which had the Porsche’s engine installed, went out of control and hit a tree and the other car flipped over and the driver, who survived despite serious injuries, later said that the car suddenly locked up when he went into a curve.
The car’s malevolent influence continued after the race as one young punk, trying to steal the Porsche’s steering wheel, slipped and gashed his arm. Barris reluctantly sold two of the car’s tyres to another young man and, within a week, he was nearly involved in a wreck when the two tyres blew out simultaneously.
Feeling that the Porsche could be put to good use, Barris loaned the wrecked car to the California Highway Patrol for a touring display to illustrate the importance of automobile safety but, within days, the garage housing the Spyder burnt to the ground, with every vehicle parked inside – but not the “Little Bastard” – being destroyed. On another occasion, when the car was put on exhibition at Sacramento High School, it fell from its display and broke a teenage student’s hip while, later, another man, who was hauling the Spyder on a flatbed truck, was killed instantly when the Porsche fell on him after he was thrown from his truck in an accident. Even a parked truck carrying it suffered the consequences when its brakes came undone and the truck and “Little Bastard” rolled down crashing into yet another car.
There were two final incidents involving “Little Bastard”, in 1959, one when it was on display in New Orleans and it supposedly simply fell apart into eleven different pieces for no apparent reason. The other, while en-route to Los Angeles in 1960, the car mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again and, to this day, its whereabouts are unknown.
Occasionally there are reports of “Little Bastard”, along with Jimmy, rocketing ghostly down the highway near Cholame, possibly re-enacting the fatal accident, yet another contribution to the urban legend but there isn’t much of Jimmy Dean left today in Los Angeles and his memory resides out there on the highway, in the apocryphal stories and rumours about his sexuality and in the three movie rôles that are his filmic legacy.
At least one source states that Jimmy and Marilyn Monroe met but that neither was very impressed with each other, although Marilyn did serve as a celebrity usher for the benefit premier of “East of Eden” in February 1955. But unlike Marilyn, who really had no family to whom she could have left her estate, the James Dean estate was taken over and run by Jimmy’s family and it still earns in the region of $5,000,000 per year.
Curiously, while we were travelling through Texas, US actor Paul Walker, who starred in the “Fast & Furious” series of action films and in the suspense drama “Hours”, became the latest Hollywood tragedy when he was also killed in a car crash in California, as a passenger in a Porsche sports car driven by a friend – who also died – when it crashed north of Los Angeles. The 40 year old Walker was said to be attending a charity event at the time.
When James Dean’s three major films were made in the mid 1950s, American teenagers identified with him and the roles that he played, especially that of Jim Stark in “Rebel Without A Cause”, a film that depicts the dilemma of a typical teenager of the time, who feels that no one, not even his peers, can understand him.
Jimmy Dean has been described as “one of the rare stars, like Rock Hudson and Montgomery Clift, whom both men and women find sexy” and, according to one film critic, this quality is “the undefinable extra something that makes a star.”
His iconic appeal has been attributed to the public’s need for someone to stand up for the disenfranchised young of the era, and to the air of androgyny that he projected onscreen with his loving tenderness towards the besotted Sal Mineo in “Rebel Without a Cause” continuing to move and excite gay audiences by its honesty. The Gay Times Readers’ Awards cited him as the “male gay icon of all time”.
Jimmy Dean has been mentioned or featured in various songs – the chorus of David Essex’s original “Rock On” includes the refrain “Jimmy Dean, James Dean”, and The Eagles song named after him explores his fast and dangerous lifestyle. John Mellencamp mentions him in the lyrics of “Jack & Diane” while Phil Ochs had a song titled “Jim Dean of Indiana”.
In addition, Jimmy is often noted within television shows, films, books and novels – in the sitcom “Happy Days”, Fonzie has a picture of him in his closet next to his mirror, a picture of him appears on Rizzo’s wall in the film “Grease” and, in the American version of the TV series “Queer as Folk”, the main character, Brian Kinney, mentions him together with Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix, saying, “They’re all legends. They’ll always be young, and they will always be beautiful”.
In April 2010, a long “lost” live episode of the General Electric Theater called “The Dark, Dark Hours” featuring him in a performance with Ronald Reagan was uncovered by an NBC writer while he was working on a Ronald Reagan television retrospective. The episode, originally broadcast in December 1954, drew international attention and highlights were featured on numerous national media outlets. It was later revealed that some footage from the episode was first featured in the 2005 documentary, “James Dean : Forever Young”, the title of one of Bob Dylan’s songs from his 1974 album, “Planet Waves”, a song which is also performed by Bob and The Band towards the end of the “The Last Waltz”.
The final notable curiosity of “Giant” is the tragic fate which befell, not only Jimmy Dean, but several of the other actors in the movie – Sal Mineo was murdered in West Hollywood in 1976, Rock Hudson succumbed to Aids in 1985, and Elizabeth Taylor yo-yoed her way through several marriages and weight and health issues until 2004 when she announced a diagnosis of congestive heart failure, a progressive condition in which the heart is too weak to pump sufficient blood through the body, particularly to the lower extremities such as the ankles and feet. In 2009 she underwent cardiac surgery to replace a leaky valve but, in February 2011, new symptoms related to heart failure caused her to be admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for treatment, where she remained until her death at the age of 79 in March of that year.
Meanwhile, Dennis Hopper lived his life as “one of Hollywood’s most notorious drug addicts”, spending much of the 1970s and early 1980s living as “an outcast” after the success of “Easy Rider”. He was also notorious for his troubled relationships with women, including with his second wife, the Mamas & Papas singer, Michelle Phillips, who divorced him after fewer than two weeks of marriage. He was married five times and was in the process of divorcing his fifth wife – of 14 years – at the time of his death. In 2009, his manager reported that he had been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and, in January 2010, it was reported that his cancer had metastasized to his bones to the extent that, in March of the same year, he reportedly weighed only 100 pounds and was unable to carry on long conversations. According to papers filed in his divorce court case, Hopper was terminally ill and was unable to undergo chemotherapy to treat the cancer and be died at his home in the coastal Los Angeles district of Venice on the morning of 29 May 2010, at the age of 74, due to complications from his disease. After his funeral had taken place at the San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos, he was buried in the Jesus Nazareno Cemetery, in the town where he had maintained his alcohol-fuelled behaviour which, one night, had landed him up in the County Jail, after he’d been stopped for speeding and discharging a firearm in the Plaza !
And so, we return to Marfa, the name of which has recently been found to be of strange origin. For after 22 years of on-off research carried out in local archives, Thomas Wilson, an Alpine native who holds a PhD from Rice University in Houston, recently posited the idea that, in the late 19th century, the well-educated wife of an engineer named the town “Marfa” after a character in Feodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.”
Considered to be one of the ten greatest novels ever written, “The Brothers Karamazov” was published in December 1880, shortly before Dostoyevsky’s death on 28 January 1881, the town of Marfa being named on 16 January 1882, only a year later. But the academic was curious to know how a woman sitting on an unfinished railroad track in West Texas in 1882 could be reading an English translation of a novel only 13 months following its publication in Russian and he set out to discover the answer to this conundrum.
The name “Marfa” is actually the Russian equivalent of the English name, “Martha” and Dostoyevsky created nine different characters named “Marfa” in six of his novels over the last 21 years of his life.
The first “Marfa” to appear in a Dostoyevsky novel is in “The Village of Stepanchikovo” of 1859, the next is in “Crime and Punishment”, then a character named “Marfa” was in his next works, “The Idiot”, “The Gambler” and “The Possessed” and finally it is to be found in “The Brothers Karamazov”.
It is known that the team that built the trans-continental railroad in 1869 came out of retirement to build the Southern Pacific and one of them was the husband and wife team of James Harvey Strobridge and Hanna Maria Strobridge, the latter being seen in an infamous historical photo of the driving of the “golden spike” at Promontory Point on 10 May 1869.
Strobridge took his entire family with him during the later construction, in a special rail car that served as their home, although, when the Southern Pacific was built, his children were grown and he was now 51 years old.
It is not known for a certainty if Hanna Maria Strobridge was on the train when it first saw what is now Marfa and other towns being built, such as Feodora and Marathon but what is known is that her husband, James, had given her the right to name the different stops in the region, which she did.
The existence of Feodora, for example, convincingly identifies Dostoyevsky as the choice of author whose work was used as the source and that Marfa was almost certainly named after the heroine of “The Brothers Karamazov” as the name “Feodora” itself was taken directly from the title page of the Russian novel, indicating that it was not translated into English at the time Marfa was named.
As Dostoevsky’s final novel, “The Brothers Karamazov” is a passionate, philosophical work – set in 19th century Russia – which enters deeply into ethical debates about God, free will, and morality, a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, and reason, set against a modernizing nation. It seems, therefore, to constitute a very suitable historical parallel to the rise of this other country that we’d been travelling through for the past 50 days or so, The United States of America, if not a simile for what “Giant” had dealt with, if not Marfa’s own contemporary evolution.
My final piece of music, to accompany the choice of “Giant” and our visit to Far West Texas, is by a favourite singer-songwriter of mine by the name of Tom Russell, who resides today in El Paso, just 200 miles up the road from Marfa, across the border from the notoriously dangerous Mexican town of Cuidad Juarez, which he has written about in several of his songs.
Born in the late 1940s, although Tom Russell is most strongly identified with the Texas Country music tradition, his music also incorporates elements of folk, Tex-Mex, and the cowboy music of the American West. Many of his songs have been recorded by other artists, including Johnny Cash, The Texas Tornados, k.d. lang, Guy Clark, Joe Ely, The Sir Douglas Quintet, Nanci Griffith, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Iris Dement and Suzy Bogguss. In addition to his music, he also paints, making art in a kind of folk style – if not one that is deliberately naïve or untutored – and he has also published a book of songwriting quotes, a detective novel and a book of letters with Charles Bukowski.
Russell was born in Los Angeles and graduated from the University of California in Santa Barbara with a Master’s degree in the Sociology of Law, specializing in criminology. In 1969, he spent a year teaching in Ibadan, Nigeria, during the Biafran War and, later, he also lived in Spain and Norway and played music in a circus in Puerto Rico. He began his musical career in earnest in the early 1970s in Vancouver where he played country music with various bands in local clubs and strip bars – “We were backing topless dancers, strippers, female impersonators, dog acts and sword swallowers” – and, then, he moved to Austin, to take part in the burgeoning country music scene there.
After relocating to Texas, he formed a band with singer-pianist Patricia Hardin and, in 1977, they moved to San Francisco, performing regularly in clubs as Hardin & Russell, during which time they recorded the second of their two studio albums. Their songs were critically well received, but sales were minimal, resulting in the duo breaking up, in 1979, at which point Tom drifted out of the music industry for a while.
Putting music aside for a time, Tom moved to New York and pursued fiction writing, securing a deal with the William Morris Agency to help him place his manuscripts, but when this failed to yield results, he took to driving a taxicab to earn a living in Queens where he met guitarist, Andrew Hardin, who, after hearing his songs, convinced him that they should form a new band. Shortly after, Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead was a passenger in his cab and, when Tom sang him his song “Gallo Del Cielo”, an impressed Hunter invited Russell and Hardin first to join him on stage at New York’s Bitter End, a venue in Greenwich Village, and, then, to become his regular opening act. Hardin would remain Russell’s full-time sideman until April, 2006.
By the mid-1980s, he was performing once again, this time in tandem with guitarist Hardin and, during this period, he worked on the New York country music circuit along with other local musicians in Manhattan nightclubs which were meeting places for many artists and in which an intermingling of the bands took place. Tom’s was one of the “purer” of these bands, almost always featuring the same line-up.
Between 1984 and 1994, the Tom Russell Band released four albums with material that blended together elements of folk, country, and rock music, often featuring songs inspired by the American Southwest, blue-collar American life and events from his own life. His storytelling approach was to be found in songs such as “Haley’s Comet”, which told of the final, sad days of Bill Haley.
Tom began to record again, releasing his first album as a solo artist, “Heart On A Sleeve”, in 1984 and several more albums followed, including “Road To Baymon” and “Poor Man’s Dream”, these song collections being in a country-rock vein, although his version of this musical style was uniquely his own. His emphasis on writing about downtrodden American characters in real-life terms led him back to traditional Western music and “Cowboy Real”, released in 1991, started him off in a new artistic direction that lasted for the next several years.
During this period, Russell enjoyed success as a collaborator with other singer/songwriters, most notably with folk artist Nanci Griffith and Canadian, cowboy balladeer, Ian Tyson. “Outbound Plane,” a song co-written by Russell and Griffith, became a top ten country hit for singer Suzy Bogguss in 1993 and a Russell/Tyson collaboration, the Western-themed “Navajo Rug,” was selected as the 1987 Country Music Association single of the year.
A more unlikely partnership came when Russell joined forces with Barrence Whitfield, a flamboyant R&B vocalist – “He’s sort of a modern Little Richard”, Tom said of Whitfield – “He wanted to do something country-oriented, so he contacted me, and what we came up with was this real eclectic, good-timey blend of roots music.” The pair released their “Hillbilly Voodoo” CD in 1993, followed by “Cowboy Mambo”, in 1994.
Tom joined forces with fellow singer/songwriter, Dave Alvin, in 1994, to co-produce “Tulare Dust : A Songwriters’ Tribute To Merle Haggard”, an album featuring a number of artists interpreting Haggard’s classic country tunes, including Russell himself. “Tulare Dust” went on to top the Americana radio format charts. In 1995, he released “The Rose Of San Joaquin”, a contemporary folk/country album.
Yet another rewarding collaboration during this period was with Canadian singer/songwriter Sylvia Fricker, the former wife of Ian Tyson and, in addition to co-writing songs with Fricker, he also collaborated with her on “And Then I Wrote : The Songwriter Speaks”, an anthology of quotes by songwriters about various aspects of their craft.
Music remained Tom’s main career, and he began working on a major song cycle dealing with American history in the early 1990s but before this was completed, he released a pair of albums featuring re-recordings of earlier songs, “The Long Way Around” and “Song Of The West”. From there, he concentrated on the ambitious work that would eventually be released as “The Man From God Knows Where” in 1999.
As he worked on this project, Tom delved deeper into the stories of his immigrant ancestors from Ireland and Norway – “After reading the diaries of my great grandfathers, the soundscapes and poetic ideas faded, blending into the real voices of my ancestors,” he wrote in an essay – “I read between the lines, added a touch of rhyme. I drew them out.” Several songs dealt with Russell’s father Charlie, a salesman and colourful character, who had seen the highs and lows of the American dream during his lifetime – “I couldn’t have written about my father until he passed away in 1997,” he said – “I’d had a lot of resentment towards him, and it enabled me to go back and deal with it. It’s been therapeutic for me as a writer.”
“The Man From God Knows Where” was recorded in a seventeenth-century baronial home in Norway and, besides Tom, the cast of featured vocalists on the album included American folk singers Iris DeMent and Dave Van Ronk, Irish artist Delores Keane, and Norwegian performers Sondre Bratland and Kari Bremnes. A sampling of poet Walt Whitman’s voice taken from an 1890s-era wax cylinder recording was also included.
The album drew on the music of Norway and Ireland in addition to American folk and country music, as a song cycle tracing the journeys of Tom’s ancestors from Europe to America and the struggles that they encountered there. It was recorded near the spot where his great-grandfather was born in 1847, with his guest musicians playing the roles of his various ancestors and telling their stories. The title came from the epitaph of another Tom Russell, an Irish activist executed in 1803.
The album was released in the United States in March 1999 to a favourable response with one review giving warm praise to the singer-songwriter – “whose reach is both wide and deep, balancing the grand sweep of history with individual tragedies of his ancestors, broken on the frontier”. One critic felt that the album “should be required listening for every American history student.”
Russell toured actively after “The Man From God Knows Where” album was released, and looked forward to his next recording project. In an interview, he reaffirmed his bond with his audience – “They’re eclectic,” he said, “You can go to one of my concerts and they’ll be quite a few young people who may be discovering Hank Williams or Dave Alvin or Tom Russell, and then there’s the older audience that was into folk music in the sixties. It’s not a pop audience that’s coming because this is getting a tremendous amount of radio airplay. It’s the people who really want to seek out alternative roots music.”
In the past fifteen years, Tom’s work has been heavily influenced by his current home city of El Paso with albums such as “Borderland” featuring a strong Tex-Mex influence and songs about life on both sides of the border.
In 2005 he released “Hotwalker”, the second part of his Americana trilogy, the first part being “The Man From God Knows Where”. It was another conceptual work largely inspired by his correspondence with author Charles Bukowski. Subtitled “A Ballad for Gone America”, the album features songs and spoken word pieces, many of the latter delivered by a friend of Bukowski, the circus midget, Little Jack Horton. The sampled voice of Lenny Bruce is also heard on the album which takes the form of a musical collage lamenting the passing of the America of Tom’s childhood and of the Beat generation.
In addition to working on new music, Tom exhibits his original artwork and organizes an annual trans-Canadian music train, which combines song-writing and singing workshops with live concerts aboard a vintage long-distance train. This train trek was depicted in the 2005 concert/documentary, “Hearts on the Line”, which featured a concert with Tom and Andrew Hardin videotaped at Capilano College in Vancouver as well as behind the scenes footage of the music train experience.
In 2006, Tom released “Love and Fear”, a collection of original songs that were inspired by the highs and lows of his relationships with women and this was followed, in 2007, by “Wounded Heart of America”, a tribute album of his songs covered by other artists, including Joe Ely, Suzy Bogguss, Dave Alvin, Jerry Jeff Walker, and legendary Beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
In 2008, Tom released a 2-CD retrospective album, “Veteran’s Day : Anthology” and a DVD called “Mano a Mano” featuring Tom and Ian Tyson in which they discussed the art of songwriting. His record company released his album, “Blood and Candle Smoke”, in 2009, featuring twelve original songs which were recorded in Tucson, Arizona, with members of Calexico providing a world music beat to many of the songs.
In 2011, Tom brought out both a new album, “Mesabi”, and a DVD, “Don’t Look Down”, while 2013 saw the release of “Aztec Jazz,” a concert recording made with the Norwegian Wind Ensemble in Norway and consisting mostly of Tom’s more recent songs. He also released “Museum of Memories Vol. 2 (1973–2013)”, a collection of demos, outtakes and previously unreleased live recordings covering a forty-year span.
A fascination with American folk culture and traditional music has been the hallmark of his career, from his recording debut in the mid-1970s onwards, as he has grown into the rôle of a musical storyteller, focusing in particular on America’s working class and its struggles. As a result, he has cultivated an international following for his literate, well-crafted songs, which draw upon both country and acoustic folk styles for inspiration.
As a native of the West Coast, Russell felt drawn to America’s folk music heritage while still a child – “As a kid, I was interested in early folk songs. The first songs I heard from my brother were the cowboy ballads like ‘Sam Bass’ and ‘Jesse James,’ the ones that were really polished by being handed down over and over. I was so intrigued with how somebody could keep your attention with a narrative through seven or eight verses, whereas very rarely was I as moved by contemporary love songs or pop songs, until they became arty with Dylan or the Beatles.”
I saw Tom play in the St John the Evangelist church in Oxford, UK, in July of this year when he was accompanied by a great acoustic guitarist, Thad Beckman, who hails from Seattle, and it was a very memorable concert. On our travels through Texas, I saw some of his paintings in the Yard Dog Gallery in Austin, which confirmed my view that he shouldn’t give up the day job ! He’s not a great painter but he is a great songwriter who can take aspects of America’s history and culture and shape it into something insightful, epic and elegiac.
And, out of his extensive output, my song choice is one that captures the mysterious attraction that Far West Texas has had for many people, not least for a young man who, at a certain moment in time, found a place to lay his head –
The song is titled, “A Land Called ‘Way Out There'” and it first appeared on the album “Mesabi” –
“James Dean died ‘neath the tree of heaven
Near the old Jack Ranch Café
And Brother Donald Turnipspeed must have
Looked the wrong old way
Oh, that German car was burning
As the hawks took to the air
Forty miles from Paso Robles, in a land
Called, ‘Way out there’
In a land called, ‘way out there’ my brother
In a land called, ‘way out there’
Forty miles from Paso Robles
In a land called, ‘way out there’
Come look outside my window, mama
Something wicked this way comes
The carnival is breaking ground
With its roustabouts and bums
And the hoochie koochie dancing girls
With the sawdust in their hair
And the band played John Phillip Sousa
In a land called, ‘Way out there’
In a land called, ‘way out there’ my brothers
In a land called, ‘way out there’
Forty miles from Paso Robles
In a land called, ‘way out there’
Oh, All we’ve learned about love and violence
Comes from bibles and movie magazines
But what goes down in the trenches, baby
It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen
People tearing people up, good God
It makes me scared
Heaven take me beyond all this
To a land called, ‘Way out there’
In a land called, ‘way out there’ my brothers
In a land called, ‘way out there’
Forty miles from Paso Robles
In a land called, ‘way out there’
James Dean died ‘neath the tree of heaven
Near the old Jack Ranch Café”
Boots On The Ground 