Lies and Weddings(103)
Eden shook her head sadly. “Think of all the men, women, and children risking their lives right this second trying to cross this desert just to get the chance at a better life here. And if they survive they still have to deal with this welcome party from the border patrol. It really puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?”
“We are so bloody lucky,” Rufus said.
“You know, when I think of what I saw in LA, it just makes my blood boil. All the giant houses sitting empty, the pointless private clubs and restaurants, the way Luis Felipe lived—one man-child occupying a soulless mini-city on a mountaintop with fifty cars in the garage—it was an orgy of excess. But all these houses are run by armies of immigrants. You see them up and down all those streets—they’re the gardeners, the housekeepers, the construction workers, they’re doing all the work nobody else wants to do. So why make it so hard for them to come here and do it? It’s such a tragic farce.”
They got back into the car and kept driving along the highway for another thirty minutes until they arrived in Marfa. As they drove through town, Eden looked out her window and was surprised to see art galleries dotting the main drag, intriguing little shops next to old gas stations, and Airstream trailers transformed into food trucks. Young hipsters wandered around the dusty streets looking like they had just stepped off planes from Stockholm, Tokyo, and Reykjavík. “I feel like we’ve somehow been transported to Camden,” Eden commented.
Rufus laughed. “I’ve been wanting to come here for years. The artist Donald Judd came out here in the 1970s. Not much was happening, so he was able to buy up abandoned office buildings, the old supermarket, big chunks of land for cheap. He used all the spaces to make and display his art, and he invited his friends to create art installations here as well, to create artworks that they could make only out here with all this space. Artists like John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Yun Hyong-keun. So now this remote little town six hours from the nearest city has become a mecca for artists and art aficionados. Marvelous, isn’t it?”
They crossed railroad tracks and went down a dirt road leading to an old military base that Donald Judd had transformed into his perfect vision of a museum—the Chinati Foundation. After buying tickets from the young Swedish intern who couldn’t seem to figure out how to use the Square app, Rufus excitedly made a beeline for a pair of gigantic artillery sheds. They entered the first shed and found themselves coming face-to-face with Donald Judd’s minimalist masterpiece 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum.
Across two vast hangarlike buildings with poured-concrete floors and glass walls along each side, Judd had sculpted one hundred large rectangular aluminum boxes and spaced them in three equidistant rows. Rufus stood in the middle of the monastic space, utterly transfixed by the majesty of the monumental art installation. The rows of boxes shimmered in the sunlight, casting geometries of shadows across the space as the light shifted. He didn’t say a word, but Eden could tell how moved he was. This was his Fallingwater, his Notre Dame, his Santiago de Compostela. Eden left him and wandered through the space, realizing as she studied the boxes more closely that no two were alike. Even though they were of the exact same dimensions, each box was configured differently—some missing a side, some missing a top, some bisected like Mondrianesque puzzles. Each box seemed to emanate a mysterious power, and Eden found herself being quietly mesmerized by the installation and the Zenlike tranquility of the space.
Eden glanced back at Rufus leaning against the window perfectly still, staring intently at the artwork as the afternoon sun cast a halo around him, and she almost gasped in astonishment. He looked just like a fierce archangel that had descended from the heavens. Only he wasn’t an angel—he was very much a human made of flesh and blood. He was so different from any other man she knew—so unafraid of his emotions, so gentle and brimming with heart. How was it that a man born into such extreme privilege could have managed to be filled with so much humility, to be so utterly lacking in pretension and ego and any interest in material trappings? In a flash, she realized how incredibly attractive he had become to her, how deeply she loved him, like never before. She found herself blushing at the intensity of her own thoughts and forced herself to look away.
After a while, they left the room of boxes to explore other artworks around the property. They discovered barracks filled with ethereal Dan Flavin light installations, a haunting re-creation of an abandoned Soviet classroom by Ilya Kabakov, and monumental sculptures by Claes Oldenburg and Richard Long. Rufus walked around each art installation in sheer delight, taking picture after picture. At the far end of the base, they came upon a wooden bench in the shaded porch of an old fort. They sat down on the bench side by side, staring out at the town glimmering in the distance, not saying anything for a long while.
“I’m so flooded with ideas, I feel like my head’s about to explode,” Rufus said.
“I bet. I can’t wait to see what comes out of all this,” Eden said encouragingly.
“I just want to go back to my studio and make work.”
“What was your favorite installation? The one hundred aluminum boxes?”
“I loved it, but you know, it’s less about the individual art pieces and more the sum of what Judd’s created here that’s most impressive to me. He came here and saw Marfa as this blank slate that he could reinvent, building by building, and mold an entire town to his vision. I want to do something like this in Greshamsbury.”