Titus O.

October ushered in yet another Open House in Marfa, co-hosted by the Judd and Chinati foundations, the two primary organizations devoted to maintaining artist Donald Judd’s work and vision. Despite annually increasing crowds that now more than double the town’s population, I found it overall the most satisfying and well coordinated of the few I’ve attended.

 

 

“Antidote”: this is the word that arose recently viewing the excellent, even revelatory, “Declaring Space” exhibit at the Ft. Worth Modern. It also summed up the weekend, finding myself once again immersed in the gesamkunstwerk that Judd left as his legacy. His significance, never disputed, is becoming apparent as years pass in surprising and unexpected ways, his methods perhaps delineating approaches through, past, or around the current market/fashion driven atmosphere of the millennial art world.

 

At times it can seem as if the prophet Warhol has eclipsed the sun itself, his shadow looming over all, popular and fine art culture alike. Nowhere does this seem more true than in the DFW metroplex, where the welcome boom in gallery activity has often appeared especially commerical, safe, neat, and maddeningly tasteful. At times one almost forgets there was another way, driven by an entirely different set of impulses. Perhaps this latter approach is on the ascendant, in no small part due to events in Marfa. An anticipated, inevitable art market crash wouldn’t hurt matters either.

 

There were two illuminating keynote discussions on Saturday afternoon. The first, “Across Art and Architecture,” was a conversation between African-born British architect David Adjaye ; American artist Andrea Zittel ; and curator Trevor Smith . Surprisingly for a man generally thought so adamently Apollonian, the shared point of interest among them boiled down to Judd’s remarkablly passionate intimacy: with the nuances of perception, with the physical craft of material objects, and his engaged, living relationship with terrestrial existence at all levels. One needed to look no further than the array of extraordinary examples close at hand. Tours of his myriad private studios, residences, and of course the permanently installed works continually unveil layers of insight and subtlety, even (or especially) after repeated visits.

 

There is a living artist featured each year, with a carefully curated installation of artwork to last until the next summer, and an appearance during the Open House. Recently they’ve included Judd contemporaries like John Chamberlain and Robert Irwin. This year, I was enormously pleased with the opportunity to become more familiar with sculptor David Rabinowitch and his work. As a massive thunderstorm broke outside, his discussion with critic Kenneth Baker was a clash of styles – Baker’s questions were more often simply abstruse assertions of his own understanding, often met with pugnacious Rabinowitch replies like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” “That’s totally irrelevant;” “I don’t find that interesting;” or simply “You’re completely wrong.” However, rather than just ending up a confrontation of egos, when Baker hit the nail (as he did on occasion,) the artist readily concurred. The highlight came near the end, when an audience member finally asked what should have been the first question – could Rabinowitch please just discuss what he is doing in the work, rather than what Baker presumed was happening? The following explanation of the early works on view at the Chinati Foundation was the most engaging part of the talk.

 

Called “Fluid Sheet Constructions,” these sculptures, made of whole sheets of galvanized sheet metal folded and rolled and bolted together into almost infinite variety, were first conceived in the early 1960′s when Rabinowitch was in his early twenties, and many have never been fully realized until now. Not really objects or ideas, resisting any reference to figure or gesture, they demonstrate a virtuosic comprehension of the elements of sculpture from a pivotal moment in the past, throw into relief aspects of his later work, and finally appear now completely fresh and timelessly engaged. The most important thing about this art is that it is about real-time, phenomenological perception, available independent of historical context or conceptual understanding – though a cursory comprehension of these factors can help open the work up.

 

If the 80′s and 90′s saw much of Minimalism’s impact diminished by the prevalent attitudes and approaches of the Post-Modern moment, we have clearly moved into another era. The seriousness, rigor, and criticality of Donald Judd and his contemporaries seem especially ripe for reappraisal, signaling to us almost like a lighthouse beacon, cast about in this ocean of overpriced, fashionably decadent art fueled more by gimmick than grace, and at the whim of market speculators who wouldn’t know a Michael Heizer from a hole in the ground.

 

Speaking of grace, anticipating the appearance of musical guests Sonic Youth Saturday night, I had the song “Hey Joni” going through my head for two days prior. For the uninitiated, that song kicks off the second record of their classic 1988 double album Daydream Nation, considered by some (myself included) to be the finest rock record of all time. In a weekend full of synchronicities, I pulled up right in front of the packed venue and stepped out of my rental Corolla at the very moment they lit into that very tune. They proceeded to play all of the subsequent ones in order. Bliss ensued. A spoken interlude from the middle of “Hey Joni” (updated by Lee Ranaldo for the occasion) jubilantly and poetically summed up certain of my feelings walking away from the weekend, reminded by the works of these great makers of things to just be here now, in the spacious perceptual present:

 

forget the future
these times are such a mess
tune out the past, and just say yes

it’s 1963
it’s 1964
it’s 1957
it’s 2006

put it all behind you
now it’s all behind you