Joan reaches her left arm out, maybe for support
in the swoon of being called, but instead
of grasping branches or leaves, her hand,
in what is for me the crucial passage, partially
dissolves. It’s carefully positioned
on the diagonal sight line of one of three
hovering, translucent angels he was attacked
for failing to reconcile with the future saint’s
realism, a “failure” the hand presents
as a breakdown of space, background
beginning to swallow her fingers, reminding me
of the photograph people fade from, the one
“Marty” uses to measure the time remaining
for the future in which we watched the movie,
only here it’s the future’s presence, not
absence that eats away at her hand: you can’t
rise from the loom so quickly that you
overturn the stool and rush toward the plane
of the picture without startling the painter, hear
voices the medium is powerless to depict
without that registering somewhere on the body.
But from our perspective, it’s precisely
where the hand ceases to signify a hand
and is paint, no longer appears to be warm
or capable, that it reaches the material
present, becomes realer than sculpture because
tentative: she is surfacing too quickly.
Now I believe I might have surfaced too quickly. I had gone more than two weeks without really speaking to anyone, a period of silence with no precedent in my life. It might also have been the longest I’d ever gone without speaking to Alex, who was, as she put it in an e-mail, respecting my distance. Finally I shaved, showered, did laundry (there were machines in the garage), and, feeling at least semihuman and diurnal, I went to look around at the Marfa Book Company, a well-regarded bookstore downtown. On the way I happened upon a coffee shop I’d never seen before. I asked for their largest iced coffee, and it was delicious; there were a few young people in the shop typing on their laptops. A basic, acute physical desire for one of the women passed through me, and was gone, as if the desire were en route to someone else.
I was sipping my coffee in the surprisingly good poetry section, full of small-press books, when a man approached me, casually said my name:
“I heard you were here — Diane and I have been waiting to run into you.” Who was Diane? He was vaguely familiar to me. Shaved head, those transparent glasses frames, in his midforties — I had seen him at art openings in New York. He might have been a friend of Alena’s. I couldn’t remember if I knew him too well to ask him to remind me of his name, and then it was too late.
“What are you doing here?”
“Chinati. And Diane has an old friend here.” He said the name of the friend as if she were famous. “We’re going to get a private look at the Judd boxes in a couple of hours and then dinner and drinks, if you’re interested.”
“I’m not a big Judd fan.”
He laughed at this. Nobody saying that in Marfa could be serious.
“I’m really exhausted,” I lied, the iced coffee having burnt off all fatigue. “I haven’t slept and think I’ll be dead tonight.”
“It’s not like you have to work in the morning,” he joked.
After all the silence, I was socially disoriented, more so for having first encountered somebody from New York out of context. Trying to figure out how to politely persist in refusing his invitation seemed to require a series of operations I could no longer recall how to perform; it was like trying to solve one of those word problems on a high school math test. “I guess I can go,” I said, not up to the challenge.
I gave him my address and they picked me up about an hour before sunset. I recognized Diane immediately (she had been introduced to me as Di), a painter who also ran a gallery whose shows I had reviewed, probably in her mid-fifties, but the man’s name still wouldn’t come to me; I hoped Diane would use it.
The Chinati Foundation was on a few hundred acres of land where there had once been a military fort. A young woman and a younger man met us in front of the office — it was Sunday, and the foundation was closed to the public. Diane introduced me to the woman, Monika, who she explained was a sculptor from Berlin, here for a few months as the Chinati artist in residence. She was tall and about as heavy as I, but stronger-looking, probably twenty-five; she had close-cropped blond hair, and I could see tattooed flames or maybe flower petals peeking above the neck of her denim jacket. The man, who looked barely twenty, was a Chinati intern in skinny jeans, his black hair arrested by some product in stylized disarray; he had the keys to the sheds where Judd’s aluminum boxes were housed.
I had never had a strong response to Judd’s work, not that I was any kind of expert. I believed in the things he wanted to get rid of — the internal compositional relations of a painting, nuances of form. His interest in modularity and industrial fabrication and his desire to overcome the distinction between art and life, an insistence on literal objects in real space — I felt I could get all those things by walking through a Costco or a Home Depot or IKEA; I’d never cared more for Judd’s “specific objects” than any of the other objects I encountered in the world, objects that were merely real. The work of his I’d seen — always in museums or small gallery installations — had left me cold, and so many of his followers celebrated his cool that I’d never questioned my initial response.
But things were different when I was an alien with a residency in the high desert entering a refashioned artillery shed that had once held German prisoners of war. German-language messages were still painted on the brick: DEN KOPF BENUTZEN IST BESSER ALS IHN VERLIEREN, read one. I asked Monika to translate: “Better to use your head than lose it,” she said. The sheds had been ruins when Judd took them over. He replaced what had been garage doors with walls of continuous squared and quartered windows, and he placed a galvanized-iron vaulted roof on top of the original flat roof, doubling the building’s height. The space was so flooded with light, and the milled aluminum so reflective — you could see the colors of the grass and sky outside the shed — that it took me a minute to see what I was seeing: three long rows of evenly spaced silver, shimmering boxes, positioned carefully in relation to the rhythm of the windows. Although all the boxes have the same exterior dimensions (41" × 51" × 72"), each interior is unique; some are internally divided in a variety of ways, some sides or tops are left open, etc., which means that, as you walk along the boxes, you might see dark volumes, or a band of dark between light-filled volumes, or, depending on your angle, no volume at all; one box is a mirror, another an abyss; all surface one moment, all depth the next. Although the material facts of the work were easy to enumerate — the intern was reciting them a little didactically, his voice echoing throughout the shed — they were obliterated by the effect. The work was set in time, changing quickly because the light was changing, the dry grasses going gold in it, and soon the sky was beginning to turn orange, tingeing the aluminum. All those windows opening onto open land, the reflective surfaces, the differently articulated interiors, some of which seemed to contain a blurry image of the landscape within them — all combined to collapse my sense of inside and outside, a power the work had never had for me in the white-cube galleries of New York. At one point I detected a moving blur on the surface of a box and I turned to the windows to see two pronghorn antelope rushing across the desert plain.
I had read or half listened to people praise these boxes before, but nobody had ever mentioned the German stenciled on the wall, or talked about how their being set in a refurbished artillery shed influenced his or her experience of the work. For me, surfacing from my silence and my Whitman, a privileged resident in the region of a militarized border, the works felt first and foremost like a memoriaclass="underline" a line of boxes in a military structure that once had housed prisoners from Rommel’s Afrika Korps recalled a line of coffins (I thought of Whitman visiting makeshift hospitals); the changing rhythm of the boxes’ interiors felt like a gesture toward a tragedy that was literally uncontainable, or a tragedy that, since some of the “coffins” internally reflected the landscape outside the shed, had itself come to contain the world. And yet memorial wasn’t really the right word: they didn’t seem intended to focus my memory, they didn’t feel addressed to me or any other individual. It was more like visiting Stonehenge, something I’ve never done, and encountering a structure that was clearly built by humans but inscrutable in human terms, as if the installation were waiting to be visited by an alien or god. The work was located in the immediate, physical present, registering fluctuations of presence and light, and located in the surpassing disasters of modern times, Den Kopf benutzen ist besser als ihn verlieren, but it was also tuned to an inhuman, geological duration, lava flows and sills, aluminum expanding as the planet warms. As the boxes crimsoned and darkened with the sunset, I felt all those orders of temporality — the biological, the historical, the geological — combine and interfere and then dissolve. I thought of the “impossible mirror” of Bronk’s poem.