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Volume 2 | Issue 200
High of 60°F | Low of 45°F 90% chance of scattered thunderstorms
February 11, 2019 Marfa, Texas
paper news
ARCHITECTURE
FIFT Y-FIVE NEW WAYS OF LOOKING AT MARFA by jack murphy Marfa. Say it loud and there’s music playing. Say it soft and it’s almost like praying. Three times and it aquires a Brady Bunch-esque insistence: Marfa, Marfa, Marfa!
ART
MINIMALIST MASTER OF LIGHT DAN FLAVIN by amah-rose brams
On returning to New York in 1956, Flavin enrolled at the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts under German Expressionist painter Albert Urban, before studying art history at the New School for Social Research and drawing and painting at Columbia University. Flavin’s first works were paintings inspired by the Abstract Expressionist movement.
in Marfa, as they say. When the town was featured on 60 Minutes in 2013, Morley Safer offered reductive descriptions of the town’s “artful coexistence” between “cowboys and culture,” but a clear evolution was present in this “capital of quirkiness,” obvious even in national television coverage. Though still thoroughly addressing the long shadow of Donald Judd’s life and work, the town supports new generations of working artists in addition to the more steadfast economies of Border Patrol exercises and ranch operations.
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but a clear evolution was present in this ‘capital of quirkiness’
A split between locals and artist types is an easy — and still mostly accurate — binary classification, but the truth acquires complexity as the factions mix and as artist types establish sincere roots in this remote outpost. Marfa’s tourist economy has grown considerably in recent years, but it remains strapped for adequate lodging. According to a 2015 Big Bend Sentinel article by Sasha von Oldershausen, Marfa had at least 12,493 visitors but only 104 hotel rooms in four establishments (not counting the funkier, camp-like accommodations at El Cosmico, or the many vacation rentals). Meanwhile, Alpine, to the east, recorded only 4,461 visitors but sports over 600 hotel rooms.
HAPPENINGS created in 1961, consisted of shallow boxes with fluorescent bulbs that were attached to their sides or along their edge.
A native New Yorker, he initially intended to become a priest until he left his religious studies and joined the US Air force. While serving in Korea between 1954 and 1955, Flavin began to study art as part of an extended course run by the University of Maryland.
Stories of a transcendent escape to here are heard everywhere, and are met with a supportive ear or a dismissive smirk, depending on the listener’s persuasion. The town is undeniably in the midst of a boom as its cultural star soars ever higher, thanks to the hard work of its artistcitizens. Their efforts offer serious reasons to visit, beyond the more important smorgasbord of celestial beauty or, below, the rolling high desert landscape itself.1 Take, for example, a possible schedule at this year’s CineMarfa festival: Where else could one screen an Agnès Varda film, participate in an afternoon video synthesis workshop, and, later, eat Thai food and watch a free Tortoise concert inside a former lumberyard? Only
There was a spirit of fun and experimentation at the start of the 60s, and artists were keen to push the boundaries of painting as far as they could go. By 1959, Flavin was making works out of found objects, mostly used drink cans. In 1961, the young artist was working as a mail room clerk in the Guggenheim Museum, where he met and befriended fellow artist Sol LeWitt, critic and curator Lucy Lippard, and minimalist painter Robert Ryman. It was also in this year that he began experimenting with fluorescent lighting. Flavin’s Icons series,
These light works came out of a Minimalist ideology. Flavin used factory-made colored, fluorescent light fittings, and gradually developed his work into full-scale, site-specific installations—creating a completely new artistic language in the process. All the while Frank Stella literally pushed the boundaries of painting through shaped canvases, Flavin was taking color out of the confines of the canvas and into our corporeal space. “Though the installation must look very stable, it’s easily understood with a slight confounding paradox, as the lamps operate out of the corners and with the corners,” said Flavin when talking about his work in the documentary American Art in the 1960s. As the same work could be installed differently according to its location, the inherently sitespecific nature of Flavin’s works became apparent as a key element to this new approach to art-making. Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy (the Diagonal of May 25, 1963) is considered to be Flavin’s earliest “mature” work. STORY CONTINUES PAGE 2
TARANTULAS, TOPO, AND THE TRANS-PECOS FESTIVAL OF MUSIC + LOVE A RELUCTANT, FIRST-TIME CAMPER TAKES ON A MARFA MUSIC FEST by dana duterroil
We had two cans of Blue Bottle Cold Brew, 15 ounces of Chex Mix, two cartons of granola bars, one pound of pub-seasoned snack blend with not near enough of those crunchy sesame sticks, a rapidly depleting batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies, a bag of banana toffee crunch, and two gallons of water to wash down this diabetic coma-inducing, artery-clogging, off-thecharts sodium mountain of snacks as we headed on the 599-mile drive to Marfa.
sionals was unknown to me—no Brownie vest or Girl Scout sash ever hung in my closet—the town of Marfa was familiar. My husband and I had visitI was being pushed to ed in 2009, making the the limits of my very low tolerance for camping, on 8-hour drive from Houston for scenic views of rolling the grounds of El Costumbleweeds, towering mico’s 2017 Trans-Pecos yuccas, and Donald Judd’s Festival of Music + Love. 100 Untitled Works in Mill While camping without Aluminum displayed in a the assistance of profes- space once occupied by
German prisoners of war during World War II. You might know Marfa as the dusty backdrop for Hollywood’s oil-fueled films, Giant and There Will Be Blood. It’s a landscape of wide open spaces dotted by United States Border Control interior checkpoints; an uneasy mix of law and disorder. STORY CONTINUES PAGE 2
PEOPLE GO INSIDE HOTELIER LIZ LAMBERT’S PRIVATE MARFA RETREAT by lauren smith ford
It’s fitting that the hideaway of one of Texas’s greatest creative minds is found in a one-story, olive-colored stucco home on a dirt road about twelve miles outside of Marfa. After all, “Queen of Cool” Liz Lambert has
built her hospitality empire (including the San José and Saint Cecilia hotels in Austin, the Hotel Havana in San Antonio, and Marfa’s El Cosmico) on an aesthetic that’s grounded in minimalism and layered with interesting, authentic details. The structure, built in the sixties, sits on Lambert’s family ranch and once served as a bunkhouse
for the foreman—Lambert not only calls the retreat the Bunkhouse, but her hospitality company is called Bunkhouse Group. It was unoccupied when Lambert took it over and transformed it into a stylish retreat, filled with unique finds (a discarded road sign, old oil barrels) and marked by her signature design style. STORY CONTINUES PAGE 2