Marfa: Cowboys Out, Artists In

HIGHLAND STREET - This may be THE most recognizable streetscape in Texas. It is Highland Street in Marfa, which is the main downtown street. The old but classy and atmospheric Paisano Hotel is in the left foreground, the old Palace Theatre is on the right, the striking Presidio County Courthouse is at the head of the street and, as usual, there  is no traffic. Being in Marfa is nearly as quiet as being out in the country. Quiet it is, but filled with wonders. 

     Marfa (pop. 1,981) is an interesting town. Located amidst the good ranch country on the high and wide Marfa Plateau, it got its start in 1883 when the newly built railroad between El Paso and San Antonio made the place a water stop for its steam engines.

     Within a year it became the county seat of giant Presidio County when a man who owned 640 acres around the water stop took a wagon up to Fort Davis, the real county seat, and in the middle of the night loaded up all the county records, brought them back to Marfa and declared it the new county seat. With both a railroad stop and county seat sitting on his 600 acres, he figured to make a fortune selling building lots. Of course, the people in Fort Davis were sore about this. Years of wrangling, lawyering, politicking and hard feelings ensued. Finally, in 1887 the peace pipe was begrudgingly lit when 2,264 square miles were lopped off the north end of Presidio County to become Jeff Davis County, with Fort Davis as its seat.

PRESIDIO COUNTY COURTHOUSE - In 1886 when this huge, remarkable Second Empire style courthouse was built, the people of Presidio County must have believed there county was really going places. Not!  Today Presidio has a population of 7,818,  82 per cent of whom live either in Marfa or the town of Presidio down south. That leaves 1,431 persons to fill the remainder of 3,855 square mile county - which is a very roomy 2.7 square miles per person.  The courthouse is a must see. The light pink exterior is made of local stone and brink and features handsome detailing such as the tall windows with elegant lintels, mansard roofs and an oversized cupola. The late 19th century interior is even more awesome with high ceilings, transomed doors, exquisite old-fashioned lighting fixtures and beautiful dark wood bannisters and wainscoting, all in fabulous condition. And you can climb five flights of stairs to the cupola, where can easily view the entire town, since it does not extend more than a mile in any direction, and gaze off across the plateau at several distant mountain ranges. For my money (its free), its the best thing in town.

THE 1930 PAISANO HOTEL - The door in

the background is the Paisano's main

entrance to the hotel lobby. It is reached
from the street by passing through this

charming courtyard, where guests as well

as local folks take their ease sipping cock-

tails around the fountain. Also, some of the

upstairs rooms have large roofed and

porch-like balconies, partially visible

to the left and right above the main

entrance. James Dean stayed here during

 the filming of "Giant." When the filming

wrapped, he left here and, just days later,

died in a car crash.   

     Marfa grew slowly as a railroad and ranch supply town until 1911 when depredations by Pancho Villa as well as Mexican bandits caused the the U.S. Government to put an Army post there for cavalry and air reconnaissance. The post eventually became Fort D.A. Russell, growing during World War I, serving as a base for Army patrols countering smuggling and illegal immigration between the wars, becoming home to the 77th Field Artillery during the 30s and, during World War II, it trained thousands of Army Air Corps pilots, served as home to a WAC unit, a chemical warfare mortar battalion and as a prisoner of war camp for captured Germans. During these years, much of Marfa's economy and social scene revolved around the fort. It was a great blow to the town when the fort was closed in 1946 during the demobilization.

     The town shrank and became a dusty, down at the heels West Texas nowheresville. Unbeknownest to everyone, however, the abandoned fort withering at the southwest edge of town was like one of those seeds that can remain dormant for decades, waiting for enough water in which to sprout. Enter Donald Judd, artist - and waterer extraordinaire.

     I had never heard of minimalist artist Donald Judd until I came to Marfa, nor did I have much idea what minimalist art is. Still don't. However, judging by the impact on Marfa, both of them are big deals in the art world.

     Judd came to Marfa from New York City. I'm not familiar with his work, but from what I've seen it seems to be mostly sculpture constructed of metal or concrete, and furniture. In NYC he had a building which he was redoing to permanently display his art, which tends to take up a lot of room. However, his ambitions were cramped there, and the cost of New York real estate made it impossible to expand.

     To get a break from the busy NYC art scene, he came to quiet, dusty and poor Marfa in 1971 and rented a house. There he saw an opportunity to obtain lots of property cheaply, by NYC standards, and let his art work stretch out. Soon he was buying numerous buildings around town, all of which he restored or refitted very nicely, as well as a 60,000 acre ranch called Ayala de Chinati (sheh NAH tee). With the help of a foundation, he also acquired 340 acres of Fort D.A. Russell in 1979, including its abandoned buildings. From then until he died in 1994, he worked to install his art work indoors and out around Marfa.

     It's weird stuff. His first Marfa installation was a straight row of 15 three-dimensial rectangles set up on flat range land. Think 15 giant, cinder blocks spaced apart in a straight line, all set up square with each other but facing in different directions, stretching about the length of a football field.  He has another artwork that consists of 100 milled aluminum cubes, each with a different interior, lined up in two, huge former artillery sheds.

     Judd was instrumental in starting the Chinati Foundation, which is ensconced in 10 of the old fort's large building. Chinati is dedicated to displaying and preserving permanent works of art by Judd and several other contemporary minimalists. There is also something called the Judd Foundation, which serves to preserve Judd's permanent pieces in NYC and in Marfa, excepting those in the care of the Chinati Foundation. These include the Marfa buildings that Judd bought and fixed up, greatly improving the looks of the town.

NEW PAINT, NEW USES - Marfa is full of old and often dilapidated stores, car dealerships, warehouses, gas stations and etc. that have been bought up by Donald Judd, or other artists, or their foundations or aficionados, spiffed up to pretty much  their former appearances on the outside and turned to new uses on the inside. The bank building (top) on Highland Street and the antique service station (bottom) on San Antonio Street are good examples. While the obvious care with which these refrurbishments are made has given the town the town a clean, well maintained look, they also give it a strange phony feel, because the buildings are not banks and not gas stations alive with people and vehicles coming and going in the course of usual small town commerce.  Instead they museums, galleries, studios and workshops that are only intermittently open according to no known schedule. Most of them, most of the time, are closed, giving Marfa a partial ghost town atmosphere.

     Judd's efforts and to larger those of the Chinati Foundation have turned Marfa into a minimalist's Bali Ha'i, a mysterious, exotic, hard to get to paradise that artists and art aficionados around the world yearn to see (I say they all need to get a job). The Chinati Foundation held annual open houses that drew an international crowd of thousands, but in 2008 they cut back the program and shrank the crowd.

SAUCY NAME - All the hoity-toity New York artists work

through fancy foundations, so this mom & pop pizza

named itself the Pizza Foundation, which is barely visible 

on the sign at the upper left of the building. And, just like

the big-time foundations, they have refurbished - sort of -

an old, down and out business, this one a Gulf gas

station. The kitchen is on the right side, where the office

and parts room used to be. The dining room, with mix and

match old furniture and little more than the motor oil

scrubbed off the walls, is in the service bays. However,

the pizza is excellent, with shells made in-house daily and

sauce they make themselves from locally grown tomatoes.

Yummy! But as is the case in Marfa as well as the whole

Big Bend area, this business marches to its own drummer.

They are open Wednesday thru Sunday, most of the time,

and from noon to 9pm unless they run of of pizza shells, as

they often do, in which case they close no matter what time

it is.

     Nonetheless, the mystique of Marfa is spreading. There are now numerous independent galleries and workshops scattered around town, much of it minimalist art, but not all. In addition, other foundation and groups are showing up in town dedicated to writing, theatre and art films. And the price of real estate is shooting up as artists, art followers or people who just like what a pretty little town Marfa has become buy and fix up residential property, furthering improving the look of the town.

     I looked in a couple of the downtown galleries. One, formerly a large store of some kind, held two enormous Andy Warhol paintings as big as a living room wall. Besides the two of them and a lady behind a desk staffing the place, there was nothing else in all that space. A little further down the street is what appears to have been a automobile dealership. The building is wonderfully spruced up and landscaped. The entire place, from former new car showroom to service department, displays about eight old cars that have been through a crusher. Millions are being spent on such weirdness.


      Of course, despite the money flowing into town, not all sweetness and light. While riding my bike around town taking the pictures in this post, I met a college age woman who comes from a ranch family that has been in Marfa since its earliest days. While she said she likes the changes so far, she doesn't want Marfa to get bigger and busier. However, some of the older generations are becoming downright disgruntled. To them Marfa now seems awash with New Yorkers doing too many weird things and changing the nature of the town too fast. The poor but comfortable old shoe of a ranch town they have lived in all their lives is fast becoming a memory, replaced by an artist community. At first they liked the money that poured in, but eventually they came to feel they were being bought out even though they never offered to sell. She said her rancher grandfather comes to town once a week and goes about scowling at all the new people he doesn't know at the Post Office and the grocery store, and then he high tails it out of town in his truck, not to return until he really has to. She said her parents sold their home in Marfa to a couple of guys from NYC, later to learn they were, indeed, a couple. She said her father was so incensed that homosexuals were cavorting in his former master bedroom that he left town and moved to Fort Davis, where, she says, he is happy. He is comforted there, I suppose, by an entire population that has nursed negative feelings about Marfa ever since it stole the county seat.

FIX 'ER UPPER - Never judge a book by it cover nor a house

by it curb appeal. Stepping around back of the house above

reveals a lot more work is needed, shown below, than can

be seen from the front. In Marfa there is a whole neighbor-

hood of old, falling down adobes like these, and people from

New York pay good money for them. They aren't satisfied to

build a new adobe structure. They must have authentic "old

adobe" like this, which they then fix up being careful to

preserve the original parts. They will even save rubble, such

as is behind this building, mix it with water and straw and

and make it into bricks again in order to increase the

portion of the house which can be called original adobe.  

     Marfa is also famous for an unexplained

phenomenon called the Marfa Lights. In an area of the plateau  a few miles east or town near Paisano Pass, mysterious lights from an unknown source can be seen out on the range just after dark. They were first seen, or at least became known to Americans, by a cowboy in 1883. Martians having not yet been invented, he at first thought they were Apache camp fires. Trouble is, they moved, split apart and changed colors. There have been many theories and efforts to find out what the lights are, including one full-blown team of scientists from Japan who stayed a month. But the answer is yet to be found. In the meanwhile, the lights draw more tourists to Marfa that the Chinati Foundation. Cousin Tom Shortt actually went out onto the range trying get closer to them. He didn't get closer, but he got far enough out that some lights were behind him. He said they look like 40 watt bulbs burning in the distance.

     Another big event in Marfa's history occurred in 1955 when Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean plus a major cinema making crew came to town to film "Giant." The major stars and movie bosses stayed at the Paisano Hotel while everyone else found quarters wherever they could be found far and wide. Director George Stevens kept an open set, i.e., he allowed the local people to come out to the set and watch the filming and rub shoulders with the cast and crew, and he used some of them as extras. It was a lot of excitement for remote and sleepy little Marfa, and people there still talk about it, though few of the people who there to actually see it are still alive. The Paisano has suites named after the stars, and it keeps a small museum/gift shop dedicated to the movie. The first part of the movie was filmed in Albemarle County, Virginia, where Rock Hudson came to buy a prize bull from from a high class breeding farm. He fell in love with the farmer's cultured daughter, Elizabeth Taylor, and takes her back to his gigantic, hot, dry, dusty and lonely Texas ranch, filmed in and around Marfa. And so begins the story of the marriage and life of a refined Easterner and a no nonsense Westerner in a rough country.

     Other noted movies, such a "No Country For Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood" have been filmed around Marfa. The awesomely expansive and nearly empty Marfa Plateau is the place to be if your film calls big, out west scenery of ranch or desert lands.

WHAT WAS THAT?! - I guarantee you when anyone is driving for the first time across 75 mph, flat and straight as an arrow U.S. 90  and goes whizzing by the Marfa Prada, they stop, turn around and come back for a longer look. I did. This full-sized storefront, which the artist called a "sculpture," was constructed in 2005 at a cost of $80,000. It contains actual Prada shoes and handbags selected by Miuccia Prada herself, and the interior lights up at night. It is located 37 miles west of Marfa and stands, all by itself, in the middle of miles and miles of cattle grazing land with nothing else in sight except barb wire fencing and telephone poles along the road. Of course, it is not a real Prada store, but a piece of artwork commenting, I suppose,  on  human vanity and prodigal consumerism. However, like so much of what I've seen in the new Marfa, I think it more of a statement  - an inditement really - of prodigal artwork.