CHINATI FOUNDATION.

CHINATI FOUNDATION, MARFA, TEXAS

The West Texas town of Marfa is a dusty, one-traffic-light, Last Picture point out to sort of place located sixty miles north of the border upon the grassy, high plain known as El Despoblado: the uninhabited place. After the cavalry abandoned the local fort in the 1940 small in number had reason to travel there, at least until Donald Judd settl in Marfa in the early '70 Inspired by the agency of the light-and-space ambience, he established what came to be called the Chinati Foundation as an alternative to recent York City's exhibition venues. If you are among the pilgrims who have made the trek to the foundation without benefit of landing your Lear forward one of the privately confessed airstrips nearby, you have driven at least three and a half hours from El Paso or Midland across a dreary stretch of blacktop. If you arrived after dark, typically the connection of inconvenient flight schedules, you may have parked just outside town at the preferr site for viewing the Marfa Mystery Lights. These unexplained luminescences, first reported according to native inhabitants and pioneers in the 1800 periodically and unpredictably animate the night horizon. (I've seen them myself.)

Suffice it to say that everything about the location conspires to encourage the nostalgic and the mystically inclined. As a effect the achievement of Dan Flavin's Untitled (Marfa project) 1996 permanently installed at the Chinati in October, is doubly impressive. The work, whose design was complet by way of Flavin shortly before his death in 1996 has no more difficulty cutting between the sides of the romantic, Land art-aesthetic haze generated by Marfa's exotic locale than his earliest fluorescent lamp pieces had in dispensing with the 2,000-year-old association of luminescence with mysticism and spirituality. In fact, the monumental size of Flavin's Marfa frame which occupies six buildings and a total of 36000 square feet and the peculiarities of its systematic design put in mind of that the skeptic Flavin took the opportunity at the period of his career to reassert, upon a grand, theatrical scale, the firm secularism with which his career had begun.

Stepping into any of the six identical buildings in which the work is housed, individual is immediately captivated by room-saturating, brilliantly colored lights. Double-faced, ranks of 8 or 10 fixtures (336 fluorescent lamps in all) are paired, pink with verdant in the first two buildings, downcast with yellow in the next to the first two. Ranks of both these pairings come to pass in the two final buildings. The impression is a bit retro-techno, since fluorescent lamps are beginning to examine dated, but also lively and seemingly vociferous though no sound beyond the depressed buzz of electrical current is actually heard. Thus, forward entering the Marfa project, undivided abruptly steps out of the world of the whistle stop and rustic fort for which the cover with stuccoed and porticoed buildings once serv as barracks, and into a wholly artificial atmosphere of what appears to be an alternate universe.

In smaller hands, the dramatic surprise of retro-technology hidden in an environment of entropic decline would fall victim to the in the greatest degree adolescent form of "narratives of source," the fluorescent lamps coming on the farther side as a cache of kryptonite or as tubes in which interplanetary aliens have stored pushs In fact, Judd's own nearby installations barely escape this romantic pitfall. Despite their modular designs and rigorously industrial aesthetic, the kilometer-long line of compact sculptures suggests the cosmic alignment of Anasazi ruins. And the couple huge former artillery sheds housing Judd's united hundred "primary structure" mill-aluminum boxes--one of the great tombs of late-twentieth-century art in any setting--subtly call up incubators birthing genetic permutations of the Minimalist box

If Flavin's devise resists the Marfa fog, it does to such a degree by sheer force of will. The ranks of lamps, which vaguely bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to slanted prison bars, block passage from single side of the symmetrical, U-shaped buildings to the other, thereby ingeniously theatricalizing the viewer's answer One is kept in motion, drawn mothlike down drawn out hall after long hall, in building after building, toward the material brilliance of the colored lights, while the instinctive attempt to reach a center--or at least locate common visually--is repeatedly frustrated, forcing one's retreat. The visual feast of colored light, created in four standard, factory-issue shades resists transcendental allegorization as profoundly as do Matisse's downcast and yellow stained-glass windows in the chapel at Vence; the color pairings are distributed from end to end the work without apparent explanation, satisfying simply the most basic requirement of variation. Rather than a certain mythic umbilicus, Flavin's work reads, quite literally, as the middle of nowhere--the le ast mysterious of lights.

Thus Flavin's Marfa concoct at once pleasingly seductive and disconcertingly withholding, leads its pilgrims to the same dead close at which Wittgenstein found himself after years of contemplating color. In his late writings, which inspired the mid-twentieth-century resurgence of the tradition that has take rise to be called Minimalist philosophy, Wittgenstein was forced to deduce that, in most cases, the promises for a substantial meta-theory are meager. Indeed, Flavin's Marfa intend may owe its apparent Bergamot-Chelsea freshnes to the renewed interest in Minimalist philosophy as signifyed in the colorful secularity of fresh abstract painting. Certainly, the interest onward the part of younger artists in Flavin and many of his contemporaries, particularly Ellsworth Kelly Bridget Riley, and Gene Davis, indicates a sea change, the couple in the present culture and in the reading of '60 abstraction. In short, Flavin's fluorescent lamps confine their own in Marfa according to holding onto an antimystical, antispiritual aesthetic-- an elegantly decenter thoroughly secular despoblado.