Tumbleweeds in Airport Towns

Marfa, Donald Judd, Borders

It was approaching closing time when the laid-back West Texas patio bar, under a luminous sky, burst into a flurry of activity – as if someone had said "action" from behind the bushes. It started with a heavyset woman approaching the longhorns dangling from the pergola that held the bar. She flung her arms around each horn and made a futile attempt at a pull-up while her friends filmed and backed up onto our table. This seemed to invigorate the male patrons to join in. One of the bartenders came next and effortlessly did some 10 pull-ups, then smiled at the women and gestured, "Should I do it again" – at which point I glimpsed into his eyes and saw nothing behind it other than pure animal instinct. It didn't help that he had big teeth that shone through the darkness of the desert. The speakers started playing Down with the Sickness by Disturbed. We had stayed too long. The song is like "closing time" for meth heads. "It's time to go", I said to Camille, and went to get our friends Hiatt and Amelia.

This was our third night in Marfa, Texas – The "art town" near the Texas-Mexico border that was a meme in the 2010s thanks to the Prada store in the desert that I've to this day only seen on Hinge profiles. It's changed. For one the Prada Store was abandoned after several break-ins. A lot of the land has been brought up by an entity called Pecos realty that sells $1M 3D printed houses, and Marfa is now home to some of the best experiments in Texas cuisine.

Structured Messiness

We had lunch at Bordo three days in a row – an Italian sandwich place at the edge of town. The space is crammed and unorthodox. We sat under an aluminum roof right next to the large oven all three days. it was the one spot that everyone seemed to avoid.

Bordo and similar places in Marfa remind me of what

Vaughn Tan

calls structured messiness. Vaughn uses the variety and flexibility of Tokyo real estate as an example in his piece:

The structured messiness I'm talking about is exemplified in Tokyo by old small buildings that are true mixed use. A typical example is an 8-storey, 1980s building on a 40 sqm parcel of land. The building contains restaurants, apartments, offices, retail shops sprinkled through the floors, some units less than a hundred square feet in size. The building is safe to occupy but it's old and shabby. The units in it are small and sometimes weirdly shaped or poorly fenestrated.

This kind of building usually permits almost any kind of use that is not specifically prohibited, and is called a zakkyobuilding (雑居; the characters mean "miscellaneous" and "house" 2). If you operate out of a unit in one of these buildings, you can do most things as long as your neighbours don't complain about what you're doing. Imagine whole neighbourhoods where each block is filled with such buildings, each owned by a different person.

Marfa is the American frontier version of structured messiness. This is a town that had its largest population during the second world war when it was home to a military base, which was disbanded promptly when the war ended. A couple of the abandoned military buildings were bought out by artist and designer Donald Judd who moved here in the 60s, and repurposed to house his sculptures.

A lot real estate in Marfa have roughly similar stories. We toured an artist studio that was previously a jail, got coffee at a coffee shop that is bundled together with a local newspaper called The Sentinel, and went to a wine bar that was right next to a laundromat that ...dumped refuse right into the front yard it shared with the wine bar. The lots are all odd sized and the buildings have their idiosyncrasies.

I assume real estate leases are more flexible around here, and a large power imbalance does not exist between the landlord and the renter. In a lot of cases, the spaces were likely cheap enough to be bought outright.

The structured mess also extends to the airport, which leases out large amounts of land to greenhouses, which produce Marfa Tomatoes that are regularly available in HEB grocery stores around Texas. I read in The Sentinel – the aforementioned local newspaper – that the airport is now set to lease out space to members of the military who are to be stationed here as part of the government's border protection measures (although border crossings are already at their lowest). The article quotes a military representative saying, "We love leasing out airports, they are perfect for us", which, upon tumbling around in my head for a couple of hours, made sense – airports are the perfect Nakatomi Spaces – large blocks of concrete that can be infiltrated easily by any dominant ideology – be it woke liberal murals (RIP), bad advertising or literal infiltration by the military.

Big Judd

Donald Judd's studio, where he lived and raised two kids, mirrors the landscape and attitude of border towns, albeit for different reasons. It is the only compound in Marfa that has a 10-foot brick wall around it, which the guide told us was erected to protect his kids, who would run around in the yard. There is a second symmetrical U-shaped wall inside. On the longer sides of the U are the studio buildings, and the short side is parallel to the perimeter wall. You walk in the shade provided by the narrow space between the U and the building/wall to browse Judd's studios and library.

The Marfa remake really began when Donald Judd, who furiously hated the New York scene, moved here in the 1960s. Here he found a permanent space for his sculptures and furniture. Judd's sculptures, primarily hollow cubes made of aluminum and wooden furniture composed of straight lines.., a lot of straight lines.., and more straight lines, seem like everyday objects to me – this is a testament to how successful the aesthetic of Judd and his contemporaries were. I came away thinking that these are objects that are not to be interpreted in but simply looked at – like items at a store that I don't intend to buy anything from - a category that seems to expand rapidly every year, culminating eventually at the grocery store – accurately reflected by the eggs collab between MSCHF and Ordinary. Judd's aluminum cubes, some of themglazed with colors, made me wonder if Steve Jobs copied these for the Macs in 98. "Did they invent any new methods for finishing metal?" I asked our guide and he said they did not know since Judd simply designed them, and they were made elsewhere.

Donald Judd on the left, Ordinary eggs on the right

Judd was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Barnett Newman, who he called the best painter in America, apart from the likes of Rothko, and Mondrian. Judd was prolific in his production, being exhibited at nearly 230 retrospectives and galleries. He also made the smart decision of moving to the desert, where his sculptures could find a permanent place. The only other abstract expressionist of that era who I know to have a permanent installation is Mark Rothko – The Rothko Chapel in Houston.

Donald Judd, with his prolificity and good decision-making, is what I'd like to call a mediocre genius. This newsletter does not see mediocrity as an insult in anyway, as written in Some Kind of Mediocre Genius. He's also a boomer, which I define as a group of people who hated globalization but benefitted immensely from it. If the Judd aesthetic has appreciators today it is because of mood boards and dispersion of vaguely eastern minimalism throughout the west.

Who's Watching

Marfa is watched over by buzzards in the morning, crows at noon, and border patrol at night. The city has a population of under 2000, and on our drive back to our AirBnB late at night, I spotted at least 4 border patrol cars.

According to the books I see lying around the AirBnB, It was not always like this. Before the Second World War and before passports were established as primary identity, the borders were much more porous. Tensions escalated in the 1910s during the Mexican Revolution, which brought in thousands of refugees to Marfa. Once again to paraphrase the local paper, "We don't know why the military is needed. It's not like the 1910s when there were roving violent mobs".There are some footnotes in these books about mutualista societies that existed to support immigrants. I could not find further details about these societies, so I think they are mostly local myths and small operations blown up for people to feel good about themselves - like watching Schindler's List and thinking, "Oh, I would totally save the little girl in red".

Even after the adoption of passports in 1926, and establishment of border patrol, the southern boundary remained leaky, with people sometimes registering their birth both in the United States and on the other side of the border. It was only in 2009, that the border security became much less porous, reflecting the anxiety of a post-2008 financial crisis United States – which brings us to the high presence of border patrol in Marfa. At one of the coffee shops, I saw a "Save Gaza" sign but no mention anywhere of the central tension of this town – open exploration of arts vs closed, hostile borders. This exclusion or silence on anything immediate to the environment embodies western liberalism of the last 20 years, which has focussed on the aesthetics of resistance and protest without meaningfully engaging in either – maintaining distance from near by issues while professing attachment to vague ones. Or perhaps Marfa shows what urban liberalism is without ideological facades - an airport that is always in the process of being rearranged and reimagined, an environment where no one really belongs but merely passes through, indifferent yet alluring.