synthesizes,
innumerability,
Iroquois.
strands,
asses,
punctures,
pretentious,
occupant,
wiry,
wedges

synthesizes,
innumerability,
Iroquois.
strands,
asses,
punctures,
pretentious,
occupant,
wiry,
wedges

synthesizes,
innumerability,
Iroquois.
strands,
asses,
punctures,
pretentious,
occupant,
wiry,
wedges

synthesizes,
innumerability,
Iroquois.
strands,
asses,
punctures,
pretentious,
occupant,
wiry,
wedges

synthesizes,
innumerability,
Iroquois.
strands,
asses,
punctures,
pretentious,
occupant,
wiry,
wedges

synthesizes,
innumerability,
Iroquois.
strands,
asses,
punctures,
pretentious,
occupant,
wiry,
wedges

synthesizes,
innumerability,
Iroquois.
strands,
asses,
punctures,
pretentious,
occupant,
wiry,
wedges

synthesizes,
innumerability,
Iroquois.
strands,
asses,
punctures,
pretentious,
occupant,
wiry,
wedges

synthesizes,
innumerability,
Iroquois.
strands,
asses,
punctures,
pretentious,
occupant,
wiry,
wedges

Munching down a succulent brioche in Mike’s Café in Marfa, Texas, I contemplated the mural occupying an entire wall. The scene, in vapid tempera, showed a birch forest in full autumn splendor. So heavy with nostalgia was the image that the trees themselves seemed bent in sorrow over the carpet of color which their lost leaves had laid on the forest floor. One looked more closely, half-expecting to glimpse a furtive Iroquois, the gleaming strands of his black hair flowing in the wind as he ran, darting off to the security of his family tent, or whatever Iroquois lived in.

You have to understand that in the art world, Marfa is to Texas what Bilboa is to Spain. Just as the Guggenheim Museum bravely plopped Frank Gehry’s giant titanium thingie in a small provincial Spanish city that nobody’d ever heard of, the late New York sculptor Donald Judd had plopped his studio and a large number of very large minimalist concrete objects in the vastly flat West Texas desert just outside Marfa. Judd had passed to his esthetic reward, but the objects remained and turned Marfa from a simple minimalist ranching town into an object of pilgrimage and esthetic sustenance for an endless stream of subscribers to Art in America. Thus it was not uncommon to see on the streets of Marfa Volkswagen convertibles with New York license plates, and in Mike’s Café, newly refurbished to look like a transplant from SoHo, wiry wanderers from afar, a tattered copy of Walter Benjamin’s essays peeking from their backpacks, munching brioches and thinking of a kinder, gentler past among the birch forests of the distant, oh so distant, East Coast.

I at least had an immediate, real reason for being in Marfa. On assignment for the Times Sunday magazine, I was here to interview one Olmstead Jones, alleged harbinger of the Next Big Thing, which editors on the edge in New York were already referring to as "the new humanism." We all knew it was only a matter of time before the Upper Case Compulsion set it, and the Times wanted to be the first with a definitive piece on The New Humanism.

Only months before, Olmstead Jones, gathered up his moderate fame (two downtown shows, one Chelsea show, and a couple of pieces in the last Sorrento Biennale), gave a hurried press conference in which he announced that, sponsored by the newly formed Anchorite Foundation, he was following Donald Judd’s footsteps to the end of the Texas desert where, he firmly believed, total solitude would enable him to re-establish contact with the only subject worthy of great art in the Age of Great Technology, namely, the human body, and split for Marfa.

Here I was, finished with my not-bad brioche, halfway through a decent wedge of Brie (alas, Marfa!), hot on his trail. I eyed my rented RAV, which I’d gotten 200 miles away at the El Paso airport. Glinting, verily, baking in the Texas noonday sun, even it seemed to sense that it was a long, long way from any place envisioned by either its Laguna Beach designers or its Madison Avenue marketers. I shared its feelings of dislocation. Large portions of West Texas are mountainless and perfectly flat, so that driving across it, one loses all sensation of speed, or motion. Nothing, including the horizon, gets closer. Landscape as treadmill. One puncture you could survive by changing the tire. A second puncture and your obit would start, "Found stranded in the wasteland east of El Paso…" Still, the magazine fee kept me going, and eventually Marfa had popped up in the far, far distance. So here we were, my cute little RAV and I, far from home. At least I had the birch mural to remind me of whence I came. I wondered what fading automotive memories the RAV was calling on for consolation.

The other lunchtime occupants of Mike’s were ignoring me as steadfastly as I was ignoring the two groups of them. Pilgrims all, the members of one group (mostly female) looked as if they had just stepped out of one of the covey of Learjets I’d spotted at the Marfa airport. Fresh from one of the coasts (did it matter which? I think not), they in their boutique uniforms (does it matter what the uniform was that season? I think not) were chatting up their usual multisyllable storm. Words like "perspectival adjudication" and "colorific innumerability" splashed at my feet and threatened to inundate Mike’s Café.

Artists all, members of the other group (mostly male) clearly had not yet completed the cultural shift entailed by the move to Marfa. "Motley" doesn’t even begin to describe their attire. Clearly, they were still every morning choosing outerwear designed to immediately catch the lens of any "seen on the street" Times photographer who might happen to be encountered strolling along Highway 290 in downtown Marfa. This group was strangely silent. Then I realized they were no doubt saving up their desert bon mots for the visitors from the first group who that very afternoon would no doubt be making the rounds of the studios. Under a heavy purple cloud of pollution from the NAFTA maquiladoros on the other side of the Rio Grande, they would explain to the pilgrims how they had exchanged the impurities of New York/Los Angeles for the utter clarity of desert light.

Sensing I might be losing by grip on the story, I gulped the last of my Marfa cappuccino and fled to the safety of the RAV. Rummaging through the assignment folder, I found Olmstead Jones’s bio supplied by his agent, along with directions to his place of work in the clear desert light. Né Joseph Baumberg, Jones was a graduate of the Colorado School of Mines who had turned his sketches of core samples from oil wells into wall-size oils on unstitched canvas, to growing critical acclaim. Early interviews revealed a talent not yet in control of his subtlety ("Less is a bore," he had said once, but who in New York was going to get THAT pun?). By his third show, he had learned to modulate his self-promoting commentary ("The thesis of my work is the synthesizing antithesis of art and science"), and the show had sold out in a week, with even the smallest pieces going for six figures. The unexpected, abrupt move to Marfa, his agent was quoted as saying, "showed an artist who knew his own worth."

For his studio, Jones had in fact appropriated a bit of Marfa history. Prior to the appearance of Donald Judd on the minimalist landscape, Marfa’s only claim to national attention had come in 1957 when George Stevens had brought James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson to endure the purity of light (and heat) for a while during the filming of Giant. While nothing remained at the filming site (the huge, Victorian house miles from town had been only a false-front used for exterior shots), Jones felt the location was hallowed American cultural ground and succeeded in acquiring a long-term lease. Even with his new affluence, he was not able to afford Gehry’s fee, so he designed the studio himself as an homage to his predecessor in the desert. While Donald Judd had confined himself to your smaller concrete cubes, say 12 by 12 by 12 feet, scattered across the desert, Jones had created for himself a livable cube, 36 feet on a side. One critic had referred to the structure’s windowless, "awful symmetry," to which Jones had responded, "Those who follow the Golden Mean have no sense of proportion."

Forty-five minutes later, Marfa having Brigadoon-like sunk again below the horizon line, I found myself and the RAV chugging down a rocky dirt trail well off the highway ("Keep going until you can’t go anymore" the instructions said). At length, the monstrous cube appeared in the distance, and I arrived.

Windowless, in this heat? It must be air conditioned, but where was he getting his power? No electric lines were visible. Looking closely, I thought I could see a line of disturbed earth following the road. Buried cables.

I parked beside a wine-colored Lexus and a Ferrari-red 7-liter Dodge Ram pickup, got out, and approached the one door, a steel affair (to keep out the Indians?). Beside it, the smooth surface of the concrete wall was broken only by one small button, which I, my sense of dislocation now, well, completely out of proportion, pressed.

Thirty seconds, a minute passed. Sweat was Niagaring down my forehead, Angel Falling from my armpits.

The agent had assured me that Jones knew I was coming today. I pressed the button again. No response.

I set off around the cube. Windowless and doorless on the other three sides. though there was a peculiar, large rectangular indentation on the rear, western face.

Pressed again. Nothing.

I retreated to the RAV, started the engine, turned on the A/C, and waited. At intervals I dismounted and pressed again. This went on through the afternoon. I was torn between the lure of the magazine fee and a desire to accelerate as rapidly as possible back in the direction of El Paso.

How much more time was I going to give him? I arbitrarily decided 9 p.m. was my limit.

The sun set, washing the empty plain in a sweep of quickly changing colors, turning the purple cloud of who knew what chemicals into a pretentious light show in the sky of the kind normally seen only from your better condos in Santa Monica.

Eight o’clock. Eight thirty. I was now ringing the bell at half-hour intervals.

At nine, as the sun disappeared and the light begin to fade quickly, I ring one more time, and the door opened instantly.

Olmstead Jones himself, naked as he came into the world, grinned out at me and gestured for me to enter. Which I did.

The bottom floor was one large, empty space, dimly lit, with stairs to one side. At the rear, facing the west wall was one Eames chair.

Olmstead Jones held a finger over his lips, indicating silence, and led me to the chair.

I sat.

I realized we were at the position where I had noticed an indentation on the exterior. He punched a button on the wall. The wall appeared to vaporize, but I knew it was one of those high tech windows that can go from opaque to translucent to transparent. This one became transparent, and I was looking at the remnants of the sunset.

Olmstead Jones stood, still silent, beside me. We watched until it was dark, and the sky was a uniform black, with more stars than I’d ever seen.

Finally, he punched the button again, and the world disappeared.

He seated himself cross-legged on the floor in front of me.

I started to speak. He shook his head and looked at me intensely.

I tried again. Same response.

He stared at me, then got up and hit the button again. The wall gave way to the night desert. His body was faintly outlined against the desolate backdrop.

Minutes passed.

Though intrigued, I was also becoming irritated. He had known I was coming. He knew I was here for an interview.

"Olmstead, we have to talk. I’ve come a long way."

He didn’t stir, still looking westward.

More time passed. I was ready to get up and walk out, when he spoke.

"Distinctions."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Distinctions."

In the near darkness, I smirked. "You want to clarify that?"

More silence.

Then I heard him sigh. He turned toward me, held his hands out in the gesture of supplication.

He turned back to the window and said, "Distinctions arise from the clinging needs of the ignorant."

Back in El Paso, the following morning I called my editor and explained the situation, told him what had happened.

"Do you think he’ll allow photographs?"

"Don’t know. Ask his agent."

"Sounds like the story’s going to need heavy graphic support."

"I’m not going to write it. I think we ought to leave him alone."

For this, I got a heavy New York silence.

I continued, "Yeah, yeah, I know you want the story, but it’s not coming from me. I was in the RAV, ready to go, and he came running out, this naked man, out of this inhuman house, running out, he came up and said, ‘Did you get it? Did you get it?’ His eyes were like that endlessly black desert sky, except no stars. ‘Did you get it? Did you get it?’ he kept saying. ‘Get what?’ I said. Shaking his head, he looked at me, looked through me, and said, ‘What does the business of humans have to do with the business of the world?’ and walked back into his house."

"Jesus, man, it’s a great story. A career-maker, and you’re throwing it away?"

"You do it. Come look at his window, and maybe you won’t think I’m such an ass. Oh, and if you do, be sure to bring a tape measure. I’m pretty sure his house his little hole into the world, is no cube. If you measure it, you're going tol find the ratio of its long side to its short side is a nifty 1.62 to 1."

END

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