October 14, 2004
By JAMES BAE
MARFA — If some unaware tourist by chance was looking for merlot and cheese in Marfa this week, they’d be out of luck. It seems people who came from all over the globe to experience the 2004 Chinati Foundation Open House left the cupboard bare over the weekend’s festivities.
Enjoying a drink or two after the last of Sunday’s happenings, the Chinati interns at least seem to be happy they survived the deluge of art, gastronomy, and random men in bunny suits. “I didn’t know whether I should’ve been laughing or scared,” said intern David Gilbert.” He was dancing and drinking the entire Saturday night,” added fellow intern Jonathan Kinkley.
Things kicked off to a rolling start last Thursday night, with Chinati’s Locker Plant packed with art fans for the opening of Chinati artist in residence Christian Freudenberger’s show, Zeitmaschine. A heavy out-of-town population ogled the wall-paintings, making one woman comment Freudenberger’s work was worth the drive from Chicago. Also on Thursday was the Marfa Studio of Arts community reception to celebrate the opening of its newly renovated exhibition space replete with handsome work by numerous local and area artists. Music by the Mules of Presidio County rocked Ray’s following the shows.
A noticeable trickle came into town earlier in the week, but saturation levels were rising dangerously by Friday, if you couldn’t tell by the swarm of unrecognizable faces taking over the Marfa Book Company outdoor tables in the morning. By the night, the town was breaking out in random parties and cocktail parties, highlighted by more than 200 individuals attending Chinati’s annual member’s dinner, catered by Maiya’s restaurant. Members got an early glimpse of the Ken Price exhibition, followed by a goat-cheese and pork stuffed chile relleno dinner in the Arena, the monolithic do-it-all space on the Chinati grounds.
By twilight, the crowd moved on to Ballroom Marfa, to watch an amazing jazz performance by Fire into Music, a quartet consisting of jazz heavyweights Jemeel Moon-doc, William Parker, Hamid Drake, and Steve Swell. “These musicians are giants,” jazz aficionado and Marfa journalist Robert Halpern observed. “It was an amazing, spectacular performance.” As great as the music was, with unimaginably good percussion and bass, the overwhelming ribaldry of the crowd also took center stage after the jazz ended. Something akin to a Turkish soccer riot taking place in a Neiman Marcus outlet, it was a moment having to be witnessed to be believed.
Young, urban hipsters danced late until three in the morning, jamming to music supplied by Waxploitation records, until the crowd seemed to dance themselves out of their own groove. Steady crowds fell upon Chianti Saturday morning, clogging Cavalry Row and nearby streets with an unending stream of small rental cars and large SUVs, to take a rare opportunity of looking at the Chinati collection on their own, many of them admiring the Ken Price exhibition as well as the new John Wesley building, finally realized after more than a decade’s worth of effort. Other crowds drifted around the various happenings around town, some to see the new Galleri Urbane or the Marfa Studio of the Arts, others to check out the shows on North Highland ranging from the Texas Tech University MFA student show co-opted at the furniture store, and a photography show at the Highland Gallery.
If you didn’t catch it, Gallery 2D put on a great show of Anish Kapoor, but the show’s still ongoing. Eugene Binder gallery has moved to the Tyler Building with a stylish and smart body of work on exhibit Ad hoc Gallery 5 showed the work of part-time Marfa newcomer Louise Girling, in town with her partner, Rick Peters. The Thunderbird Motel had an early open house on Saturday, doling out coffee, orange juice, breakfast eats and T-shirts. The place is still a work in progress, but it’s taking shape as an upscale motor court. When completed before year’s end, owner Liz Lambert and crew next will focus on the Capri Hotel, across the street, for a complete makeover, including a breakfast and lunch counter.
No doubt next year’s Chinati visitors will be packing every square foot of both motels this time next year. People in need of literary fulfillment got what they want, and then some. For those who caught the Rikki Ducomet/Quincey Troupe Lannan Foundation double reading, this part can go unsaid. But it can’t. It was flat out dazzling. Ducomet’s sly, brilliant tale about memory and its transfigurations, followed by Troupe’s knock-your-breath-out poetic exhortations couldn’t have been any more stylistically different, yet, on that day, couldn’t have been any more collectively apt.
As a glorious Marfa waned, Chinati provided a gigantic barbecue feast at dusk, blocking off North Highland Avenue in between Oak and Texas streets, supplying energy for people to make it for the music at the Ice Plant later that evening. Meanwhile, Mariachi Aguila quickly got folks to their feet to dance waltzes, polkas, rancheras and cumbias in front of the Presidio County Courthouse.
About 500 people came out on a cold night to enjoy Benjamin Curtis of Secret Machines play a set of songs accompanied only by his guitar, including a Stone Roses cover of “She Bangs the Drums,” followed by the atmospheric jazz stylings of the Earl Harvin Trio. A Marfa resident should receive his proper recognition for the trio not being whittled down to a duo.
Tim Crowley flew his turbo-prop twin plane last minute to pick up the stranded Harvin in El Paso, getting the eponymous drummer onto stage minutes before his performance at around 10:45 p.m. It was a relatively quiet Sunday, with people packing their belongings, no doubt nursing a weekend of artistic overdose. Those willing to punish themselves in the back safari seat of an old Bronco, rattling their way down perditious ranch roads to the Judd Ranch for the Judd Foundation barbecue, can slap their back for thwarting common sense while picking bugs out of their teeth.
It was all worth it for Sheriff Danny Dominguez’s out-of-this-world brisket and BBQ sauce. The burgers were great, and so was everything out there, but the brisket forces a beyond nutrition comparison, a Nietzschean metaphysic that Donald Judd could appreciate: “What you can put into words, there’s no place for it in your heart.” If it weren’t for the sheriff and his .357-caliber sidearm holstered conspicuously on his belt, one might have had the chance to eat more than the four plates some guy had over the course of the day.
