Twenty-one houses in and around Marfa, Texas, provide a glimpse at
creative life and design in one of the art world's most intriguing
destinations.
When Donald Judd began his Marfa project in the early 1970s, it was
regarded as an idiosyncratic quest. Today, Judd is revered for his
minimalist art and the stringent standards he applied to everything
around him, including interiors, architecture, and furniture. The former
water stop has become a mecca for artists, art pilgrims, and design
aficionados drawn to the creative enclave, the permanent installations
called "among the largest and most beautiful in the world," and the
austerely beautiful high-desert landscape.
In keeping with Judd's site-specific intentions, those who call Marfa
home have made a choice to live in concert with their untamed, open
surroundings. Marfa Modern features houses that represent unique
responses to this setting - the sky, its light and sense of isolation -
some that even predate Judd's arrival.
Here, conceptual artist Michael Phelan lives in a former Texaco service
station with battery acid stains on the concrete floor and a twenty-foot
dining table lining one wall. A chef's modest house comes with the
satisfaction of being handmade down to its side tables and bath, which
expands into a private courtyard with an outdoor tub. Another artist
uses the many rooms of her house, a former jail, to shift between
different mediums - with Judd's Fort D. A. Russell works always visible
from her second-story sun porch.
Extraordinary building costs mean that Marfa dwellers embrace a culture
of frontier ingenuity and freedom from excess--salvaged metal signs
become sliding doors and lengths of pipe become lighting fixtures,
industrial warehouses are redesigned after the area's white-cube
galleries to create space for private or personally created art
collections, and other materials are suggested by the land itself: walls
are made of adobe bricks or rammed earth to form sculptural courtyards,
or, in one remarkable instance, a mix of mud and brick plastered with
local soils, cactus mucilage, horse manure, and straw.
