by Ben Lerner
Tomorrow I’ll see the Donald Judd
permanent installations in old hangars, but
now it’s tomorrow and I didn’t go, set out hatless
in the early afternoon, got lost and was soon
seeing floaters and spots, so returned to the house,
the interior sea green until my eyes adjusted,
I lay down for a while and dreamt I saw it.
Tonight I’ll shave, have two drinks with a friend
of a friend, but that was last week and I canceled,
claimed altitude had sickened me a little, can
we get back in touch when I’ve adjusted?
Yesterday I saw the Donald Judd in a book
they keep in the house, decided not to go until
I finished a poem I’ve since abandoned
but will eventually pick back up. What I need
is a residency within the residency, then
I could return refreshed to this one, take in Judd
with friends of friends, watch the little spots
of blood bloom on the neck, so I’ll know
I’ve shaved in time, whereas now I’m as close
to a beard as I’ve been, but not very close.
Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually
not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance,
“Washes and razors for foofoos—
for me freckles and a bristling beard,”
a big part of reading him is embarrassment.
Woke up today having been shaved in a dream
by a nurse who looked like Falconetti,
my cot among the giant aluminum boxes
I still plan to see, then actually shaved and felt
that was work enough for one day, my back
to the future. The foundation is closed
Sundays and nights, of which the residency
is exclusively composed, so plan your visit
well in advance, or just circle the building
where the Chamberlain sculptures are housed,
painted and chromium plated-steel, best
viewed through your reflection in the window:
In Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc (1879)
Joan reaches her left arm out, maybe for support
in the swoon of being called, but instead
of grasping branches or leaves, her hand,
in what is for me the crucial passage, partially
dissolves. It’s carefully positioned
on the diagonal sight line of one of three
hovering, translucent angels he was attacked
for failing to reconcile with the future saint’s
realism, a “failure” the hand presents
as a breakdown of space, background
beginning to swallow her fingers, reminding me
of the photograph people fade from, the one
“Marty” uses to measure the time remaining
for the future in which we watched the movie,
only here it’s the future’s presence, not
absence that eats away at her hand: you can’t
rise from the loom so quickly that you
overturn the stool and rush toward the plane
of the picture without startling the painter, hear
voices the medium is powerless to depict
without that registering somewhere on the body.
But from our perspective, it’s precisely
where the hand ceases to signify a hand
and is paint, no longer appears to be warm
or capable, that it reaches the material
present, becomes realer than sculpture because
tentative: she is surfacing too quickly.
Now I believe I might have surfaced too quickly. I had gone more than two weeks without really speaking to anyone, a period of silence with no precedent in my life. It might also have been the longest I’d ever gone without speaking to Alex, who was, as she put it in an e-mail, respecting my distance. Finally I shaved, showered, did laundry (there were machines in the garage), and, feeling at least semihuman and diurnal, I went to look around at the Marfa Book Company, a well-regarded bookstore downtown. On the way I happened upon a coffee shop I’d never seen before. I asked for their largest iced coffee, and it was delicious; there were a few young people in the shop typing on their laptops. A basic, acute physical desire for one of the women passed through me, and was gone, as if the desire were en route to someone else.
I was sipping my coffee in the surprisingly good poetry section, full of small-press books, when a man approached me, casually said my name:
“I heard you were here—Diane and I have been waiting to run into you.” Who was Diane? He was vaguely familiar to me. Shaved head, those transparent glasses frames, in his midforties—I had seen him at art openings in New York. He might have been a friend of Alena’s. I couldn’t remember if I knew him too well to ask him to remind me of his name, and then it was too late.
“What are you doing here?”
“Chinati. And Diane has an old friend here.” He said the name of the friend as if she were famous. “We’re going to get a private look at the Judd boxes in a couple of hours and then dinner and drinks, if you’re interested.”
“I’m not a big Judd fan.”
He laughed at this. Nobody saying that in Marfa could be serious.
“I’m really exhausted,” I lied, the iced coffee having burnt off all fatigue. “I haven’t slept and think I’ll be dead tonight.”
“It’s not like you have to work in the morning,” he joked.
After all the silence, I was socially disoriented, more so for having first encountered somebody from New York out of context. Trying to figure out how to politely persist in refusing his invitation seemed to require a series of operations I could no longer recall how to perform; it was like trying to solve one of those word problems on a high school math test. “I guess I can go,” I said, not up to the challenge.
I gave him my address and they picked me up about an hour before sunset. I recognized Diane immediately (she had been introduced to me as Di), a painter who also ran a gallery whose shows I had reviewed, probably in her mid-fifties, but the man’s name still wouldn’t come to me; I hoped Diane would use it.
The Chinati Foundation was on a few hundred acres of land where there had once been a military fort. A young woman and a younger man met us in front of the office—it was Sunday, and the foundation was closed to the public. Diane introduced me to the woman, Monika, who she explained was a sculptor from Berlin, here for a few months as the Chinati artist in residence. She was tall and about as heavy as I, but stronger-looking, probably twenty-five; she had close-cropped blond hair, and I could see tattooed flames or maybe flower petals peeking above the neck of her denim jacket. The man, who looked barely twenty, was a Chinati intern in skinny jeans, his black hair arrested by some product in stylized disarray; he had the keys to the sheds where Judd’s aluminum boxes were housed.
I had never had a strong response to Judd’s work, not that I was any kind of expert. I believed in the things he wanted to get rid of—the internal compositional relations of a painting, nuances of form. His interest in modularity and industrial fabrication and his desire to overcome the distinction between art and life, an insistence on literal objects in real space—I felt I could get all those things by walking through a Costco or a Home Depot or IKEA; I’d never cared more for Judd’s “specific objects” than any of the other objects I encountered in the world, objects that were merely real. The work of his I’d seen—always in museums or small gallery installations—had left me cold, and so many of his followers celebrated his cool that I’d never questioned my initial response.
But things were different when I was an alien with a residency in the high desert entering a refashioned artillery shed that had once held German prisoners of war. German-language messages were still painted on the brick: DEN KOPF BENUTZEN IST BESSER ALS IHN
VERLIEREN, read one. I asked Monika to translate: “Better to use your head than lose it,” she said. The sheds had been ruins when Judd took them over. He replaced what had been garage doors with walls of continuous squared and quartered windows, and he placed a galvanized-iron vaulted roof on top of the original flat roof, doubling the building’s height. The space was so flooded with light, and the milled aluminum so reflective—you could see the colors of the grass and sky outside the shed—that it took me a minute to see what I was seeing: three long rows of evenly spaced silver, shimmering boxes, positioned carefully in relation to the rhythm of the windows. Although all the boxes have the same exterior dimensions (41" × 51" × 72"), each interior is unique; some are internally divided in a variety of ways, some sides or tops are left open, etc., which means that, as you walk along the boxes, you might see dark volumes, or a band of dark between light-filled volumes, or, depending on your angle, no volume at all; one box is a mirror, another an abyss; all surface one moment, all depth the next. Although the material facts of the work were easy to enumerate—the intern was reciting them a little didactically, his voice echoing throughout the shed—they were obliterated by the effect. The work was set in time, changing quickly because the light was changing, the dry grasses going gold in it, and soon the sky was beginning to turn orange, tingeing the aluminum. All those windows opening onto open land, the reflective surfaces, the differently articulated interiors, some of which seemed to contain a blurry image of the landscape within them—all combined to collapse my sense of inside and outside, a power the work had never had for me in the white-cube galleries of New York. At one point I detected a moving blur on the surface of a box and I turned to the windows to see two pronghorn antelope rushing across the desert plain.
I had read or half listened to people praise these boxes before, but nobody had ever mentioned the German stenciled on the wall, or talked about how their being set in a refurbished artillery shed influenced his or her experience of the work. For me, surfacing from my silence and my Whitman, a privileged resident in the region of a militarized border, the works felt first and foremost like a memorial: a line of boxes in a military structure that once had housed prisoners from Rommel’s Afrika Korps recalled a line of coffins (I thought of Whitman visiting makeshift hospitals); the changing rhythm of the boxes’ interiors felt like a gesture toward a tragedy that was literally uncontainable, or a tragedy that, since some of the “coffins” internally reflected the landscape outside the shed, had itself come to contain the world. And yet memorial wasn’t really the right word: they didn’t seem intended to focus my memory, they didn’t feel addressed to me or any other individual. It was more like visiting Stonehenge, something I’ve never done, and encountering a structure that was clearly built by humans but inscrutable in human terms, as if the installation were waiting to be visited by an alien or god. The work was located in the immediate, physical present, registering fluctuations of presence and light, and located in the surpassing disasters of modern times, Den Kopf benutzen ist besser als ihn verlieren, but it was also tuned to an inhuman, geological duration, lava flows and sills, aluminum expanding as the planet warms. As the boxes crimsoned and darkened with the sunset, I felt all those orders of temporality—the biological, the historical, the geological—combine and interfere and then dissolve. I thought of the “impossible mirror” of Bronk’s poem.
When we left Chinati, we drove to Cochineal, a restaurant downtown that Diane preferred; she’d invited both Monika and the intern along, but they rode their bikes. We only beat them by a minute or two. I’d said next to nothing at Chinati, and, trying to make normal conversation as we waited for our drinks, I felt like a character actor trying to return to an old role. All of that vanished with the first sip of gin; I realized that the weeks I’d gone without speech or alcohol was as long a period of abstinence as I could remember having undertaken since my early teens; the second martini transformed all my accumulated circadian arrhythmia into manic energy. Without ceremony I dispatched the giant steak I had ordered, inhaled it, basically, eating most of the fat off the bone, finishing it while the others were only a bite or two into their barramundi, which left me free to focus on the wine. Here, I noticed, none of the waitstaff spoke Spanish.
The drink seemed to have a similar effect on Monika, and we talked a little frantically about the Judd, although I was embarrassed to concede how much I had been moved, and wasn’t sure about turning the conversation toward the German inscription and World War II. Her English was very good, but she seemed to deploy a limited number of words, rearranging them like modular boxes. She liked to call things “trivial” (“Flavin is a trivial artist,” a bold claim for Marfa) or “nontrivial” (“I am trying to figure out what nontrivial things sculpture can do”), and when, making fun of her own repetitiveness, she described the gorgeous sunset we’d witnessed as “nontrivial,” I found it both funny and beautiful. Whenever the intern tried to contribute to the conversation, the man whose name nobody had used talked over him, cut him off.
I don’t know what part of my largesse was due to alcohol, or to the disorienting power of the Judd, or to my sudden return to human company, but I insisted on using my “stipend” to pay for everybody’s food, even though Diane and the nameless man were almost certainly very rich. We said goodbye to the intern, who biked away, and Diane said we should all go to a gathering at her friend’s. I said I should probably go home and work on my novel, but never intended to, and soon the four of us were driving through the dark to the party. There were a few flakes of snow in the high beams, melting against the windshield, but I saw them as moths, or saw them first as one and then as the other, as if it were winter and then the midsummer of my poem.
We arrived at the same time as the intern, who must not have known if he had the authority to invite us, and when we confronted each other in the gravel driveway, he smiled with embarrassment. Before he could try to account for himself, I hugged him as if he were an old friend I was thrilled to see after an interval of years—a kind of humor totally out of character for me—and everyone laughed and was at ease. How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?
Because the house had only two low stories, I was not prepared for the vastness when Diane, without knocking, opened the door and let us in. It seemed like the giant living room we entered was an acre wide; the floor was an orange Spanish tile, with carpets and animal skins thrown here and there. All over the room were clusters of furniture, most of it black and red leather, organized around little tables; some of the furniture was art deco and some of it, for lack of a better word, southwestern. There were people, most of them younger than I, sitting and smoking and laughing in these various groupings, and some kind of country music emanating from a stereo I couldn’t locate—country music, but the singing was in French. There was a sense of incoherent opulence: a giant retablo shared space on a beige wall with a Lichtenstein painting or print. Near a vaguely familiar abstract canvas there was a large, silvery photograph of a half-naked, androgynous child facing the camera with a dead bird in its hand.
The intern broke off from us to join one of the groups and Diane led us out of the room and into the adjacent kitchen, also giant, a thousand copper pots and pans hanging from a rack above an island the size of my apartment. I was introduced to Diane’s friend, a handsome woman with silver hair, silver jewelry, and green eyes, who then introduced me to the other people drinking wine and beer around a table that had once been a door; Monika knew everyone. The people in the kitchen were considerably older than those in the living room, as if the parents had retreated to let the kids have their fun at the party—except, disrupting that image, a heavy man with long hair and a beard was dividing a small pile of cocaine with a straight razor on a silver tray. His T-shirt read: JESUS HATES YOU. Diane’s friend pointed us to the drinks.
The man asked politely if anybody would like to join him, and only one of the women at the table sai
d in her British accent that she’d have a little for old times’ sake. The man then proceeded to separate two thin lines from the small mass of cocaine, rolled a crisp bill into a straw, and handed it to his friend. She snorted one of the lines off the tray, inhaling harder than she needed to, and tipped her head back, laughing, saying she was out of practice. The man then took the bill and, after hesitating theatrically over the small line, proceeded to inhale the entire mass of cocaine he had not divided. I stared at him wide-eyed, waiting for him to die or dissect, while everybody else at the table laughed. At this point a young woman in a cowboy hat entered from the living room, her hair down her back in a long blond braid, and asked what was so funny. “Jimmy did the pile,” Diane’s friend said. The young woman smiled in a way that made it clear that this was a thing that Jimmy did. He offered the bill around for whoever wanted the remaining small line; Monika took it.
I carried my beer back to the living room and roamed around looking at the walls. The place was bizarre. A young man and a woman were intertwined on a long burgundy leather couch talking about the pros and cons of raising chickens in their yard. Beside them on the floor a young woman in a swimsuit with a towel draped around her shoulders was texting, saying to nobody in particular, “This is why I left Austin.” The intern appeared with a bottle of white wine and glasses for the group and, seeing me milling around, introduced me to the others as one of the residents, a novelist. More of a poet, I said. They were going to go outside and smoke a joint—although it seemed they had permission to smoke indoors—and wanted to know if I wanted to join them; I said I’d tag along, which wasn’t an expression I ever used.
