Discovery 
A Beautiful Mind 
Letter From Marfa
One Hundred Boxes
Living with Donald Judd’s austere sculptures for a month convinced me I’d misunderstood them all these years.
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Such an effort, conceptual and contingent as it is, will necessarily be hit-or-miss. Art that’s meant merely to exist is easy enough to pull off, but art that’s meant to do something always runs the risk of failing its purpose. Think of it as a machine, an invention: Whether it pushes the world around the way it’s meant to depends in large part on the world it’s set loose upon. A ship, no matter how ingeniously designed, can’t float on dry land, and Judd’s sculptures often seem beached and abandoned. For years I’d been coming across them in this museum or that, and two or three times in people’s homes; I knew that it was important work, and I felt the appropriate respect, in the appropriate, obligatory manner. But I can’t say it excited me. Yes, I thought, I see: Sculpture is about forms in space, materials unhidden, lack of illusion, denial of content, and the way an object seems to draw in and knit together the empty volumes around it. I got it, and then I moved on. Judd’s sculptures suffer if there’s anything else in the room, especially if there’s any art of comparable power. They’re a bit narcissistic that way: They don’t play well with others.
I would imagine Judd knew as much and came to West Texas to play alone. A very wise move. If seeing one sculpture in a gallery had been like watching someone plonk on a single piano key, seeing one hundred of them installed at Chinati was a revelation, like listening to Bach for the first time. Walking through the sheds, or even passing them on the path, I could almost hear them, working a series of variations on a theme, growing ever more complex and contrapuntal, the aluminum boxes opening, unfolding, and recombining, echoing one another in elaborate patterns of rhyme and dissonance. I could feel them jostling one another, and jostling me, very rigorously but also a little bit playfully, and each time I went through the installation I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: a new progression, a new harmony, something new about the space inside and the landscape outside. From the right angle, the boxes are as reflective as mirrors. You can see the desert bouncing off their surfaces, the long, scrubby slopes, the pale-yellow grasses, the mountains in the distance, and above all, the sun. They’re about waist-high, and to me they seemed to be genuflecting. They reminded me of monks I once saw in a monastery in southeastern Tibet, individual but identically clad, aligned patiently in rows while they performed their devotions.
I should admit at once that Judd himself would have no truck with such rank anthropomorphism; it was precisely what he was trying to overcome, the idea of sculpture as representation of the human form. Mea culpa. But I think he would have acknowledged the Bach comparison more readily, for that was what he listened to (along with, God help us, bagpipe music), and I suspect he would have endorsed the meditative, studious qualities I’m trying to get at. He started out with a philosophy degree from Columbia—as, for what it’s worth, did I—and much of his library is preserved in his house in Marfa: Wittgenstein, Carnap, Paul Benacerraf’s Philosophy of Mathematics, classics in mid-century epistemology. He liked to call himself an empiricist, and he meant something very specific by that: The word describes someone who believes that knowledge emerges from experience rather than from reason. A number of critics, and probably quite a few viewers, think of Judd’s work as the product of pure intellection—intensely rational, deliberate, arithmetic—but the drawings for them are surprisingly free and intuitive. “Empiricist” is the right word, after all. What he was after, and what he achieved, was not abstract appreciation of noumenal forms but a specific engagement of the senses, called forth by that metal with that surface, arranged in those forms, in that building, awash in that light, in that landscape.
But space is only part of what art reveals, and the plainer part at that. The other part is more subjective and more elusive, though by no means less profound. Space is one axis of art’s effect. The other axis is time.
There’s the time that passes between the fashioning of a work and our apprehension of it, a span that a work will wear on its face, by its style and sometimes because of its patina. There’s the contrast of time between a work and its context—new paintings in old buildings, old paintings in new cities. West Texas, for example, always seemed to me to be an ancient place (though in truth it’s no older than any other part of the planet), and against that background, Judd’s sculptures, bright and shiny and built out of a world-of-tomorrow material, have a quality both futuristic and ancient, like the monolith on the moon in the movie 2001.
There’s the time an artist spends on a work, and there’s the time we spend looking at it. Some art, especially art in public places, we merely glance at, at best. Even in a museum, most of us walk at about 3 miles an hour, pausing now and then to gaze at a single painting for a minute or so before moving on. We page through books of reproductions or photographic prints at much the same pace. It’s the inevitable rhythm of looking, mandated by everything from habit to economic exigency. Unless you’re wealthy enough to own an artwork, or stubborn enough to resist the throng, there’s no way to look for any greater length of time.
Or you can get lucky. I had the good fortune, when I was just out of college, to find a job in the curatorial department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, working, coincidentally, for the same Trinidadian curator who first brought Judd to prominence. I was essentially his secretary, and the job paid poorly, but it had one unbeatable perquisite: On Wednesdays, when the museum was closed to the general public, employees were allowed to wander through the galleries at their leisure. No guards, no crowds, and a full lunch hour to look at whatever we wanted. So each Wednesday, I would slip down from the offices, remove a cushion from the window seat in what was then the Matisse room, and lie on the floor in front of whatever painting I had selected that week—van Gogh’s Starry Night, a Mondrian, a Pollock. For an hour I would look at it as if it were mine, my possession if not exactly my property, and when I was done (I’ve never admitted this in print before), I would rise and gently touch my lips to the surface of the painting I had been studying, in much the same way as I used to kiss the fringe of my tallit after touching it to the Torah in synagogue—with that reverence, if not that official sanction. In fact, if I’d been caught, I would have been fired immediately, and quite rightly. But I never was.
An hour, I soon discovered, was both too much and not enough. Too much because it’s almost impossible to focus for that long on a single image. You can go up to get a good look at the surface, pull back to get a sense of composition, the colors, the figures if there are figures, but after a while your eye’s saccade begins to break down and the painting begins to dissolve. At Chinati, though, I had even longer—a lunar month—plenty of time for the sculptures to cross over into insubstantiality and then cross back again.
Eventually I began to notice how fantastically diurnal they are. They’re sundials, calendars, clocks: They measure time as elegantly as they apportion space. If I woke before dawn, I could see them come alive, cheerful things, catching the first rays of the sun. In midday, when the sun was highest and the sheds most shadowed, only the outermost edges of the outermost boxes caught the light and gave off a fiery gleam. In the evenings they seemed to glow like embers, winding down from the day, breathing. You don’t ordinarily think of Minimalism as being responsive to nature: It seems like a quintessentially citified sort of endeavor, cerebral, a lab experiment. But nature is finally what it refers to.
Or not nature, but Nature. There’s something Emersonian about the Judds—Emerson with a twang, since the grand old Yankee never saw this landscape. It’s all there, though: the obeisance to the sublime, the elevation of experience to a fundamental fact about the world, the idea of art as a revelation of the categories—space and time—by which experience is organized. Emerson would have loved the Judds. He would have understood that someone like him had made them.
As for me, I’ve said all I can, and maybe a little bit more. The only thing left to mention is this: If you happen to be out that way, heading to El Paso or down to Big Bend, or maybe just looking for a way to spend a weekend, drive over to Marfa and up to Chinati. Take your time, tune out your tour guide, and, while you’re at it, forget everything I just told you. Walk through the sheds, look at the sculptures, and see for yourself what there is for you to see.
Jim Lewis is the author of three novels, most recently, The King Is Dead. His last article for Texas Monthly, about Somali refugees in San Antonio, appeared in the July 2005 issue.
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My Library
