46 SOME OF WHAT IT IS THAT DONALD JUDD
COMES TO FIND OUT WITH RESPECT TO SPACE
ALGUNOS DE LO QUE ES QUE DONALD JUDD VENDE A CONOCER CON RESPECTO AL ESPACIO
Adrian Kohn
71
RICHARD MAXWELL’S
ADS
AD: Eliseo Martinez
THE HEART OF MARFA
EL CORAZÓN DE MARFA
Daphne Beal
78
EDUCATION REPORT
INFORME SOBRE EDUCACIÓN
Michael Roch
84 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE 2018–2019
ARTISTAS EN RESIDENCIA 2018–2019
Michael Williams
Rochelle Goldberg
Daniel Rios Rodriguez
Nicholas Shake
Pete Schulte
Rachel Jones
100 Membership Edition:
Edición para los afiliados:
Rosa Barba
102 Chinati publication:
Publicación de Chinati:
Robert Irwin:
untitled (dawn to dusk)
103 Staff News
Noticias sobre nuestro personal
Internship Program
Programa de becarios
104 Funding, Membership
Financiación, Afiliación
108 Visitor Information
Información para visitantes
109 Staff/Board;
Credits/Colophon
Personal/Consejo;
Aunque agosto es uno de los meses más tranquilos para los visitantes de Marfa, fue un mes particularmente ajetreado en Chinati, con un énfasis especial sobre las publicaciones recientes y futuras. En julio lanzamos Robert Irwin: untitled (dawn to dusk), una publicación dedicada a la última incorporación en la colección permanente de Chinati. El libro hace una crónica, mediante una serie de ensayos académicos, del desarrollo del trabajo artístico a través de sus muchas versiones a lo largo de los años y traza la experien-cia de la obra a lo largo del primer año de su existencia mediante la documentación fotográfica que capta hermosamente la esencia de la instalación, tal y como Bob Irwin describió su jardín para el Getty Center en Los Ángeles, “siempre cam-biando, nunca dos veces el mismo.” Uno podría emplear esas mismas pala-bras para describir a Chinati; a pesar de la naturaleza permanente de las instala-ciones artísticas, la experiencia del museo -a lo largo de las estaciones, a lo largo de los años, mediante repetidas visitas-, nunca es dos veces la misma. Esta vitali-dad es un elemento esencial de Chinati: la dinámica mezcla de lo permanente y lo constantemente cambiante es una de las muchas razones por las que la gente se siente impulsada a volver una y otra vez. Es un elemento que tenemos en cuenta a diario en nuestro trabajo para conservar y presentar todo lo que es Chinati. A lo lar-go de los últimos meses -gracias a una ge-nerosa subvención de la Andrew W. Me-llon Foundation anunciada el año pasado en esta publicación informativa-, hemos iniciado la tarea esencial de organizar, catalogar y hacer accesible a los estudio-sos y al público el archivo de Chinati. Leer correspondencias, revisar concienzuda-mente fotografías, abrir sobres y cajas ha dado lugar a un fascinante viaje al pasa-do de Chinati, desvelanpasa-do las acciones y actividades monumentales y mundanas que han formado este lugar. Nuestro compromiso para entender y compartir nuestra historia se ha extendido hasta el empeño de tener una historia oral. Nos emociona presentar en esta edición una de las primeras entrevistas de este tipo, una larga charla con Jamie Dearing, que fue ayudante de Donald Judd desde 1968 hasta 1983. También hemos incluido una selección de las fotografías personales de Dearing -que ahora se encuentran en la colección del archivo de la Judd Foun-dation- que documentan la fabricación de las primeras obras instaladas en los terrenos de Chinati, la primera y segunda
configuración de las 15 obras sin título de hormigón de Judd. Expresamos nuestro sincero agradecimiento a Jamie por su tiempo y generosidad al compartir sus memorias y reflexiones sobre este pe-riodo extraordinario de la vida de Judd y de los primeros tiempos cruciales del desarrollo de Chinati.
A lo largo de las últimas semanas hemos dado los últimos retoques a la segunda edición de Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd. Casi diez años después de su prime-ra publicación, es un momento oportuno para renovar el libro con un capítulo de-dicado a la adición de Irwin a la colección permanente, fotografías puestas al día de las instalaciones y listas y documentación completas y actualizadas de las exposi-ciones especiales, actuaexposi-ciones y publica-ciones en Chinati. La segunda edición será publicada con motivo de la tan esperada retrospectiva de la obra de Judd en el Museo de Arte Moderno que se abrirá al público en marzo de 2020.
Examinar el pasado solo puede resaltar las esperanzas que uno alberga para el futuro. Al leer los volúmenes de informa-ción en nuestro archivo, al escuchar las palabras de Jamie Dearing sobre Judd, al releer el libro de Chinati, me sorprende una vez más el compromiso y dedicación extraordinarios de tanta gente por po-sibilitar este lugar improbable: no solo de originarse sino de perdurar. Desde aquellas personas cercanas a Judd que participaron de primera mano en la for-mación de su visión para Chinati hasta los artistas que siguen depositando su fe en nuestra capacidad de representar su obra de acuerdo con sus deseos, al visi-tante informal que pasó la tarde en los hangares de artillería mientras estuvo en el pueblo para el Festival de las Luces de Marfa la semana pasada, a la clase de primaria que nos visitó esta tarde como parte de su currículo escolar de vuelta al cole: me honra ser testigo, y formar par-te, de la gente cuyas vidas son tocadas -y, en muchos casos, fundamentalmente cambiadas- por Chinati. Chinati, y el arte al que sirve, es para todo el mundo, para cualquiera que esté dispuesto a pasar una tarde o toda una vida en su presencia. Cada año que existe Chinati entra gente nueva en su historia y sus contribuciones hacen que la experiencia de Chinati sea más fuerte.
Entre las muchas personas que forman parte de la historia de Chinati, este año perdimos a dos que fueron particular-mente queridas por la comunidad del Oeste de Texas. Boyd Elder creció en una hacienda en Valentine pero se trasladó a la costa oeste para desarrollar una carrera artística que tomó su forma más famosa en las portadas de los discos de los Eagles: calaveras pintadas de los ani-males del oeste. Regresó a su hogar justo
Although August is one of the quieter
months in Marfa for visitors, it was a
particularly busy month at Chinati, with
a focus on recent and upcoming
pub-lications. In July we released Robert
Irwin: untitled (dawn to dusk), a
pub-lication dedicated to the newest
addi-tion to Chinati’s permanent collecaddi-tion.
The book chronicles, through a series
of scholarly essays, the development
of the artwork through its many
itera-tions over the years, and traces the
ex-perience of the work over the course
of the first year of its existence through
photographic documentation that
beautifully captures the essence of the
installation—as Bob Irwin described his
garden for the Getty Center in Los
An-geles, “always changing, never twice
the same.”
One could use those words to describe
Chinati itself; that despite the
perma-nent nature of the art installations, the
experience of the museum—through
the seasons, through the years, through
repeat visits—is never twice the same.
This vitality is an essential element of
Chinati; the dynamic mix of permanent
and ever-changing is one of the many
reasons people are compelled to return
again and again.
It is an element we consider daily in
our work to preserve and present all
that Chinati is. Over the past several
months, thanks to a generous grant
from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
announced last year in this newsletter,
we have begun the essential work of
organizing, cataloging, and making
accessible to scholars and the public
Chinati’s archive. Reading through
correspondence, sifting through
photo-graphs, peeling open envelopes, and
cracking open boxes has enabled a
fascinating journey into Chinati’s past,
revealing the monumental and
mun-dane actions and activities that have
formed this place. Our commitment to
understanding and sharing our history
has extended to the endeavor of an
oral history. We are excited to feature
in this newsletter one of the first of these
extensive interviews, a long talk with
Jamie Dearing, who was assistant to
Donald Judd from 1968 to 1983. We
have also included a selection of
Dear-ing’s personal photographs—now in
the collection of the Judd Foundation
archive—that document the fabrication
of the first works installed on Chinati’s
grounds, the first and second
configu-ration of Judd’s 15 untitled works in
concrete. We extend our sincere thanks
to Jamie for his time and generosity in
sharing his memories and reflections on
this extraordinary period in Judd’s life
and in the crucial early days of Chinati’s
development.
Over the past several weeks we have
put the finishing touches on the second
edition of Chinati: The Vision of Donald
Judd. Almost ten years since its first
pub-lication, it is an opportune time to
up-date the book with a chapter devoted
to Irwin’s addition to the permanent
col-lection, refreshed photographs of the
installations, and updated,
comprehen-sive lists and documentation of Chinati’s
special exhibitions, performances, and
publications. The second edition will be
released on the occasion of the
Mu-seum of Modern Art’s much anticipated
retrospective of Judd’s work that will
open to the public in March 2020.
A consideration of the past can’t help
but color one’s hopes for the future. In
reading through the volumes of
infor-mation in our archive, in hearing Jamie
Dearing’s words about Judd, in
reread-ing the Chinati book, I am struck once
again by the extraordinary
commit-ment and devotion of so many people
to enable this unlikely place—not just
to come into existence, but to endure.
From those close to Judd who
partici-pated first-hand in the formation of his
vision for Chinati, to the artists who
continue to put their faith in our ability
to steward their work according to their
wishes, to the casual visitor who spent
the afternoon in the artillery sheds while
in town for the Marfa Lights Festival last
week, to the first grade elementary
class who visited this afternoon as part
of their back-to-school curriculum, I
am honored to be a witness to, and to
be one of, the people whose lives are
touched, and in many cases
funda-mentally changed, by Chinati. Chinati,
and the art to which it is in service, is for
everyone, anyone willing to spend an
afternoon or a lifetime in its presence.
Each year that Chinati exists, new
peo-ple come into its story, and their
contri-bution makes the experience of Chinati
stronger.
Among the many people who are part
of Chinati’s history, we lost two this
year who were particularly dear to the
far West Texas community. Boyd Elder
grew up on a ranch in Valentine but
re-Letter from the Director
Carta de la Directora
J E N N Y M O O R E
cuando Judd empezaba su proyecto en Marfa. Boyd conocía a todo el mundo y quería que todos se conocieran entre sí. Sin importar los artistas que llegaban a Marfa, de alguna manera Boyd ya había tenido una aventura con ellos o estaba empecinado en asegurar que tuvieran con él una aventura singular del Oeste de Texas. En 2002, Lonn Taylor, escritor e historiador, se jubiló en Fort Davis con su esposa a medida que se desarrollaba en Marfa una nueva era de artes y cultura. Lonn era cuentista consumado, fascinado por todo lo relacionado con Texas. Su his-toria del Fuerte D. A. Russell -la antigua
base militar donde se encuentra Chinati-, presentada como una charla el Día Comu-nitario en mayo de 2011, fue publicada en el volumen 16 de esta publicación infor-mativa. El último libro de Lonn, Marfa for the Perplexed, es en sí mismo su propio archivo de la gente y los acontecimientos que han formado este pueblo único. Para mí, estos dos hombres aparentemen-te opuestos, igualmenaparentemen-te extravaganaparentemen-tes, extraordinariamente generosos -tanto Boyd como Lonn siempre tenían tiempo para detenerse, preguntar por tu familia y charlar un rato, contando una historia (o tres) durante el proceso- personifican el espíritu, la inteligencia, la independencia y el encanto de las personas que perdu-ran, junto con el arte, aquí en el lejano Oeste de Texas.
En esta historia, no cada historia ha sido fácil y no todo el mundo se ha llevado bien. Y, sin embargo, sigue la tarea más grande; perdura el arte y, por un tiempo,
las personas. En 1983, a medida que se descomponía la relación entre Dia (que había apoyado financieramente el pro-yecto de Judd en Marfa) y Judd, Heiner Friedrich -que fundó Dia junto con Philipps de Menil y Helen Winkler- escribió una carta a Judd. Hace unos meses, encon-tramos una copia en nuestros archivos. En la carte, Friedrich escribe: “Me complace enviarle la información adjunta que re-presenta nuestros primeros estudios para la creación de `El Museo de Arte Contem-poráneo de Marfa´ (o cualquier nombre que decida) que conservará y presentará las obras de Donald Judd, Dan Flavin y
John Chamberlain… Estoy dispuesto a hacer mi parte para fomentar un enten-dimiento positivo y mutuo ya que, solo así, tendremos éxito para realizar plena-mente el logro cultural único que hemos emprendido juntos. Debemos dejar de lado nuestras personalidades para que podamos seguir trabajando con nuestras mejores cualidades hacia nuestro obje-tivo común que es hacer que Marfa sea un centro de arte contemporáneo único en este siglo.”
Ahora, una copia de esta carta se encuen-tra sobre mi escritorio. Es un recordatorio del mundo del que formamos parte todos nosotros: artistas y visitantes, junta y per-sonal, afiliados y fundadores, personas del pasado, el presente y el futuro. Saludos cordiales de Marfa, Jenny
located to the west coast to develop an
art career that took its most famous form
in album covers for the
Eagles—paint-ed skulls of the animals of the West.
He returned home just as Judd was
getting started on his Marfa project.
Boyd knew everyone and wanted
ev-eryone to know each other. No matter
what artist arrived in Marfa, somehow
Boyd had already had an adventure
with them or was hellbent to make sure
they would have a uniquely West Texas
adventure with him. Lonn Taylor, writer
and historian, retired to Fort Davis with
his wife Dedie in 2002 as a new era
of arts and culture was developing in
Marfa. Lonn was a consummate
story-teller, fascinated by all things Texas. His
history of Fort D.A. Russell, the former
army base in which Chinati is situated,
presented as a talk on Community Day
in May 2011, was featured in volume
16 of this newsletter. Lonn’s recent
book Marfa for the Perplexed is its own
archive of the people and events that
have formed this singular town.
For me, these two seemingly opposite,
equally flamboyant, extraordinarily
generous men—both Boyd and Lonn
always had time to stop, ask after your
family, and talk for a while, telling a
story or three of their own in the
pro-cess—embody the spirit, intelligence,
independence, and charm of the
peo-ple that endure, along with the art, out
here in far West Texas.
In this history, not every story has been
an easy one and not everyone has
gotten along. And yet the larger
en-deavor remains; the art—and for a time
the people—endures. In 1983, as the
relationship between Dia (which had
financially supported Judd’s project in
Marfa) and Judd broke down, Heiner
Friedrich, who founded Dia along with
Philippa de Menil and Helen Winkler,
wrote Judd a letter. We found a copy
in our archives a few months back. In
the letter Friedrich writes: “I am happy
to send you the enclosed information
representing our first studies toward
the creation of ‘The Marfa Museum of
Contemporary Art’ (or whatever name
you choose) which will preserve and
present the works of Donald Judd, Dan
Flavin and John Chamberlain….I am
willing to do my part to foster positive,
mutual understanding as only with that
will we be successful in fully realizing
the unique cultural achievement we
have undertaken together. We must
put personalities aside so that we can
continue to work with our best qualities
toward our common goal of making
Marfa a center for contemporary art
unique in this century.”
A copy of this letter now lives on my
desk. It is a reminder of what we are
all—artists and visitors, board and staff,
members and funders, people past,
present, and future—a part of.
With best regards from Marfa,
Jenny
DONALD JUDD INSPECTING NEW QUONSET ROOF FOR ARTILLER Y SHED , C . 1 9 8 4 -8 5 .Chinati Foundation
Project
Oral History
The Chinati Foundation has embarked on an oral
history initiative with the goal of recording the
testimonies and recollections of people who worked
closely with Donald Judd during the early years of
Chinati. The following pages offer an edited and
condensed interview with
jamie dearing
,
Judd’s studio assistant from 1968 to 1983. The
interview was conducted by Marianne Stockebrand
(director emerita) and Rob Weiner (associate director)
ms Today is the sixth of June, 2019, and we [Marianne Stockebrand
and Rob Weiner] are with Jamie Dearing at 155 Wooster Street,
New York City.
jd The whole point is to try and gather information that is true at
least in the mind of the speaker in an effort to head off all the
re-visionism that’s going to happen anyway, which we’re all familiar
with. And Don is a great candidate for revisionists, because he’s
a little oblique. Actually, a very shy guy and very private guy, who
really wanted the work to speak for him. And he was very good
at speaking and writing, but if it wasn’t a text he was writing,
refusing all edits to, it got screwy and he got infuriated. And if he
spoke, he wound up being very easily misunderstood. Peculiar
writing style, peculiar speaking…well, not peculiar,
unique—par-ticular. Nobody wrote or spoke like him. So, it wasn’t as though
he was participating in any kind of vernacular—he was wide open
to misunderstanding and misinterpretation and reconstitution.
rw I would have to read a sentence three or four times, paying
atten-tion to where the commas are, to glean what he is
communicat-ing. We went through this.
ms Often enough. Because he’s so compact.
jd It’s so compact and the ideas are huge, and there are about four
of them in every sentence, or in every part of the sentence, and
the grammar doesn’t fit the ideas, so forget grammar. But the
ideas are there—cogent and profound. But boy, it’s a challenge.
I love reading him, but it’s work.
ms Were you around while he was working on a text in the early or
mid-seventies? He was rather disciplined and was writing the
last essays while I was with him. He would sit down every day.
He wanted to get it done. There was a discipline. When he felt
he was done with the work for the day, then he would go and sit
down and have a drink or something.
jd He wrote almost every day. He tended to work in the mornings.
I couldn’t tell whether he wrote first and then drew, or the other
way around. Almost every morning there was a very intense
period of writing and drawing. He felt those were his best hours
for both, and really by noon he had accomplished pretty much
what he wanted, and the rest of the day was housekeeping of
some sort.
ms That goes hand in hand with my experience. He was reading a
lot at the time.
When I was in Marfa, he would get up in the morning, make
a coffee and then sit down and read, typically for a few hours,
and then go to the office, see the guys, look at the mail, discuss
things and very often in the afternoon there were another couple
of hours or so to sit down and read again. I also know of phases
where he produced a number of drawings or sketches for pieces
or prints. But it was reading or drawing…and writing.
jd And long periods of time where he’s thinking. I remember a
vivid moment when Rainer wanted something very urgently and
he said to her “Rainer, it might look like I’m doing nothing, but
I’m thinking.” It was like a block of time—like the reading,
writ-ing, sketching; it was inviolate, really.
You knew Don already while he was still on 19
thStreet.
Can you tell us something of what you remember about that
space? Or your first meetings with Judd?
jd I kind of slid into the relationship. I was still in the Whitney
Independent Study Program and first met him there when
he was installing his show in 1968. [Whitney curator William]
Agee introduced me, and a little while after that I heard that he
was looking for studio assistants and Agee and David Hubert,
who was the head of the education department at the Whitney
at the time, recommended me and I went to meet him at the
19
thStreet studio. We had a good meeting, and I heard through
others that I was on, at least for a trial. So my first day of work,
whenever that was, soon thereafter, was on the third floor, and it
was a mess. It was way too small for him. Flavin was just born,
Julie was trying to dance, and that was his studio, house…the
kitchen sink was full of dirty dishes, as was the bath tub—there
was stuff everywhere, including a growing but already quite large
collection of cacti, which everybody knows about. My first job
was to take care of the cactus. I didn’t care, I thought: “This is so
cool…I could be working with Don Judd.” The only thing I was
allowed to be involved with was the cactus. It was my break-in
trial, I guess. But I really had to do that seriously and Don took
it very seriously. I subscribed to the Succulent Journal, I studied
and learned the names of everything he had in his collection. He
instructed me on watering and care. We rotated them, I cleaned
them. They were in these shallow galvanized pans that Bernstein
Brothers had made for them,
1and the trays were lined up along
the windows on the 19
thStreet side of the building and got most
of the sun. Those pans were, I think, the same proportions of the
work that later became the floor pans. Every time I see a pan I
think of that. And I thought at the time, boy, that looks kinda
like art—those galvanized pans. But they weren’t. They were
just for moving around. His interest in the cactus, in botany, in
science—in-depth thinking about anything he is involved with, I
learned right off the bat because of the cactus.
rw Had he been cultivating them for years?
jd For several years, I don’t know how long. And I don’t know
exactly where or why that happened. I didn’t see it right away
but soon realized he liked cactus because (unlike trees) they have
very simple and clear fractalization. Simple forms.
rw Did he have other people helping with the art while you were
tending to the cactus?
jd It was just me then. I did things around the house and helped
him move art around and swept and cleaned up, ran errands, but
I was mainly the cactus guy. And I wondered if that was it. But
it became clear very quickly that that was just an aspect of his
life and I wound up getting involved in all of it, the art very soon
thereafter. And the thing I noticed most was there were still a lot
of paintings around—none of them on the wall. And dss 33, the
right-angle, red-with-the-black-pipe piece was sitting very
promi-nently in a central place in the loft, and he was giving it a lot of
attention. It was surrounded by diapers, books, dust and dirty
dishes—in a chaotic environment. But it was an object of great
import and intention for Judd and I too gave it a lot of attention.
I think he taught me how to clean it early on. That was probably
my first engagement with the objects.
ms Do you remember how you cleaned it?
jd No. It would have been very simple. First we brushed it, then
I think we used distilled water on a cotton t-shirt or rag—just
damp, not wet, very gently with attention to the grain. Don’s
work is so difficult, so delicate. The surfaces are very sensitive
and very hard to maintain. Always were…the paintings were
too…that sand in the pigment, the topography…very difficult
to store, to handle, to hang and clean. That goes throughout his
work. They’re so robust intellectually and so delicate physically.
1 In 1964 Judd began working with the New York-based firm of Bernstein Brothers onthe fabrication of his sheet-metal works.
ms/rw
It’s kind of a contradiction that got his pieces into a lot of
trouble over the years. Probably the main thing that irritated
him was the inability of the world to deal with the requirements
of his work. A real major theme—one of the difficulties of his
life.
ms He dedicated a whole essay to that subject.
jd And he had a lot more to say about it. I have a lot more to say
about that. But in terms of meeting him, very shortly after I
went into this very crowded space and thought: how could this
guy, with a world-renowned reputation be living in this?…It’s a
lovely loft, a very nice building, nice light, nice part of town, but
it was way too small for him. How could this be? He was having
a major show at the Whitney…Shortly after getting there, David
Whitney moved and he managed to get David Whitney’s loft,
which was on the second floor, so he had two floors. Right after
David moved out my first job was to move the cactus down to
the second floor. And then we started to develop a studio, his
studio on the second floor, so it was just his art, his studio, his
cactus, and that was a huge leg up on his sanity and comfort.
rw Was he already collecting art by other people at the time?
jd Yeah, there was other people’s work around. There was a Flavin,
a Stella, a Smithson, Sol LeWitt…there were some things,
smallish things around, all mixed in. And it all sort of started to
get cleaned and separated.
ms That photo that’s been reproduced a few times of his studio, I
think he’s painting the top of the brown piece with the recessed
top, was that there perhaps on the second floor? There were a
bunch of red pieces around.
rw I think that photograph may have been at Bernstein Brothers.
jd I don’t remember that brown recessed-top piece even being at
19
thStreet.
ms OK. But there is a photo with several red pieces, I don’t recall
exactly which ones, I think the one painting with the yellow oval
that went to San Francisco is in the photo. Is that of the second
floor?
jd It’s a panel, a bas relief on the wall. That was on the upper floor.
He had four and two, the third floor somebody else had. And yes,
that bas relief was hanging very prominently in his living space.
rw Did you photograph those spaces? You began to take pictures…
jd I don’t think he wanted me to. There’s probably a few. He
gener-ally didn’t like photography. I was interested in documenting
and was also doing some photography work myself, my own
work. So I was around with the camera a lot and it made him
nervous. So that was dialed way back in the early years.
rw But he seemed to become more comfortable with it.
jd A little bit more. He never liked it. And always made it difficult.
And I always felt uncomfortable, every image I ever took.
rw But you found it to be important work because you took
thou-sands of photographs.
jd It interested me, and I thought this is incredible, I’ve never
seen a situation like this, I’m not sure there’s been a…I’ve
seen Brancusi’s studio, photographs of his studio, I’ve seen
Duchamp, you know, I knew my art history, but I’d never seen
anything quite like this. And I really wanted to capture it.
rw Sure. And now it’s an invaluable resource and they are beautiful
photographs.
jd Thank you. It was interesting and important to me and I got
away with what I got away with. He was never overtly irritable
about it and never told me not to. We went to Europe a couple
of times and I think I decided not to photograph because I
ARTILLER Y SHED DURING RENO V A TION .
would be missing too much of the trip, thinking too much.
Generally I tried to make a photographic record of what was
going on. So, there are very few photographs from 19
thStreet.
And then right after we got installed on two, and things were
humming, I thought, he negotiated with the landlord to get the
roof. So I said what…move the cactus to the roof…! And this
is no easy job…weeks of work, thousands of cactuses, dirt…
twenty-four large pans, each one filled with dirt and cactus, 400
pounds…Moving them down to two was a Herculean job, and
I was doing it all by myself. He wanted first to prepare the roof,
we imported a huge amount of more dirt, more pans, I built low
wooden beds—it was a big project. So, within less than a year of
my arriving, I moved the cactus twice.
rw This feels very pre-Marfa…to find a bigger desert.
jd Exactly. And I thought, wow, I’ve only been here a year and
we’ve gone from one cramped loft, which is already by my
standards a pretty big loft, to two plus a roof. And just as the
cactus got settled up there, he said: “Well, I bought a building.”
So then everything starts to get moved to 101 Spring Street. And
of course that was a huge project. And in fact I probably spent
most of my time in those early years dealing with the move and
with the physical needs of making 101 useful to him, because it
was full of machinery and rag-merchant materials.
rw So you needed to do quite a lot of work on the building before
he could move in? Cleaning the building out…
jd Yeah, and there were two tenants still there when we moved
in finally, and he was very generous to those two tenants, he
didn’t just kick them out…I think he gave them both a year or
so to move at their own speed. One of whom was a rag
mer-chant—because he had to move, he got out of that business and
got involved in an elevator business, which is the Mercer Street
parking lot. And the guy—Maurice was his name—was so
grate-ful for Don’s generosity in not rushing him out of the building,
he gave him a free parking space in the building for many years.
It was a nice relationship. Everybody was very anxious, me
certainly, to get the whole building and to start working on it.
ms Which floors were the first to be used?
jd Four, I think. Yeah, the fourth floor. We moved just there. So all
of 19
thStreet went to four plus the two basements, which
ac-cepted a lot of overflow. But they were a mess, dirty, and had all
kinds of crap in them. It was an awkward first several years.
ms How long were he and the family on 19
thStreet before they
started to move on to the fourth floor of 101 Spring Street, after
the purchase of the building?
jd Six months to a year.
ms Did you clear 19
thStreet entirely?
jd I think I moved everything with rental trucks.
ms So the art went into the basements?
jd Everywhere that was available. And not ideal. We started using
the spaces way before they were ready for that use. No
tempera-ture or humidity control, not really clean. Don having
exceed-ingly high expectations and standards for the care of the work,
and no real way to accomplish it. So it was dicey. I remember
doing my best to make the pieces safe for transport, and finding
a safe circumstance for all of it at Spring Street? Impossible.
Don was always in impossible situations.
ms Was that because he was rushing it? Or was it also a question of
money?
jd Large money issues then. Huge money issues. And his ambition
and his vision for not only 101 Spring Street. But as it became
clear very early on, Spring Street wasn’t big enough for him. So
just to finish this, from one loft, to two lofts and a roof, to an
entire building with five floors and two basements still being too
small. And for him, expressing his claustrophobia, both
intel-lectual because his ideas were huge and didn’t fit into any life
he could conceive here, even though he had just bought a whole
building,
rw Did the growing SoHo neighborhood and cacophony of New
York have as much a negative impact on him as the lack of
space?
jd Well, it’s funny, I thought he was a very graceful urbanite. In
hindsight he wasn’t a city guy. He’s a country guy, his
upbring-ing was in Missouri and his grandmother’s farm, outdoors,
hunting and fishing, running in the fields. That was in him
very strongly. It got subdued by his intellect and his studies at
Columbia. Intellectually, he’s very urban. I think that made him
as comfortable as he was in New York—Columbia, all the artists
and critics being here, the institutions being here. And he was
in tightly, writing for the art magazines, so engaged. It’s almost
secondary that it was a dense cacophonous city. His intellectual
engagement was of a piece with being here. But this
undercur-rent of open space and rural life was at odds with that.
ms How did he nurture his intellect in addition to reading and
writ-ing? How social was he? Did he connect with artists or critics?
jd He was quite social. He and Stella and Johns and Flavin and
a couple other people had a poker game once a week over in
Stella’s place in the Village. They partied together a lot. He
knew everybody and everybody knew him. And, of course, in
the sixties, “everybody” was under a hundred people, probably.
Everyone knew everyone else and went to their places. Don
didn’t like a lot of the social milieu, but he tried it at least once
and was in it at least once. He drove in a beat-up old station
wagon, with a crowd, out to the Hamptons, and spent some
time in that scene. Max’s Kansas City, Jerry’s…yeah…a
partici-pant. And he was seeing everybody’s art and reviewing it.
ms And did he continue to look at exhibitions in galleries and
museums after he stopped writing reviews?
jd Yeah, but I don’t know how. I don’t know how he did it, but
there wasn’t a show that occurred that he didn’t know about
and have an opinion about. I was running around like crazy,
try-ing to see everythtry-ing. Because he seemed exceedtry-ingly engaged…
and how he saw so many people, knew so many people, knew
about a new book having been written, or article that people
were discussing, an idea that was afloat…very, very engaged and
seemed to know everything about everything. He read all the
time, read everything. And not only is he reading news, three or
four newspapers—this is before computers—but he is reading
many books at the same time, through the sweep of human
history. He could be reading Voltaire or Montaigne and Cicero
and Lucy Lippard all at the same time.
ms Did he like to speak about what he was reading?
jd No…no. He didn’t speak much. He communicated a lot. In
the same way I never quite understood how he had all of this
knowledge, both historical knowledge but seemingly hands-on
experience both with the intellectual activity of his mind, and
the social…it was like osmosis. But there was a lot of contact
and he got tired of it. He wrote that one of the reasons he
wanted to get out of New York, one of the main reasons, he
didn’t like going out for a walk and running into everybody
he knew. And he’s very private, very busy in his head—a lot of
what was occurring was an interruption to his work.
rw While the building was being developed and work was being
installed, did he speak early on about the future of those
instal-lations as having some long-term goals attached?
jd Oh, absolutely. From day one. He wasn’t going to just slop
about at 101. He wanted to do it carefully, and what he did he
wanted to be a thing that would last. Not only an event but
an installation. And if he couldn’t do it now, he would have
an inadequate substitute. If it was a sink or the location of a
painting, it could so obviously be wrongly done, that this was
clearly a temporary solution. But it had a place in the future
plan. There grew very soon after a grand vision for 101 Spring
Street, which wasn’t clear to anybody, maybe even to him,
but there was a big vision. And I thought it was obvious that,
for example, we can’t have a broken stair! You have to put a
board there or something! And that was so down on his list
of priorities that the stair could be there for a decade, broken.
What was important were much bigger ideas, and the idea
of separating the floors: one for sleeping, one for living, one
for studio, one for entertaining, one for the public, the first
basement for storing this group of things, the second
base-ment—that became determined pretty early on, and we were
working toward that.
rw You bring up the public as an aspect of the enterprise…
jd Not “the public,” but visitors.
rw People could come in and see work. You remember the first
floor being used to circulate and show art.
jd People just came by to visit, which was constant, people from
the community but also from all over the world, to other
people just knocking on the door. That’s what would
hap-pen, and he wanted it to be sort of open. The first floor was
multipurpose in the early years, the third-floor invention as
a working studio didn’t really occur until…didn’t really ever
occur because he had moved on. And I think the first time it
became comfortable to him to call it a studio (which, by the
way, was in his head—he had no physical studio), when the
third floor approached his vision for it, was after the big open
aluminum piece came in. And the smaller floor piece in front
of the elevator changed a couple of times. He tried a couple
different pieces there, but he always had the vision for the big
piece, but it didn’t come for years. When he got the new floor
put in, got the walls stuccoed, got everything cleaned up and
removed, that piece was installed. It was made for the space.
Those proportions were based on that location.
rw Was the Larry Bell placed early?
jd Yeah, it moved a couple times. It was on five for a while on its
plexi pedestal. He played with the installation really seriously,
but when he made a decision, that was it. But then it turned
out that wasn’t it. He had an Irwin on five and it didn’t work.
And I couldn’t install it well enough, I never got the
installa-tion right. And he didn’t like the lamps that he had chosen.
So it went. The Chamberlain and the Oldenburg moved
around, switched places a couple of times. And the Stella,
which wound up on four, was on five for a short time. Things
got moved around. That was OK—it took a while to figure
out, but the intention was to get it right and there was going to be
a right. And then that was it.
ms But at the same time he was acquiring those works, i.e., he didn’t
have them on 19
thStreet.
jd A lot came later.
ms I’m not talking about the Flavin barrier, of course, because that
was done for the site, but the Chamberlain, Oldenburg.
jd And the Stellas—Valparaiso Green and the Stella protractor…a lot
of that came later. And Flavin’s bas reliefs with the lightbulbs—
they came later. Lucas Samaras…
ms Once something new came into the collection, was there a “OK,
let’s see where we can place this?” moment?
jd Yeah…although it wasn’t a circus. It was pretty calm. It was
worked out…he had lead time. We were prepared for a change
when it happened.
rw Did you and Dudley [Del Balso] start working for Judd around the
same time?
jd I’m not sure of her dates...Dudley had been working with Bill
Agee on many Judd issues leading up to his show at the Whitney.
I think Roberta Smith began helping Dudley with her job. And
Roberta and I were students at the Whitney. She was in the
curato-rial program and I was in the painting program. We were friends,
knew each other. I think I was first and then very shortly thereafter
Roberta came on to do that end of things. So she was doing what
Dudley wound up doing and I did what I did.
rw And that separated generally into office vs. studio work.
jd Yes.
rw Was Peter Ballantine in the same class?
jd We were at the Whitney together. I was at the Whitney for three
years, and I started working for Don while I was still there. I
introduced—Don asked me if I knew anybody who could help him
with the prototypes, maybe art, make some cabinets, and do some
things around art, and I thought Peter would be great because I
knew him, he was a good friend, and a wonderful carpenter who
was making art himself that incorporated carpentry. So that’s how
they got together. Peter did some building for Don, he built the
puppet theater, the Japanese railing, that was a year or two after I
had been there.
rw How soon did the need to get into the truck and start exploring
the country for a new place take hold?
jd I didn’t know that was the plan, but after the first year…I went
with Judd four times to Baja. I can’t keep them straight now, they
kind of merged in my mind.
I drove seven times cross country, just with his art [to Marfa]—
this is before that. I think the first time had to do with Bill Agee,
who had left Texas [the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston] and was
in Pasadena [Pasadena Art Museum] and Don was having a show
with Agee in Pasadena, after which we went to Baja. I think that
was our first trip, I’m not sure. I realized then, on my first trip
with him to Baja, how important the outdoors was, land,
camp-ing—the antithesis to dense, urban life. Let me see if I can get
the chronology figured out…my first understanding of how big a
part of his mind and life “non-city” was were these trips to Baja.
And they were incredible. They were camping trips essentially. We
stayed with the Espinozas in El Rosario, as everybody did in
those days, but it was mainly camping out in the countryside or
at the beach, and that’s where I got the first sense of what his
sense of scale was. Moving from 19
thStreet to 101 to those trips,
I thought, well, his deepest art ideas aren’t coming from…I
thought the boxes came from urban architecture and interior
gallery spaces. And I thought the stacks had to do with cities,
buildings…they looked like…or at best, a bigger idea, like
Brancusi, the endless column. I thought that’s what it was. But
on those trips to Baja, I realized this reference to infinity, or to
something bigger than the object itself, or in relationship to the
space which surrounds the thing itself, was a much bigger idea
and had to do with a much grander reach—a universal,
cosmo-logical reach. We took a trip to a place called Arroyo Grande,
which he writes about, and it was a very profound place. He
had a very profound evening there, which really caught my
attention. It was a difficult place to get to, and way off in the
middle of nowhere, you could only go in by horseback or a
long and dangerous hike. You couldn’t go alone. So, he wanted
me to go with him, and I did. He had been there before, on
horseback with vaqueros, and was moved by it and wanted to
go back and really experience this place, so we went. We had a
difficult but fine walk in and planned to camp there for a week.
I took a lot of food, supplies, for just him and me. We had a
pleasant evening and meal. The arroyo is this dish in the side
of this mountain range, at the foothills of this mountain range,
slightly tilted, and when you get all the way to the bottom of the
dish where we camped, if you look up, you could see the rim of
the arroyo. So you had a sense of very much being on the land,
big land, big desert, huge expanse, there’s Mexico out there.
There’s this rim against the night sky, the edge…this
spectacu-lar place, and I realized why Don liked it so much. Very cool
place. And the shape of the dish and the tondo, such a volume
of infinite space. I was having a great time. When he came to
breakfast that morning, he was beside himself somehow, and I
thought something had happened, he’d been bit by a scorpion
or was having a heart attack or been attacked—something was
off, he was not himself. He said “We gotta get out of here.” I
said we just got here, it’s so nice! He said [whispering] “I gotta
go.” I asked what’s wrong, and he said “The space!…”
ms It was too much.
jd It was. There was too much…He had had an intense and
pow-erful engagement with that space. I can speculate and could
speak at length about what I thought it was about. Anyway, it
was too much, and he wanted to get out of there right away.
So we packed up the camp and walked out. It was about a
day’s hike out, which neither one of us was ready for because
we were exhausted having just arrived. But then I thought,
wow, when he’s talking about space and his intellectual needs,
and his vision for the kinds of work he wants to do, and the
implications of the space in the arc that he thinks he’s making
and wants to make, this is what it’s about. This is the reach, the
vision, the scale that he’s seeing. And that kind of clicked. And
then everything clicked. What the move to Spring Street was
about, his interests, and that led to him starting to look around.
He wanted to buy land in Baja but couldn’t because of the
Mexican government. He also had a fight with the Espinozas,
so he started looking around…in Europe, in Canada, Australia,
Iceland, and because of money, I think, more than anything,
said well, can’t I find a place in the States, something I could
afford and make happen right away? He had already outgrown
101 Spring Street. So he made these circles on a map of the
United States, I think there was a 500 mile circle, and a 200
mile circle, and he was placing it around, all over, to find a
place that had the lowest population, and one of them found its
epicenter around Marfa. And he knew Marfa because he’d been
in the area during his army training and liked it then, so he
got very interested in Marfa and started making trips there on
his own, and then I went on a couple of early trips. He rented
a little house on the side of town, a little adobe, a dumb little
residential house, and it was into that house and its garage that
he started moving art. Even before he had solidified any sense
of how he would live there, he had sort of decided that this was
it. This town is going to meet my needs, and it’s got nine of the
FISHERMAN ’S ISLAND , BA JA CALIFORNIA , MEXICO , 19 7 0 .
ten things I’m looking for. I thought it was weird to be moving
art, this delicate, difficult-to-move art before we even had a
plan or a place that he owned or liked enough to rent—this was
just a dumb house that was never going to suit his needs, but he
moved five or six major pieces, including dss 33, into that little
garage. And he had hung a couple of Barnett Newman prints
on the wall. This was the first house and he didn’t do much
to it, but in a couple of weeks we just cleaned it up and did a
really nice job reducing it down to its bones, and he hung up
two Barnett Newman prints and something else and basically
that was it. He had a chair from Webb’s, the local stable supply,
and a rickety table and two mattresses on the floor. That was
how he left it.
ms Is that the truck ride he mentions in his writing, the essay
called “Marfa, Texas”? He wrote about a truck full of art that
he shipped from New York to Marfa.
jd No, that was the second one.
ms How did you transport the art on the first trip?
jd This trip was Flavin, Don, and me. We rented a small U-Haul
truck and filled it up with art and drove down. Staying in hotels
on the way. So it was kind of small.
ms Is that the house that was also on Spring Street, but in Marfa?
A few blocks from the Porter House?
jd Yes. East of the courthouse, a block or so. It was rented, I think
on a month-to-month lease. He just wanted a headquarters
there, and a phone or address, so it was all very perfunctory.
But kind of a nice simple house. But he never had plans for it,
never did very much to it. So that was my first trip to Marfa. We
unloaded that modest truck into the garage, very unsafe,
inse-cure. We just assumed it wouldn’t matter, which it didn’t. And
then it evolved from there. Shortly thereafter he got the Lujan
house and then he got the first airplane hangar at the Block, he
rented it from the Webb brothers, and then the Walker House
and two other houses, I can’t remember which, and then he
bought the hangar, rented the second hangar then bought the
second hangar, then bought a couple more houses in town,
then bought the first ranch. Then he started to work on all the
properties in town, then he really started to develop the Block.
The first hangar then the second hangar.
rw Did you install the work in those spaces?
jd Yes. I did all the original work on both buildings. And turned
the barracks [two-story building] into living quarters, the first
hangar into the two current installations and the bedroom,
and then across the way, in the second hangar, first it was
storage, and then he built a storage building [tar building], and
it became available for the library, with an indoor garden and
outdoor garden adjoining it, the use changed a couple of times,
and the south end of that building was a working studio for
a while, and he put another [secret] garden behind that, so it
evolved.
rw Who was in charge of the crew at the time and how many
people were helping?
jd It grew. It started out being just me and Chango [Celedonio
Mediano], and then Chango’s brother Alfredo Mediano. So just
the three of us. I was handling the art and they were building
and maintenance. They started building furniture for Judd. And
helping to get the buildings cleaned and ready. Helping with
the roofs, which leaked like crazy.
rw Were you aware of the Dia Art Foundation and its activities at
this time?
jd Everybody had a different silo, therefore a different world
view. I first met Heiner [Friedrich] at 101 Spring Street.
2I
was in on some early visits with Heiner, and I realized that a
lot was changing and changing fast. The relationship with Leo
JOHN CHAMBERLAIN SCULPTURES INS TALLED IN SOUTH ARTILLER Y SHED .
[Castelli] had strained, a lot of people were auditioning Don
and vice versa; Heiner was a major player, and I thought that
Don was very quickly, I thought too quickly, getting deeply
involved with Heiner and that was before Heiner was Dia.
Before Philippa [de Menil]…
rw In what way “too involved”?
jd In the same way I thought he was overly involved with Panza.
3I thought things were getting out of control with Panza. When
I stayed there [Varese, Italy] that time I saw that things were
not going the way he thought they were going. Things weren’t
getting installed right. I felt the same about Heiner. I thought
he was a German art dealer, and all of a sudden, what’s he
doing with Spring Street? Was he financing Spring Street? Is
he paying my salary? What’s his relationship to Marfa? And
then he was visiting Marfa. I didn’t understand it; I wasn’t in
on the business. Dudley, probably more so than me, knows
the evolution of that. I don’t know and shouldn’t say. But I
saw, first, a tentative relationship with Heiner. As with all of
the European dealers, I thought it was another one of those.
And then I realized it was something much bigger. And at
some point along the way, Dia came into the picture, bringing
in a whole new cast of characters, a whole new staff, and then
turning out to be a juggernaut—a huge thing. And I thought,
whoa, what is this? Will this affect my relationship to Don?
And who do I work for? Who owns what? Who is in charge
of what? I don’t think anybody knew, including Don. And it
went that way for a while, both sides benefitting from each
other, graciously and not. And then the money started to
go up, and Don realized he could do some big things. Some
really big things. The Earth Room was here, and the Lightning
Field was there, and the scale of things was growing. Things
really started to rock and roll. To cut a long story short, Don
got paranoid and thought he was being usurped. And that
his power and vision for Marfa, which was fairly explicit and
grand in scale, was getting bent, and as things were gearing
up and wonderful stuff was happening, bad stuff started to
happen, and acrimony and misunderstanding began to take
hold.
rw Was it financial?
jd Everything. Same with Panza, Don came to realize that other
people do not and cannot fully understand what his work is
about and therefore commit sins of misunderstanding. Money
has a way of obfuscating intention. Don was always very
sen-sitive about money because he came from having none and
needed its power to continue his career, to make the kinds of
pieces he wanted to make, to work on the scale he wanted to
work on, and it was being made available to him, but along
with that availability came things he didn’t want.
rw Around that time, I noticed in your notes that you were
quite involved in the evolution of the collection, the John
Chamberlain Building and its development, the Dan Flavin
project, I saw an early model that you might have made.
jd I didn’t, but I was involved in a lot of that early thinking. I was
the one who cleaned out the Wool & Mohair building, which
had been a warehouse and offices. We turned it into a great
space. I was delighted with that project. The idea that that
group of Chamberlains would go there was just wonderful. The
original idea, he wasn’t sure for what, it was empty for quite a
while, was to get the space, and then get Chango and Alfredo to
clean it up. Don’s main modus operandi was to acquire a space,
gut it, get it down to the beauty of the bones, and then decide
what it would be for.
rw The Chamberlain works spent some time in the artillery
sheds as well. We’ve seen some of your photographs of that
installation.
jd Yes.
ms Can we go back for a second to—what I would like to better
understand is the evolution of Don’s intention to have
per-manent installations, and we have the path from 19
thStreet to
Spring Street and then the Block, but at some point there is this
other track, which becomes the Chinati Foundation. I would
like to know from you how you saw these two strains developing
next to each other, because in the late seventies there already
was the idea of his own holdings becoming a foundation. What
do you remember about his thinking in this regard? Private
holdings next to what Dia might help put in place and how they
cooperated or enhanced each other.
jd How did one expanding universe become bifurcated, essentially?
ms Yes.
jd That’s sort of how I came to see it, a bifurcation, and what
I thought was just this balloon that was being blown up, an
expanding universe, with no end, it could be all the land
down to the Rio Grande, then it’s all Trans-Pecos, all Texas,
all the world—you know, it had that feeling. He didn’t have
any governor on his engine. And the expansion was infinite.
And the implication in the art is infinite. I think the art really
did invent its…the early epiphany that he had, as I said at the
Guggenheim,
4is that he could really make a piece that made its
own space. It wasn’t an object in space, and it wasn’t
respond-ing, or it wasn’t in conjunction with, or measured from, it was
creating its own space and that space engaged with all space in a
very specific way. That was his invention. It was huge. And then
when I realized that all space meant all space. Like at the Arroyo
Grande. So it’s huge and there is no cap. And now there’s
money. And I thought Don was off and running with the idea
that there is infinite money, infinite possibilities, so he upped the
scale—if he could make a piece that is a mile long, boy, we’re
going. It never occurred to me that something or somebody
else was the engine or even a co-participant. And Don, who
must have known that all this money coming from Heiner and
Philippa didn’t really (the same way with Panza)—he didn’t
want to believe it because he was so engaged with the project…
he thought it was his. He thought it was all his…all his idea, all
his intention, his ideas about control. I mean, when he had a
show at a gallery, Leo was in control, and takes it down the next
month. It’s bullshit and he couldn’t stand it. So, control, the
circumstances of the showing, the installation, all of that was
under the artist’s control rather than the art world’s control.
Bridling against that whole idea was one of the main reasons
to leave the New York art scene. Because that was all about the
artist being suppressed and forced into these silos.
ms Did he feel compromised not having that control over the Leo
Castelli exhibition?
jd Oh, yeah. He felt very constrained by all aspects of the way
the New York art world worked. Resentful, constrained,
sup-pressed, condescended to, irritated by, and wounded. When
he couldn’t get the show to look the way he really wanted it to
2 Dia Art Foundation was founded in 1974 by Heiner Friedrich, Philippa de Menil, andHelen Winkler.
3 Giuseppe Panza di Biumo was an Italian collector of modern art who commissioned and acquired a number of works from Judd.
4 Dearing was a participant in Object Lessons: The Panza Collection Initiative Sympo-sium at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on April 9–10, 2019.
look, because the space wasn’t adequate. And then, as much as
he tried to make it right, it would be taken down in a month.
I mean, it’s depressing. He couldn’t stand it and he thought
Marfa was a way out of that. It solves his claustrophobia
prob-lems, gives him access to infinite space, gives him control—he’s
the Leo now, he’s deciding the installation is permanent. I
decided if something goes there, it stays there forever! Huge
change. More money than had ever been available before. So
boom—this is great. Then, you know, as things actually start
to happen, of course Heiner wants some control over things,
and there isn’t infinite money so they have to scale the money
back, you can’t just buy everything west of the Pecos, you can
buy two ranches, OK, that’s a lot of land west of the Pecos
but we can’t buy Texas. All of a sudden he’s feeling the same
thing he felt in New York with Dick Bellamy.
5And that’s where,
somewhat to his surprise, he’s not naive but he’s very engaged
in a vision, and visions are very capable of leaving things out,
and I think what he left out was that it was all of those issues he
was leaving behind he didn’t leave behind, they’re just taking a
different form, and in a different scale and at a different speed.
This is before Chinati even existed. We’re expanding now, and
he’s just beginning to realize that Heiner represents everything
that he thought he was escaping rather than being the guy who
is giving him the key to freedom. It didn’t happen quick. It
happened slow. But then it kind of steamrolled. And then it got
ugly. And Heiner and Philippa, rightfully, wanted to know what
was happening, and to know how their money was being spent,
and ultimately to have some control over it. They had to. But
that didn’t go gently down with Judd. So that’s I think where
the bifurcation started. He didn’t design a two-track system.
And he didn’t conceive that this was the Judd Foundation and
this is Chinati and never the twain shall meet. That was the
farthest thing from his mind. It was one project and it was all
part of this expanding-universe projection. It had nothing to do
with governments or banking or any of the institutions he was
hoping to escape. But of course you can’t, they’re there, and
they just take different forms.
ms This is interesting, that you are stressing that this was all
some-thing coherently considered and contemplated and intended.
That is something I understood as well, looking for instance at
that first catalogue the Chinati Foundation produced where the
Block is illustrated as part of a whole. From some of the papers
we have read through there seems to be a discussion of, yeah,
maybe part of Spring Street can go into the foundation. So this
is what I wanted to hear from you, whether this was indeed an
integrated thought about some of his private holdings, vis-à-vis
what was still to be developed and realized.
jd I should probably say no more, because the moment we are
talking about is the moment of bifurcation and the complication
that comes with fast growth. A fast expansion. And I don’t think
Don knew and I think a lot of other people had intentions and
assumptions and ideas about who owned what and who was
in charge and who held the power. Or that the money held the
power, therefore the money was powering the events, therefore
the money would control the events. It all happened kind of
quickly. Beside and outside the emotional, intellectual, or
artistic intention. I think it was a sidebar and all of a sudden it
could no longer exist as a sidebar. Things got scrambled. And
there was one foundation, well maybe there have to be two,
because those have to be separate and this is personal, and he’s
so private. He doesn’t want his bedroom in some foundation.
That’s ridiculous. Well, we’ll make two foundations. Something
like that.
ms I was trying to go in the direction of…all is born from the same
thought and intention.
jd What I saw, and thought I was participating in and helping to
make real, was a single thing, and as it got bigger and faster, it
got complicated. And at the time of the complication, I more
or less left. I think that’s probably fair to say. I’m not sure of
the chronology either. I’m probably not the best person to
ask. And I still don’t understand, and I should, and I keep
asking people, and trying to scrutinize my own experience with
whatever capacities I have, the relationship between Chinati
and Judd. Early on there were a lot of interviews about what
should be done with this bifurcation: what does it mean? And
what should be done about it, how do we think about it? I said
at the time that I thought it was causing a lot of confusion and
complicating finances and roiling up emotions, ultimately to
the detriment of the vision expressed in the objects, and in the
more general, ideational, intention of the artist. If anything
can be done to make them one again, it might be a good idea.
And everybody said, well, you can’t make something one that’s
become two. There’s some truth in that. Did it do damage?
Who knows? Damage is going to come to anything that’s
hap-pening—anything on that scale, that vision, which is outside the
rules of the world, which this certainly was. It didn’t conform
to normal forms of governance, it didn’t conform to normal
banking practices, curatorial, the neat progress of art history,
it didn’t conform to anything. So it was bound to run into
troubles, and one man’s intellect, no matter how forceful and
rigorous, can’t be big enough. I don’t think circumstances ever
ran out of his control, but I think he felt that events had evolved
with a speed and intensity and complication, such that he was
having to give too much of his time to administrative concerns
and it was affecting his ability to make art. That’s when things
turned dark. He had that idea, in fact that was something that
happened to him, that would have been very bad for him. Bad
for his psychology. I think he did, and that was when things
went awry. It usually starts with abstract forms of governance
and finance and very quickly becomes personal, with personal
difficulties, and I can’t speak to those. A grand vision from a
very interesting guy.
ms And the challenge for us in the past, Rob still currently, and the
next generations, to maintain Chinati, is huge. It is part of the
reason to conduct this oral history and talk to you among others
who were around and can serve as a source regarding Don’s
experience and intentions and wishes.
jd Maybe the key is to put emphasis on the obvious, that when a
vision breaks all the rules, or proceeds in such a way that its very
core is a poor fit to pre-existing schemes, on purpose, it creates
a very new circumstance. And it’s that that needs attention. And
here it is. We have an example of that: come to Chinati. The
ad-jacency of the hundred aluminum works, in those buildings, with
those windows, to the concrete pieces outside, you don’t see that
in Rome. You see bigger things in Rome, the placement, or the
Parthenon on the hill, but you don’t see anything like that. That
is new. And what that says about scale and material, and color
and land, the advancement of world art, is unlike anything else,
anywhere else. It couldn’t have happened in any city. Couldn’t
have happened under any city government, any existing
govern-ment even now. So what really is that? Those hundred boxes
sitting there next to those completely different though absolutely
the same concrete pieces outside, two different scales, that
adjacency is so incredible. If you look deeply at that adjacency,
probably all the answers are there…What is Chinati? Why? How?
It’s that adjacency. Really unique. Every time I say that people
point out, well, what about I.M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre, this
5 Richard Bellamy was director of the Green Gallery in New York, where Judd exhibited his works in the years 1963–65.
