The September 2020 zoom panel for Judd, MoMA’s mononymous Donald Judd retrospective is already a fascinating document of its moment. For a show that was closed for four months by COVID restrictions, there was much discussion of the people, and the physical experience of Judd’s work. Spatial qualities, social distancing, the reflectivity of its surfaces, the subjectivity of seeing one’s masked self seeing.
Rachel Harrison’s mesmerizing photos of details of the work and Leslie Hewitt’s discussion of how photogenic it is drew insights from curator Ann Temkin about how much she’s learned from watching visitors photograph the show, and how they’d debated whether it was safe to allow photos at all, and how much our relationship to photography has changed since even the last major Judd retrospective at Tate Modern in 2004. Harrison pointed out the historical shift in Judd photography, citing James Meyer’s catalogue essay, about Judd’s first show is documented by just two black & white installation photos by Rudy Burckhardt.
Jeffrey Weiss’s last comment was to suggest Judd saw people–and museums— as things to be avoided, not courted, though, which is why he kind of withdrew to Marfa and set up his own spaces. When Temkin said we’ll end thinking of Marfa, Harrison piped up to say, how about John Waters instead? And his great poster, which she paraphrased fondly as, “Welcome to Marfa, the Disneyland of Minimalism,” inviting everyone at home to Google it.
It is actually, The Jonestown of Minimalism,” of course, but the misquote was a clue, probably, of what Harrison was reading up on for her Judd panel. Waters’ 2003 poster was on the cover of the Summer 2004 issue of Artforum, which was largely dedicated to the first major museum exhibitions historicizing Judd and Minimalism. It included articles by Temkin [on Judd conservation], Weiss [on artists’ writing], and Meyer [on scale]. Waters’ poster is the lede for a spectacularly grumpy review by Yve-Alain Bois of three museum shows—including Judd at Tate:
“Take the Whole Family to Marfa, Texas,” exhorts the broadside, beneath a Li’l Abner–style middle-class family, grinning like they’ve just won a vacation to Disney World. A bubble on the poster advertises “The Jonestown of Minimalism,” mocking the tenacious cliché of the movement’s “spirituality” by likening it to a senseless sect.
Bois’ review, the whole issue really, including the lengthy back & forths in the letters, reads very much as of its moment, when the entire art world was talking to itself in the magazine of record [sic * 3 obv]. When I’d go back and read my blog posts from the early 2000s, I used to think my self-referentiality and -importance was insufferable, but now I realize I was soaking in it. It really did be like that sometimes.
So some art world things and faces are the same, but what’s changed? For one, you actually can fly to Marfa now—and some of us [sic] did. In April 2020, the early freakout days of the COVID shutdown, Nate Freeman reported that a private jet flew from Teterboro to Marfa with three passengers. Who quarantined at addresses of the Chinati Foundation, and a studio compound owned by Christopher Wool & Charline von Heyl.
But I think the most salient—and terrifying—development is revealed in Harrison’s prescient malapropism. Does anything capture our dire cultural moment more clearly than the conflation of Disney World and Jonestown?
