Travels with Jack and Sam

We Left Las Cruces and headed to Davis Mountains State Park - deep in Western Texas. Why you might ask. One word - Marfa. We had heard of Marfa on our way to California earlier in December, and then our good friend Vince was going there - so we figured - better see it now because who knows when we’ll be this way again, etc etc. All we knew about Marfa was that it was a mecca for art installations and that “art installation” is sometimes considered a vulgar expression. We ended up going to Davis Mountains State Park because that is the closest state park to Marfa.

I took some ordinary shots of landscape between Las Cruces and the Davis Mountains of Western Texas just trying to convey the vastness of Texas. Some are in my previous blog post and some I hope will be with this one. Beautiful light, beautiful expanses of land. Texas continues to amaze.

We got to the State Park at a beautiful time of the day - the magic hour in movie parlance - and set up camp for the night. By the way, this State Park is beautiful and as usual, we paid about $25.00 a night to stay. The odd animal in this park is a Javalina, which looks like a boar but is called a peccary and is not in the pig family

As we set up camp a family came by and told us about the McDonald Observatory which was just up the road, and something happening that night called a “Star Party.” The Observatory is affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin and is located at the top of one of the Davis Mountain Peaks. We went to an early twilight show, in addition to the “Star Party.” The earlier show was over my head, a grad student type talking about “plane of the ecliptic” and reporting there were actually 13 zodiac signs - the 13th one being Ophiuchus. I left the lecture and took the sunset picture below. At 7:00 we went to the Star Party and that was lovely. The Observatory takes light pollution very seriously - kids with those sneakers that make light had to get masking tape to put over their sneaks. Our lecturer was knowledgeable and accessible and we saw some great cosmic sites but the piece de resistance of the evening was going around to the various telescopes set up and seeing what was on the menu for this night. We went to two and saw nebulae and Uranus!

The next morning we drove the twenty miles to explore Marfa. Marfa owes its fame to Donald Judd, an artist who worked from the forties to the beginning of the nineties. I thought I had read somewhere that Judd first became familiar with Marfa due to being stationed there, there used to be an Army base here, but have not been able to confirm that. He worked in many different mediums but what we went to see in Marfa were his concrete structures.

I think Judd may have been one of the first artists to have others construct his work and he defended this practice arguing that methods should not matter as long as the results create art. He also advocated for permanent installations for his work and that of others believing that temporary exhibitions, being designed by curators for the public, “placed the art itself in the background, ultimately degrading it due to incompetency or incomprehension.” That’s a quote from Wikipedia! Judd rented his first house in Marfa, which is really truly in the middle of nowhere, in 1971 in part to have space for his art to be permanently displayed. Over the years he bought thousands of acres, some of them from the Army, and used all of them for various purposes related to his art, and of course, living space. Some of these lands are now managed by the the Chinati Foundation whose purpose is to keep art in the space in which it was created. Other artists are housed here as well, but we focused on Judd.

A note on the town of Marfa itself: I don’t know what we expected but Marfa surprised us. It was on the whole very unprepossessing and hard to figure out. It is very underdeveloped except for some chichi hotels and stores which look crazily out of place. We did manage to find a really good place to have breakfast and I, of course, captured the food below.

From Marfa we drove to Austin where we had mundane business things to take care of - car’s 12,000 mile checkup, etc. We did many of the same things we did in Austin on our first visit with the exception that we tried a different bbq place, The Salt Lick, located in Driftwood, Texas. You have to go to a place like that just because of the name, right? We left Austin after two nights to visit Galveston, a town that for some unclear reason I have aways wanted to see. Fortunately Harry agreed!Read more