From a plane to a taxi to an overnight layover to another plane to car. I am—at long last—far away from Iceland. Or so I thought.
Text and photos by Jonas Moody.
Journeying back to the state my family calls home, I find myself in Marfa, Texas, which is some kind of arty farty outpost-cum-border town in the West Texas high desert. Here you’ll find the likes of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin among the yucca plants and homemade chalupas.
Courthouse at Marfa, Texas.
Walking down Highland Street from the incongruously ornate courthouse at the town square I am bombarded by bizarre juxtapositions. On one side of a split storefront is Evan Hughes furniture, which sells exclusively through outlets strategically located in Brooklyn and Marfa.
On the adjoining side of storefront sits its sister shop, “Sacks Thrift Avenue,” proud as a pumpkin, with secondhand clothes in its display window.
Down the way after passing the Ayn Foundation and their wallful of Warhol’s Last Supper, I come across two kids selling lemonade and decide to indulge.
“How’s business?” I ask.
“Slow, but good,” he responds like a veteran salesman from behind oversized sunglasses. “But third time’s the charm,” he says, placing his hand on my shoulder and pulling me closer with a grin. “And you’re number three.”
Big plans seem to abound in these parts, and Marfa is no exception. It served as the backdrop for the 1956 film Giant in which Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Elizabeth Taylor play out their machinations of boomtown ranchin’, oil gusher drillin’, and high-desert romancin’, respectively, but are never quite able to escape their own individual fates.
Since time immemorial this place hasn’t been able to shake the notion that there is something to be had in these hills. After the Americans came with their cavalry and the speculators with their oil derricks, the moviemakers entered with their Hollywood stars and even the sci-fi crowd made an appearance chasing the unexplained "Marfa lights" off Highway 90—which are most likely no more than car headlights from Highway 67 reflected through a savannah.
Finally the artists arrived. In 1979 Donald Judd came riding in on his white horse named minimalism along with cohorts Dan Flavin and John Chamberlain.
The triumvirate claimed nearby Ft. Russel in the name of art and did their rain dance to summon forth the deus ex machina of the Dia Art Foundation, which showered them with cash. And thus was born The Chinati Foundation, an oasis of large-scale contemporary art installations in an otherwise culturally barren landscape.
My co-tourists on the outing to see the museum’s exhibitions scattered across the 430-acre parcel of land are a motley crew indeed. The black-clad art students in their thick-rimmed glasses snap pictures with bulky medium format cameras and get skittish around the ants and larger buggage hiding in the grass.
The middle-aged couple seems more keen on prodding the local flora and fauna than seeing the artwork. I diligently take notes (a habit I picked up in grade school and have yet to shake), and my mother diligently watches me diligently take notes.
Our thin-lipped and dispassionate intern docent delivers a lackluster tour, rattling off dates and names when not harping on her unremitting caveat to us, a group of grownups: touch with your eyes, not your hands. Despite her arty aloofness, the pieces that fill the museum’s abandoned army barracks emanate the same stark beauty of the landscape around them.
Standing among Donald Judd’s prodigious aluminum boxes in a cavernous hangar flooded with sunlight, I find the wide, roaming spaces of my family’s native Texas become an inkling more tangible.
And in an odd way I feel at home.
We leave the first barrack and step out onto a wide concrete slab in a field of yucca plants. Three concentric circles are laid out with stones that seem out of place, but oddly familiar. I’m told the work is called Sea Lava Circles and is made up of Icelandic rocks that the artist, Richard Long, brought with him to Marfa.
Sea Lava Circles by Richard Long (1988).
Clearly I’m not the first one to make this trek, although my luggage was doubtlessly lighter. At the sight of these rocks, the gap narrows ever so slightly. I have not gone so far away.
Trudging through the flitting grasshoppers, fuzzy caterpillars, and a lone jackrabbit crouched under a mesquite to poop, we make our way to an outlying barrack. The work inside is by an Icelander, Ingólfur Arnarsson. A sort of emissary sent to represent the arcane secrets of the North for all the curious inhabitants of the West.
But there is no great secret revealed once inside, no epiphany. The oblong room is painted white, punctuated with small squares of gray on the wall: sheets of paper undulating with crosshatched graphite patterns.
These are rectangular airplane windows gazing out into a far-off and hazy cloudscape. The tessellation of squiggly strokes possesses enough inertia that the long building appears to be drifting towards an indistinct destination.
And in an odd way I feel at home.
Works by Ingólfur Arnarsson, Photograph by M. Lauffer.
We leave the museum and find a greasy Mexican restaurant called Conchita’s where the salsa is so hot you can’t taste anything else. Once the sun drops down below the Chinati Mountains we drive out on Highway 90 and pull off to the side of the road.
Leaning against a guardrail in the cool night air we gaze out into the desert in an attempt to spot the Marfa Lights. Squinting into the darkness I could just as well be waiting for the spectacular cascade of the aurora to tumble down into the skies just outside Reykjavík. Seeing nothing I peer up to find Cassiopeia perched in her upside-down throne as always.
Iceland will always and forever be only an army barrack or a constellation away, no matter how near or far I am from the country itself. Perhaps it’s my big plan. Or perhaps it’s my fate. But unlike Rock Hudson, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and even Cassiopeia herself, I am not so keen to escape it.
Marfa has turned out to be a strange beast, indeed. Neither fish nor fowl. This place seems to be content to lead a double life, sporting two faces at every corner. Fine furniture next to second-hand sweaters. High art alongside truck-stop diners. Border-town locals neighboring New York artists.
Leaving Marfa I feel no less a Texan and no less an Icelander. Neither here nor there. Simply moving towards an indistinct destination. Áfram Marfa! Marfa ho!
