parispapa123:

donald judd

when i lived in nyc (and for some time in CA) i worked representing contemporary artists and galleries. although, i was a publicist for a big museum in brooklyn for several years, that paycheck barely subsidized the cost of the cigarettes i smoked each week. the big money came from the galleries and other clients.

pace/wildenstein was and is THE gallery. i don’t care what mary boone says. the cat lady and her troops were the shizz holding an encyclopedic stable of artists and their estates. the judd foundation was my first BIG project with them and i ventured out to marfa with mike kimmelman and a couple curators for an extended piece in the times.

getting there is an adventure. it took a flight to dallas and then we had to cram ourselves in to a tiny plane. flying in a private plane is glamorous when you take a lear or something, but those have jet engines.. and can still be dicey. flying in this disaster felt like riding in a shoe box with a vaccum cleaner engine.

once we landed, we found ourselves in a completely alien landscape that was the epitomne of flatness. from nowhere boxes emerged and eventually lights appeared throughout the skeleton of a ghost town. i still get goosebumps when i think of it lit. the only time i had ever experienced something similarly hushed and alien was when i found myself at roden crater.

a couple years ago i returned to marfa, this time working for prada in my new role pimping out fashion and culture for media interest. the eventual work was vandalized many times over and although we pushed the story that the theft was for the coveted accessories, i suspect that a local purist just couldn’t handle the crass commercialism of the “collaboration”. that’s certainly how i felt about it.