Deadline for applications is Tuesday 18 February to attend our free art-writing course, in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway. It is too soon to say whether New York has entered a period when its past is more of an attraction than its present, but that time may not be far off. In readiness for that eventuality, various constituencies are busily historicizing parts of the metropolis.
However, his huge ambitions and persnickety standards exceeded even its initially vast means, and so β after much Sturm und Drang involving the artist, Dia and a succession of dealers β Judd established the Chinati Foundation to oversee the real-estate-hungry permanent installations of his own work and that of friends such as John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg and Ilya Kabakov in Marfa, Texas.
It was β and is β a majestic cast-iron loft building in the once romantically desolate now boutique-clotted, cash-cold heart of SoHo. I have quite mixed feelings about the aesthetic and existential questions begged by one-person institutions of this kind. Except for meticulously designed and artfully constructed functional units β shelving, cabinets, closets, sleeping and storage lofts, bathrooms and a large kitchen, all conceived by Judd and realized under his supervision β the otherwise open floorplan remains intact.
With high, uncurtained windows at the front and all the way down one side, each level is bathed in natural light with views open to the western sky on the top floors. Each area has its singular function: the kitchen and dining space occupies much of the second floor; a very low platform bed dominates the middle of the uppermost floor; while drawing tables and major works of art fill the rest.
A rigorous, sometimes cutting critic of art he found wanting, Judd was also a remarkably generous, surprisingly pluralistic admirer of work he judged worthy of sustained attention. Marfa is full of it and so is Spring Street.
