Southwest

When you go somewhere new the test is always, would you go there again?

Yes to El Paso, Texas; Juarez, Mexico; Marfa, Texas; Los Cruces, New Mexico; Tucson, Arizona.

By the time I got to Phoenix, minimalism had caught up to me and when I saw the Donald Judd piece on the wall at the Phoenix Museum of Art (pictured above) I knew I'd come full-circle. It was time to fly home to San Francisco.

I'd seen a lot of art in Marfa, so much art that physical images were starting to take possession of my consciousness. My brain was changing as I drove through the Sonoran desert, drifting away from language to visual objects that actually existed in time and space, free of words. There was a way of looking at the world as if it was a Donald Judd or John Chamberlain or Carl Andre or any number of other artists who made objects purposely disembodied from their makers, and I was looking at the world this way, so that everything I was seeing had already been made by someone else and had little or no emotional content.

Somewhere near White Sands, New Mexico I came to my senses. It wasn't a conversion experience, it was much more subtle--that the dunes of white sand, the blue sky, the mountains in the distance existed without me and that words were what I had at hand to make sense of a panorama enormous enough to enable my fellow citizens to test rockets and missiles and other weapons that could blow us all up.

Once I figured out what Donald Judd and his compatriots were saying in Marfa, Texas I could see that I didn't need art anymore, though I'd be lost without it. Words were powerful and exciting once again. Now there's nowhere I wouldn't go, and I'd go there again.