There is little evidence that the land US Route 90 travels though as it arcs from El Paso to Marfa (Population: 2,121) is not the fabled middle of nowhere. That is, almost no evidence. On the roadside, about fifteen miles outside of Marfa, flanked on all sides by an untouched expanse of low rolling desert, is the smallest and remotest Prada store in the world. An immaculate window display of handbags and shoes blurs with the contents of window’s reflection: two gravel lanes of highway and the Chiahuahuan desert. The display is lit through the night, casting a solitary glow over the landscape, obscuring otherwise brilliant stars. The nearest inhabitants, cattle ranchers, spend their daylight hours attending to livestock and are likely indifferent to high-end fashion. So why would Prada – with flagship stores in Milan and New York City – put a store near Marfa, a city with a slight fraction of the population of the metropolises that hold the nine other Prada stores in the US? Retailers in Prada’s sphere make it a point not to overextend their retail base in order to maintain the perception of scarcity that derives the aura of upscale consumption. Prada doesn’t slum. But Prada Marfa is also Prada Marfa, that is, a work of art. Though overseen and owned by Prada, the store was conceived as an art installation by German artists Ingar Dragset and Michael Elmgreen. The company considers it a store, but there’s a catch:  it’s sealed. The 2005 collection is permanently on display, only to be viewed – never touched or purchased – through floor-to-ceiling windows that are only about a dozen feet from the road. Tonight the windows are splattered in mud from ranchers who come out here drunk after the rains to skid their pickups in the dirt in front of the windows. This is art in the 21^st century:  irretrievably bound to markets and marketing. But maybe it’s no longer the much conjectured about line between art and commerce that is in play, but rather a matter of how much of the world we are willing to call art in order to survive it. ••••••••••••••••••• The sunlight draws long the rectangular shadows of the pillars of wall across the cement foundation of the old base infirmiry, which, along with the pillars are all that remain of the building. In another decade this place might look sort of like Stonehenge, except that it will not be interesting. Is this better than a defunct strip mall? Does it go without saying that an absence is both an absent presence and a present absence? It’s unclear if the museum owns this property. Down the street some modest tract homes are taking shape. Beyond them only desert. A car drives down the road and stops in front of the structure, in which I had been alone. The car is a spearmint green Ford Taurus, so clean and generic it has to be a rental. A young, well-dressed couple emerge. They walk up to the massive square cement slab barren of anything except me, whom they do not acknowledge. “This is amazing,” I overhear the man say. ••••••••••••••••••• The prospect of small-town pizza might be unnerving, but the pie at a restaurant occupying an old gas station is a dead ringer for Brooklyn pizza. The guy behind the counter has a fashionable haircut and wears a bright blue shirt with a familiar orange logo. In a dusty desert town of 2,000 people, a fan of the New York Metropolitans. “What, you aren’t a Spurs fan?” I ask because he seems easy-going, thinking of the nearest professional sports team. “I’ve never been to San Antonio,” he tells me. ••••••••••••••••••• In the center of the city – a title rather too grand in its suggestion – and across from Marfa’s weathered City Hall, near the nexus of the city’s two main streets, sits an art bookstore stuffed with pricey coffee table monographs of primarily contemporary artists that would quicken the pulse of a seasoned big-city art enthusiast. Entirely absent is the painterly cowboy or “Southwestern” art that prevails in the lower border states. This is MOMA stuff – art that, if not urban itself, lives on the patronage of urban institutions. It hardly seems that the rather depressed-looking Marfa could produce more than a handful of committed patrons of this sort of product. Of course, Marfa is not the normal West Texas small town it might at first appear to be. Nor is this fact a secret. It is rather a significant if outer blip on the radar of the contemporary art world – a status it owes to the Chinati Foundation, a museum founded by Donald Judd and forged in the remains of a defunct Army base, Fort D.A. Russell. The collection’s focus is mid-to-late 20^th century conceptual and minimalist art, featuring permanent exhibition of works by heavyweights like Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, and Carl Andre. Judd’s own work, here a huge series of micro-varying aluminum boxes, fills two large hangers. The importance of the collection is beyond dispute, but it seems rather strangely situated. Flavin’s florescent lights and Judd’s riffs on mechanical reproduction would seem to lack their context here. But the town in turn adds something to the art, something other that seems to provide much of the draw for the cosmopolitan tourists who steadily find their way here year-round. For those locals who do not work in art/tourism – and one gets the impression few of the people who do are local – this must be a rather awkward predicament. When pressed, the tour guide at Chinati divulges a short history in which many locals were initially hesitant to embrace Judd’s projects and he met their concern with an open contempt. Marfa has a certain uncanny nature about it. One gets the feeling that he is in two places at once:  a town inhabited by people for whom things are placid, as they have always been; and another town, inhabited by those for whom the mere fact of being here has an air of whimsy to it. The suggestion that small town art should be populist or utilitarian is not without a measure of condescension, but the issue lies elsewhere. Chinati benefits from a unilateral relationship to its location:  it attracts visitors to what might seem like an otherworldly small-town aura, while not speaking to or reflecting that location at all. But the issue doesn’t fold up so nicely as that. One of the tour’s features is the old base gymnasium, which Judd remodeled – or so the tour guide alleges. Other than some Zen touches (the doors have been pulled out into the field surrounding the building so that they are about twenty feet away from their now empty frames), the building is largely unadorned and unaltered. This is Chinati’s – and Marfa’s – open secret: they thrive on the blurred distinction between art and surrounding – a phenomenon further complicated by the utter disconnect between the two. It is as though – as much as the works themselves – the real draw is that such works could exist in a podunk West Texas town. The guide says that Chinati visitors often wander off to untouched portions of the base and fail to realize they are no longer in the curated museum. The cumulative effect of these works and their manner of presentation beg that it is the base and the city that are already art; moreover that this is the apex of American art, that most rarefied aesthetic commodity: the real America and, through the gaze of its visitors, also its representational double. And it’s impossible to shake the sense that this gaze, so bent on the authentic, always displaces it. ••••••••••••••••••• “I’m not dead. I’m on fire.” I speak the words into the microphone, staring out at the half empty bar. “There’s a difference.” The audience doesn’t get it, doesn’t care. The instrumental introduction to Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” is really too long for karaoke. A white dash mark flicks on/off against the blue television screen counting down the twelve or sixteen bars. With the galleries and Chinati closed, there isn’t anything to do, so I end up at the bar and spend most of the night talking to Chinati summer staff and artist-in-residence types. The ceiling above the bar is strung with lights that are like Christmas lights, only with small plastic cacti and cowboy boots for bulbs. At one point, two older cowboys walk in and lean on the bar to order whiskey. This reminds me of a question I had wanted to ask but had forgotten while I was on the Chinati tour earlier in the day. “How are relations with the locals now, with Judd dead and art world dollars flowing in?” I ask a young woman here on a summer fellowship. “I’m told they keep getting better,” she says. ••••••••••••••••••• The most engrossing piece at Chinati is Ilya Kabakov’s School No. 6, in which the artist fills an entire barracks building with the remnants of a Cold War-era Soviet schoolhouse. It’s a desolate scene: disordered wooden desks, faded propaganda posters crumbling off the walls, school papers scattered about the floor – evoking catastrophic abandonment (either in the wake of the failed socialist state or, more dramatically, the remains of nuclear holocaust). Narrative suggestions notwithstanding, one can’t shake the sense that the quality which Kabakov outlines is already there in the dilapidated base – itself decommissioned during the Cold War. The remaining curiosity is which desires, what lack, drive this encounter, the viewing through the frame of art that which was already there without art. ••••••••••••••••••• It’s a fair question:  whether Chamberlain’s junked car sculptures, which fill the well-lit interior of one of the largest buildings in the town’s center, or the junked cars rotting in the scrap yard off the highway are the more compelling objects.  Can Marfa have it both ways? ••••••••••••••••••• It’s not that the light is too bright. In fact it’s too dim. But there is something nasty about it, grimy. It’s a fundamentally empty grocery store light. A brightness blown out. This is the edge of town, away from the art. There are a surprising number of generic products made by brands I don’t know. A jar of applesauce is leaking out onto the grayish linoleum of the center aisle. I am tired after the night before and hungry on the way out of town.  I find a box of cheese crackers and a Coke. I would not otherwise consider this a meal but right now it feels as though I am embracing something. And something in me wants to feel sorry for these cashier girls, who look bored leaning against their two checkout counters in blue aprons and ponytails. They are not ugly. They are both actually kind of pretty, but it’s a sort of unrealized prettiness. I don’t know who I am to feel sorry for anyone else. I walk up to pay for the food and this girl gives me an awkward look like she doesn’t know what to make of me, doesn’t know why I am here. I wouldn’t be able to answer if asked. Then something comes over me:  I know I’m leaving. “You aren’t a Spurs fan are you?” I ask. She looks at me a second, dispassionately. “No. I’ve never been to San Antonio.” These girls are sad. Or they appear sad to me. I don’t know which is true or which is worse. And it occurs to me that this is a non-place. Sure, nowhere and its middle. But it’s also a city utterly detached from the geo-cultural coordinates on which it should lie – and endlessly trying to project those sutures which would refasten it. It is a place so fervently engaged in the action of seeing itself as itself that it’s become its own mirage, glinting off of the pavement blurring in the afternoon heat. by Brandon Kreitler