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The Man Who Bought Marfa
On Sunday 8 February 2004 the Radio 3 Sunday Feature ‘The Man Who Bought Marfa' was broadcast.
Patrick Wright heads for the remote town of Marfa, Texas (population 2424), on the trail of the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. Although Judd made his name in New York in the 1960s, he decided to flee the metropolis, and in 1972 ended up in Marfa, Texas, a speck on the map almost two hundred miles from any major city. He gradually began buying up land and buildings there, including a former prisoner-of-war camp and artillery sheds, and transformed them into spaces in which to display his art, believing that permanent installations and the Texan sunlight formed the ideal environment in which to view his work. He lived and worked in Marfa until his death ten years ago.
Now to coincide with the major retrospective of Judd’s work at Tate Modern, Patrick Wright examines how Judd’s memory and legacy has affected this small Texan town and its varied inhabitants.
Listen to clips below and hear the full programme at BBCi.
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Photo of Nicholas Serota © www.frankbauer.com |
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[Patrick Wright] …he started making three-dimensional works in the early ‘60s, he employed contemporary materials with no history of artistic use, plywood, Plexiglas, sheet aluminium and with them he created works that seem like curious outcrops of space itself. By 1970 he had achieved an international reputation for these minimalist works that caught the eye of Nicholas Serota, now Director of the Tate galleries….
[Nicholas Serota] I went to see a show of Judd’s work at the Whitechapel in 1970, that wasn’t a show of course that I curated I was simply a visitor, and I remember going into that building, which of course is a very beautiful space in its own right, with that top light, and there were these boxes running across the floor, up the wall, along the wall and I thought what is this dumb art, and then the longer I stood there the more intrigued I became by these surfaces, the conjunction of materials and so on |
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[Patrick Wright]…for Nicholas Serota, opening his Donald Judd show in the refurbished former power station that is now Tate Modern it must feel, a little, as if Judd is coming home…
[Nicholas Serota] Judd himself has changed all our aesthetics and without suggesting that Judd was responsible for the whole notion of loft living, the fact is that his engagement with those kinds of industrial spaces, in particular the way in which he used them, has been enormously influential on architects in this country, people like John Pawson or David Chipperfield would acknowledge that and I think therefore when you come to this space you do see a very neat fit between Judd the sculptor and Herzog and de Meuron the architects |
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