Migraine says, Come on in, these doors are always open. Migraine says, Go ahead: count this, measure that while I flash around like schooling fish. Migraine says, If you come off the rails at 3:05 A.M. at an angle of thirty-three degrees and the dew point is dropping and the mockingbird just woke up, how long before you screech to a halt? Migraine says, Forget it, all forests are are trees. Migraine says, Is that your safe word or is that a new nickname for me? Migraine says, I’m the paint and, baby, you’re the canvas. Migraine says, this cage is a mirror, this cage can make itself disappear; here, I will make a tray of you for the sky.
Waxing, waning, eclipsing—moon of your mornings, moon of your nights, migraine says, Now it’s all black and white and gray, no more blue in here today. Migraine says, There was a symphony in here a minute ago, for a minute there all the colors of the rainbow were sitting on the knife’s edge of this whole dull affair.
Now the storm goes away again in a series
of small, badly lit battle-scenes,
each in “Another part of the field.”
(Elizabeth Bishop)
Prismatic is migraine’s point of view. Through it, we see the world prismatically. In it, we see ourselves prismed. Does it sound like I want to have it all ways? It happens to happen all ways, sometimes in recognizable sequence, sometimes recombining endlessly according to who knows what. Migraine isn’t receptacle; it’s instrument, instant incubator throwing voices and light.
It was by accident that Donald Judd, famous for his sleek minimalist (he hated the term) sculptures exactingly displayed in dialogue with their environment, realized that a dimensional painting in the process of being hung belonged instead where it was, on the floor (unpredictable swerve). It was by design, however, that the foundation hosting me chose to locate its residency program in the tiny West Texas town where years earlier Judd headquartered himself after abandoning the New York art scene.
Seeking an alternative to typical galleries and museums for the display of his own and other artists’ work, Judd built Chinati on the grounds of a former military base, beginning Marfa’s (partial and ongoing) transformation from a little-known, former railroad, desert town to a renowned art outpost to which people travel from all over the world. I’m sure many factors informed the foundation’s thinking: landscape, remoteness, size, sympathetic magic of various kinds. But there was also an intention for interplay between artists and ideas, which is why, a few weeks into my time, I’m able to arrange for a series of private visits to Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum.
Housed in two former airplane hangars known as “the sheds” on the grounds of Chinati, 100 works is a masterpiece of strict repetition as a means to infinite variation, of art whose medium is perception, of context and frame, of light. “Each of the 100 works has the same outer dimensions (41 × 51 × 72 inches), although the interior is unique in every piece.” If migraine’s prism could be painless, if migraine mind could be prismed through the lens of a hundred brushed aluminum boxes reflecting desert earth and sky, it would look like this.
Welcome to the amplified inner chamber, entering seems to speak. Your breath is a bellows. Here in the silence, sound when it rings out rings through the full field of its rising and falling to the vibrating ends you can feel but no longer hear. Light is captured, now it holds you hostage, makes sparkle, makes strange, slams darkly bright. Sometimes what you see is a ramp, sometimes a precipice, sometimes a hollow, sometimes a screen, a scrim, a veil, a mirror. Sometimes what is present goes absent and what you see disguises itself as nothing at all. Out there, beyond—the hovel huts we eat and drink and die in, the cars speeding by and the birds that dive—who cares, let them, we are here now and everywhere else is elsewhere. Hallowed hall of the inside call: we could stand here staring all day, and sometimes we do.
Or, welcome to the play. The set is these objects on this stage. The stage is this place you find yourself standing, and also your mind. Today’s performance, like every day’s performance, stars your perception unfolding in the loop that is your body feeding your mind feeding your body feeding your mind. In space. In time.