UCLA

This dissertation examines environmental artistic practices associated with Minimalism as they appear at the Chinati Foundation/La Fundaci�n Chinati in Marfa, Texas (pop. ~1800) and traces their social and economic effects within the area. The Chinati Foundation was established in 1986 by the artist Donald Judd (1928-1994) as a contemporary art museum where artworks would be permanently installed within the pre-existing buildings and land formations of Marfa. Judd curated installations that facilitate artistic experiences inseparable from an experience of local history and everyday life. Because the Chinati Foundation was established as an alternative to forms of spectacle Judd associated with temporary exhibitions and modern art museums, focus within the dissertation is given to the curatorial tactics, architectural interventions, and forms of promotion Judd employed to support this ideal. The dissertation theorizes a trajectory from Judd’s environmental art of the 1960s to Judd’s Chinati Foundation and its incorporation of Marfa within a place-based experience economy.In the 1960s Judd inaugurated a new interest in the spatial conditions of the work of art when he created what became known as Minimalist “specific objects.” By making three-dimensional objects that utilized “given” elements, like industrial materials, algebraic formulas and geometric shapes, the meaning of the work of art could be found in its public context. Chapter one considers what it means for Judd to consider Marfa as a “given” when he makes renovations to buildings at the Chinati Foundation that align with the architectural practice known as “critical regionalism.” Chapter two considers Judd’s practice of outsourcing his artwork’s construction to fabricators with specialized knowledge; this became a precursor to the forms of distributive production Judd would undertake to build the Chinati Foundation. In chronologically tracing the construction and evolution of the foundation over a forty-four-year timespan, this chapter underscores the precarious conditions that precipitated its development and argues that it was built at the “frontier of the possible.” Chapter three connects Judd’s curatorial tactics at the foundation to the radical tradition of environmental theater, which emphasized ordinary as opposed to spectacular situations. This chapter argues, however, that by emphasizing an artistic experience grounded in the “here and now” of Marfa, the Chinati Foundation created the potential for new forms of gentrification in the area, referred to here as “settler tourism.” This dissertation advances the notion that Judd’s artistic activities since the 1960s were part of a broader tradition of environmental artmaking in which the specificity of place-based experience represented a domain of resistance to mass culture. By constructing a museum where the boundaries between art and life blur, however, Judd inadvertently made place-based artistic experiences a new product within Marfa’s emergent experience economy.