Page 10 - Marfa Road Trip_ Thelma and Louise, With a Happier Ending - The New York Times

1/26/2018 Marfa Road Trip: Thelma and Louise, With a Happier Ending - The New York Times
(http://juddfoundation.org/spaces/the-block/), which is part of the Judd
Foundation, is a space so large it took up an entire city block and encompassed
two airplane hangars.

So in the morning, we took a guided tour at The Block. Everything at The Block

was symmetrical. The metal and glass doors. The endless bookshelves. The stack
of woodcut yellow and blue plexiglass installations, all isolated rectangular
blocks, hung vertically on the wall. The concrete raised pool. The plum trees in a

line, one after another. Symmetrical, except, one could argue, for the old, yet
working, grain mill across the street, with its machinery churning and grinding
all afternoon.

The mill was loud. Leave it to my friend Miriam to look beyond the art. “You

move all the way to the desert,” she said, “and you built an art compound across
the street from a grain mill?”

Fair point. But it wasn’t the clamor of the mill that bothered me. It was the nine-
foot-tall adobe brick wall. I was sick of walls. And eight-foot fences. And border

delineations. I lived in a tight suburban New Jersey enclave with one neighbor’s
driveway only 10 feet from my house.

“We need to drive back out to the desert,” I told my friends after the tour. We all
agreed that it was time to go.

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