Anhoek-Marfa '09: Digging Holes and Being Housed

Photographs by Julia Sherman

While in Marfa, the students were housed in a collection of restored air streams parked at El Cosmico, a hotel of sorts lodged between open road and the Border Patrol Headquarters. Liz Lambert, owner of El Cosmico, was on board with the experimental nature of Anhoek, and graciously offered to allow the students barter labor towards boarding costs.

They dug holes and planted trees.

After these morning chores at El Cosmico, students tended Sandra Harper's garden in exchange for vegetables they prepared together at night, perhaps in El Cosmico's outdoor kitchen.

I lived in a small house on the other side of the Border Patrol Headquarters and across from the obsolete Fort D.A. Russell. I left the students to themselves for the evenings. Students and teachers require a space where the performance of pupil and pedagogue is dispelled. In other words, if one person is in charge of ordering others' days, there must be a release from that system, no matter how dedicated to student-directed learning. Does this position miss out on a pedagogy forged in a shared teacher-student consumption of whiskey, bonfires, and slow dancing? This formula is workable in say a David Lee Roth sort of way. But if I was interested in a pedagogy based on the sense one might have of a musician, today I'll choose Karen Dalton, native american 60's folk singer. The Karen Dalton Method, if we just read the names of her slender discography at face value, would herald slowness (In My Own Time, 1971) and disloyalty to ideology (It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going To Love You the Best, 1969). It is hard to tell who's going to love you the best, author or sweetheart.

From where I slept, wrote and read, I could hear the Border Patrol's outside PA system broadcasting directives to BP who had left the building but hadn't yet hit the parking lot. The students were awash in these very same sounds: a specific set of directions, heard but not followed.

Anhoek School-Marfa: Like Mark Twain?

On one of the first days of the Marfa course, "Stealing Horses: The Invention of Possession", class begins at the cemetery on the west side of town.

On one half lies a dirt plot studded with homemade cement headstones and the stick remains of rotted wooden markers, and a broken down shed with several empty beer cans resting on their side at the threshold of miles of ranch lands. The other half of the cemetery is markedly different; well-maintained store-bought headstones rest amongst grass and trees. The surnames on the broken and barren side are primarily Spanish, while the surnames on the other are primarily Anglo. Pronghorn antelope come to graze, wandering through either side. When they are ready to return to the plains they do not leap over the barbed wire fences but slide under the lowest wire; coyotes sometimes lie in wait at these thresholds, attacking their prey as they lay midway between one space and the next.

The class employs an old archaeological surveying technique, arranging themselves in an even line with roughly ten feet between each student. They slowly traverse the deserted graveyard, calling out any detail of interest: "Broken cross." "Plastic flower." "Homemade Grave." "Wire." "Wire. again." And so on. A cadence begins to take hold. It describes its institutional neglect, its makeshift graves, its desolation. Later, a friend in town tells me she cannot find her relatives' graves because the wooden markers have rotted and the burial map has been lost. I had requested the students to select a grave for themselves and draw it. I asked them to go through several writing exercises. Five months later, I am questioning whether these investigations, at the very least, recognized this fraught space as something to respectfully be made record of or if these interventions are as blasphemous as say... Mark Twain's riding of his horse through Hawaiian burial grounds. Twain's casual description is brazen; I forget, was he on his way to the ocean?

Nocturnal Field Trip to the Marfa Lights

In Marfa, Dan Flavin's light sculptures are prominently displayed in a number of buildings at the Chinati Foundation. In NYC, Allora and Calzadilla displayed its recontextualized primo in the form of" Puert Rican Light (for Dan Flavin)".

In Marfa, summer nights possess what feels to be an excess of light because the prairies/ranch lands retain the day's glow and foremost, are situated at the Western edge of a time zone. The Marfa Lights, a natural phenomenon, sometimes gather in the darkness, forming erratic patterns in a range of tones and intensities. A viewing center, designed by a Marfa high school class, suggests a reliable vantage point. But it is too bright now- lit up by the lamps in the restrooms- and some describe the benefits of the former empty dirt lot and its darkness.

The county next to us is the darkest county in the lower 48. The night sky glows brighter, there.

Light as a form that transgresses/embodies/ touches upon the spiritual, terrestrial, aesthetic, and monetary coalesce at our site.

Is their another reading we are missing out on? Is there another kind of flame in Marfa with another use and function- something that falls outside of the natural and cultural spectacles embodied in Flavin's lights and Marfa's lights? Is it just lovely or is there complications in its illumination? What light is missing? What is the sound of light? Is that a form to posses as well? Who pays for all of this light all of the time?


photograph by Julia Sherman (AH-Marfa,'09)