Science Fiction Utopia

Donald Judd (American, 1928-1994) was an artist associated with the Minimalist movement who established the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas in 1986, after 15 years of development. Originally named the Art Museum of the Pecos, the Chinati Foundation is a contemporary art museum dedicated to perpetually exhibiting the art of Judd and his colleagues in the West Texan desert. If Judd's artwork is seen as a bridge between late modernism and postmodernism, how do we understand his museum design in Marfa, Texas? Judd used science-fictional material and temporal techniques to engage with a Scottish-American individualist legacy of utopian design. This, in practice, proposed a postmodernism that did not divorce from humanism. Judd's approach allowed for a de-hierarchized art institution and alternative conceptions of the modern-postmodern divide. However, this antiauthoritarian praxis could easily be recaptured by capital through commercializing the radically contingent subject, which prefigures the postmodern art museum and contemporary 'art experience.' This reflects broader changes in the phenomenology of art in contemporary society and thus museum design. To explain these changes, I engage with critical cultural Marxist theory through Fredric Jameson, Mark Fisher, and Slavoj ?i?ek, as well as the philosophy of technology of Martin Heidegger. I work from the art-critical milieu of the October group, particularly Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster. I advance a new term for the understanding of Judd's work, drawn from Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Heidegger: simulacral Enframing. My thesis takes the form of an entirely qualitative, critical analysis of the Chinati and Judd Foundations in Marfa, Texas. My first chapter aims to define the terms that I use so liberally throughout, namely 'postmodernism.' This, of course, implies a modernism that it transgresses, the definition of which has wider implications on how we understand Judd's techniques. I examine these largely through comparison to Robert Smithson to understand utopian and dystopian attitudes in their works, differing responses to their time. In this way, it also acts as an extended literature review. The second chapter examines the Marfan foundations as Judd and Lauretta Vinciarelli built them, how they functioned, and the social implications in reference to latter-20th century America. This ties to urbanism and social theory, a legacy within which I situate the Marfan museum design, given a politicization of the philosophical propositions within his work. This ties to Judd's own political leanings and activism; I mean to show how they are inextricable. The third chapter revisits the foundations in the present day, after their transformation into a tourist destination for the ultrawealthy artworld. I examine how Judd's techniques, established in the first chapter and enacted in the second, made the commercialization of his work somewhat inevitable by the third. However, within this capital recapture, I also highlight the utility of Judd's structuralizing museology and its relationship to the Dia Art Foundation.