Marfa Public Radio summer campers came in earlier this morning to do some investigative reporting. For your consideration, some photos of the kids in action, including Exhibition & Programs Coordinator Rosa McElheny facing intense questions such as “Do you like cheese?”
Thanks to intern Berry Stein for the snapshots!
Icon Eye‘s Christopher Turner on Judd, Prada Marfa, Marfa. From “Desert Utopia“:
Illuminated at night, with a range of original shoes and handbags displayed in its windows, this Prada store never opens. Pressing your face to the glass reveals the plush carpet inside to be covered in dead flies. A permanent sculpture installed in 2005 by Scandinavian artists Elmgreen and Dragset, Prada Marfa, about 40 miles north-west of the town it is named after, is a sort of gatepost that marks the edge of a remote yet popular art park that has bloomed over the past two decades in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert.
The artists describe Prada Marfa as a “pop architectural land art project” and its ironic, minimalist product displays make reference to the work of Marfa’s most famous artist-inhabitant. Donald Judd, a moody Midwesterner with Scottish roots – betrayed in his predilection for kilts, whisky and bagpipe music – arrived in Marfa from New York in the mid-70s. He kept his five-storey cast-iron building in SoHo but, disillusioned with the “glib and harsh” Manhattan art scene and his position in it as a doyen of minimalism (a label he always disavowed), he withdrew to rural Texas for increasingly large parts of the year. In Marfa he created his own utopian mix of elemental art, architecture and furniture and in the process was forced to meditate on the differences between these art forms.
If you weren’t one of the 6,000 people who saw this on the Ballroom Facebook page, here’s Prada Marfa caretaker and Valentine OG Boyd Elder sharing some thoughts with 60 Minutes about the controversial land art installation he looks after:
“I consider it to be hilarious, I consider it to be facetious, I consider it to be neurotic.”
Keeping things in perspective.
Big news: We’re hosting our very first contest — a poster design competition for the 27th Marfa Lights Festival featuring AJ Castillo.
The contest is open to anyone age 18 or under (yes! kids only!). Entries will be judged by a panel of professional graphic designers from around Texas. The winner receives a cash prize (!) and gets their poster screenprinted professionally and posted regionally to advertise the show.
The poster must contain the following information:
AEP Texas, Ballroom Marfa and the Marfa Chamber of Commerce present
AJ Castillo
August 31, 2013
7 pm doors | Vizcaino Park
Tickets $20 advance | $25 at the gate
www.ballroommarfa.org | www.marfacc.com
Email entries to [email protected] or drop them off in-person at the gallery. We will be stoked to receive them. Deadline is July 8th. Call or email with any questions!
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song screens at 8pm on 12 June 2013 at the Crowley Theater in Marfa, Texas as part of Ballroom’s New Growth Film Program, co-curated by Rashid Johnson and Josh Siegel, MoMA. Admission is free and open to the public.
Note: For this screening, viewers under 17 will require an accompanying parent or adult guardian.
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is Melvin Van Peebles third movie, which he wrote, directed, produced, composed music for and starred in. Dedicated to “all the sisters and brothers who had enough of the man,” the film follows a young African American man on his flight from white authority. No studio would agree to fund the film, so Van Peebles financed it independently, shooting over a 19-day period, performing his own stunts and several unsimulated sex scenes. Sweet Sweetback is hailed as the beginning of blaxpoloitation as a genre and Van Peebles refused to submit the film to the all-white MPAA ratings board for approval. His opinion was that they were not a jury of his peers and they’d been approving crippling images of people of color for years, so why let them dictate his cinematic agenda? In the end, the film received an X-rating and Van Peebles made T-shirts that read “Rated X by an all white jury,” and incorporated it into his marketing campaign.
In the book Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: A Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto, Van Peebles recounts that the idea for the film materialized during his first soul-searching and auto-erotic trip to the Mojave Desert. Looking out at the at an endless row of electric pylons sandwiched by sky and land, he thought it through:
Ballroom Marfa’s New Growth Film Program concludes this Wednesday, 12 June 2013 with Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).
Note: For this screening, viewers under 17 will require an accompanying parent or adult guardian.
All screenings are free and open to the public. Films begin at 8pm at the Crowley Theater in Marfa, Texas.
The New Growth Film program is co-curated by Rashid Johnson and Josh Siegel, MoMA.
Special thanks to Jennifer Bell, Rob Crowley, Tim Crowley, the Crowley Theater and Josh Siegel.
Poster designed by Rob Chabebe of EyeBodega
Descendants of Abraham Hill and Mary Ann Taylor
1But he joined a franchise that wants to lose, isn’t concerned about the present and has taken patience with the plan to an extreme.
Welker talked like a man who knows this could be his last season with the Broncos.
“These are good people, putting their names out over there at Marc’s horse farm for a good cause,” Pyle said.
Simone is going to be a brand beyond how she plays because of the beautiful, earthy, organic style she exudes.
“We have been aggressively contributing, for the sake of peace and to improve the welfare of the people of the Mideast,” Suga said.
He has done an absolutely tremendous job.
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Eleanor Friedberger recounts a surprise wedding performance here in Marfa during her Ballroom residency in this recent “Situation Critical” interview with Pitchfork …
“I actually performed Buddy Holly’s “Dearest” at a wedding once. I was in Marfa, Texas, doing a little residency and recording, and there was a wedding going on the same day as my show. The guy who I was recording with was also the AV guy at this wedding, so he had to take a break to go. I was like, “Well, if you’re going, then shouldn’t I go? Maybe they’ll let me sing a song.”
I was going to start singing as soon as they made their walk down the aisle together as husband and wife, but I did not know that they were going to stop and greet each and every one of their guests as they walked back. It took them so long. It’s only a two-minute-long song, so I just sang it over and over and over again– probably around 10 times.”
Take a listen to “I’ll Never Be Happy Again”, the single she recorded with a crew of Marfa players on iTunes, or order a copy of the 7-inch at the Ballroom Marfa store. (via Tim Johnson)
Space Is the Place screens at 8pm on 29 May 2013 at the Crowley Theater in Marfa, Texas as part of Ballroom’s New Growth Film Program, co-curated by Rashid Johnson and Josh Siegel, MoMA. Admission is free and open to the public.
Like Shards From Some Vanished Civilization: An Introduction to Space Is the Place
In the 1970s, Sun Ra wasn’t yet recognized as the eccentric genius that he is understood as today. He’d been leading bands for almost three decades, placing ecstatic chanting alongside percolating synthesizer pieces, using improvisational percussion and cosmic expansions of big band styles to create a voluminous if obscure repertoire that placed classic jazz and swing in an extraterrestrial timeline. This destabilized polyglot sound was too conspicuously wacky to fit in with the jazz establishment or its free jazz fringes, and though he’d already graced the cover of Rolling Stone in 1969, his music seemed as equally confusing for the Anglo psychedelic music scene.
His canonization as one of the pioneers of Afrofuturism would have to wait until later in his career, though of course his work now looks right at home next to similar explorations from Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, and would help set the stage for Funkadelic’s Afro-cosmic psychedelia, MC5’s liberation rock, Sonic Youth’s deep noise grooves and the Boredoms’ melted drum ensembles.
One place where Sun Ra did find a home was as an artist-in-residence at the University of California at Berkeley, where he delivered a series of lectures in 1971 under the heading “The Black Man in the Cosmos, Hyperstition and Fast-Forward Theory.” The course’s now legendary syllabus included the King James Bible, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, work from 19th century occultist Madame Blavatsky, poetry from Henry Dumas, as well as texts about the pagan roots of the Catholic Church, Egyptology and African American folklore.
Someone in the Berkeley AV department had the foresight to record one of these lectures — archived at ubu.com — wherein Sun Ra holds forth in such a way as to indicate that he’s both serious about his cosmological thinking, while at the same time deliberately provoking laughter from the gathered students as he tsk-task-tsks his chalk across the blackboard.
Team Ballroom. Not pictured: Jennifer Trammell, who arranged the outing, and Carlos Lujan, who generously pitched in.
Yesterday we cleaned the two miles around Prada Marfa as part of the Adopt-a-Highway program, and we were lucky to have a cloudy(-ish), cool(-ish) day for our inaugural trash duty. We collected 14 bags of trash (!) and came across a few treasures, including a complete calf skeleton (!!) and a high-powered camera lens (!!!). Our tips: Wear boots, avoid white jeans, bring gloves, find camera lenses. See you next quarter.
Click here for more info on these free screenings.
