Anhoek School's Marfa Session: If food is what you are after

Susan and Anne harvest greens. (Photograph by Julia Sherman)

At the now moribund Black Mountain School, a landmark in American educational experiments, students initially ate meals described by Michael Rumaker as ' a salad of bananas and hot dogs.' Eventually, the system for feeding the school shifted. Students were required to work on the college farm which provided most of the school’s food.

At Deep Springs College, an all male school in the Mojave desert, students divide their time between ranching and scholarly pursuits. The campus is isolated; ranching underscores the demand for self-sufficiency and the complications of stewardship. In Chicago, sculptors Jim Elniski and Frances Whitread have been asking: "what if each institution has to grow its own food?" Whitread conducts a sculpture course within the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that begins with teaching students how to grow their own greens. Determining whether these agricultural acts fall within the sculptural or ecological appears to be a matter of framing and self-persuasion. Despite the fact that the majority of the 15 students who have attended three sessions of the Anhoek School, are categorically artists, the relationship to this garden is not intended to be sculptural, even within the broader rubric of relational aesthetics. We aren't set up for that approach, as it would require fields, school to be continuously in session, and a full-time farmer. We have to borrow others' gardens.

In Marfa, students spent the mornings gardening and their afternoons in class. Food from the garden was prepared by students for a shared lunch before the afternoon meeting/field trip. The work in the garden was guided by Farmstand Marfa's Sandra Harper. The students were bartering their labor in the garden for the food they cooked at lunch and dinner. However, this garden could not provide all of the ingredients we have become accustomed to integrating. The dishes were supplemented by the local supermarkets and Sandra Harper's larder.

My pedagogical intention was for students to uses their time in the garden to think through ideas without a myriad of distractions. They could incorporate the manner in which repetitive work sustained over short periods can sometimes strip superfluous chatter from conscious thought .

Besides allowing the woman working to hone in on and follow a deeper and more complex idea, it was another way of defraying the cost of the schooling for the students. It is difficult to think of anything else if food is what you are after. So as much as I get an absurdist pleasure in the notion of a lunch of bananas and hot dogs, the reality doesn't measure up. This problem, of combining food and art, reminds me of Gordan Matta Clark's less celebrated work "Pig". Down by the East River, he roasted a pig, serving up the half-cooked pork with bread. It was a sandwich afterall and the event was fun for awhile. Then people got sick.

Anhoek School-Marfa session: After Class

Here Megan is shorn by one of the town barbers. Julia, another student, snaps the photo.

Four months later, Julia posts something on the Internet along the lines of "You will look great with short hair" and asks those reading to send her the clippings. I am struck by the stealth tactic: flattery, and then request.

Julia has begun an investigation around hair and gender and the forms that tip the material and the sex towards and away from one another. I wonder if her fascination started with the woman in the barbershop in the desert or did it start before that? Will there be a through line? Before the class, she apprenticed with a shoemaker and made a singular shoe. After the class, she apprentices with a wig maker. She is gravitating towards the end of bodies to what avail?


Later Julia writes: " I started out only wanting to make wigs with Orthodox Jews, but then I decided to expand the project. Yesterday I had my first lesson with the wig-makers for the Metropolitan Opera. It was great. It is a lot like crocheting, but more tedious. I think I am getting the hang of it. I am going to work with a woman in Boro Park who styles wigs for the Orthodox women in that area as well. I am anticipating some kind of sculptural project coming out of this, but I am not sure exactly what that will look like. The topic is so loaded..."


Photograph by Julia Sherman

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?

Marfa Session of the Anhoek School Begins at the El Paso Airport

AH-Marfa '09 begins in front of the El Paso Airport, where the city has erected a 34-foot statue made of 18 tons of bronze. Four of the five students for this inaugural session have flown into the airport from Chicago, Providence, Los Angeles and New York City. The fifth is driving her uncle's truck from New Mexico.

The airport is formally calling this sculpture "The Equestrian." However, it was commissioned as and is referred to in the airport literature as a depiction of Don Juan Onate, a 17th century Spanish Conquistador, husband of the illegitimate granddaughter of Monteczuma, and first governor of New Mexico.

In October of 1598, a skirmish erupted when the occupying Spanish military demanded supplies essential to the Acoma people surviving the winter. The Acoma resisted; thirteen Spaniards were killed, and amongst them Don Juan Onate's nephew. In 1599, Onate retaliated; his soldiers killed 800 villagers. The remaining 500 women and children were enslaved, and by Don Juan's decree, the left foot of every surviving Acoma man over the age of twenty-five was amputated.

Eighty left feet were separated from the leg.

The left? Why the left?

Stacked or strewn?

In Espanola, New Mexico, at the Onate Monument and Visitor Center, the right foot of another Don Onate statue was removed with an electric saw. The thin scar of the repairing weld is barely detectable- the foot, starfish-like, appears regenerated. The events that set the cut and weld in motion occurred over 400 years ago, but like a wake, these incidents reverberate, pulsing towards the shore of the Present.

Photograph by Julia Sherman (AH-Marfa '09)

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)