I wake up in Alpine to much more reasonable temperatures. It’s nice to be away from the southern California heat wave. My goal today is to explore Marfa. There are no car rental agencies in Alpine, but fortunately there are several individuals who will rent their own vehicles through the Turo app. The first evidence that I’m approaching an art haven is a jumble of shipping containers off in the distance. Is that art? I think so. When I get to Marfa, though, I drive from one end to the other without seeing a single thing that catches my eye. It feels like a “blink and you miss it” kind of town. I know there must be something here, because Brien said it was cool. A former coworker, Brien first told me about Marfa five years ago. He loved it so much that he bought a second home here. In a recent text of favorite restaurants, he wrote -Get lunch at Bordo (unbelieveable). I turn the car around and head back through town.
I enter an old repurposed service station and place my order. The meal at Bordo is unbelievable! To call it a sandwich shop would be accurate but misleading. I’ve never had a sandwich wake me up and make me take notice like this one does. The ingredients are fresh and the lettuce crisp.The sandwich bun is soft and chewy and has just the right amount of char. I watch a man with a pan of bread dough tend a wood-fired oven, carefully placing bun after puffy baked bun into a wicker basket. There is an air of excitement in the restaurant. Everyone who works here is full of energy and smiling, as if to say I’m so LUCKY to be a part of this! I’m lucky too. I head back to the car. I’ve heard there is some highway art worth seeing. I head west, back through town and out into ranch country.
The movie “Giant”, starring James Dean, Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, was filmed in and around Marfa in 1955. Larger than life plywood cut-outs of them are on display on ranch land west of town, including Rock in a 1950 Ford Custom Deluxe, and James up to his zipper in the dirt, holding a shotgun. The display was installed in 2018. As I drive further west, a mirage of water floats above the pancake-flat road, always out of reach. Just past the town of Valentine, I come to the smallest high-end shopping mall in the country.
Installed in 2005, Prada Marfa is made of adobe bricks covered in stucco and contains the fall 2005 Prada collection. It will never be updated, because the door does not open. It’s a time capsule with windows! I head back into town in search of dessert. According to Brien, Dopo is the place to get it. Dopo and Bordo are next to each other and have the same owner, so my expectations are high. I enjoy a sweet cream gelato affogato while talking with the barista about Marfa’s many galleries. “I love found art.” I tell her. “Oh, you have to go to Veldt. My boyfriend’s friend has an exhibit there. He makes sculptures out of old TV’s and I think something else that has to do with trains.” I’m on a mission! I walk several blocks up a slight grade away from the main thoroughfare. I see now that there is more to this town than meets the windshield. Adam Bork is at the entrance of Veldt, talking with a patron. I walk past him and view his sculptures made of old cathode ray tube televisions and Commodore computer monitors. An eery space-age buzz is coming from them. The experience is reminiscent of what I witnessed at The Mattress Factory, an avant-garde gallery in Pittsburgh that I saw on my first train trip and dearly loved. When he is free I ask him where his train art is. “Oh, you must mean my G-scale people.” G-scale is a model train set designed for outdoor garden displays. The scale is roughly 1:13, which would make the people built for the train garden to be approximately six inches tall. He positions them in an artificial landscape with miniature TVs and computers with glowing screens, and then he photographs them. The result is interesting and slightly unsettling. We talk about his cathode ray tube art. He says he has been collecting televisions and Commodore monitors for a long time. He used to get them for free, put now has to pay sixty dollars for a Commodore monitor. “I also have a collection of cars parked all over my thirty-seven acres of land. Some of them even run.” He says. “I’m thinking about using them for some kind of dystopian art installation. I can shoot stuff on my land, so maybe I’ll do something with paintball guns.”
I walk out of the gallery with a smile on my face. “That barista nailed it.” I say to myself. Continuing up the sidewalk, I see what must have been a luxurious hotel in its day. Inside, I learn that the actors, directors and camera crew used The Hotel Paisano as their headquarters during the filming of the movie “Giant”. The hotel is closed for renovation but today the courtyard is open. There is a pop-up bar serving beer and margaritas. I order a margarita and ask a couple if they would mind if I sat at their table. “Sure!” they say. “If you don’t mind us talking about pumpkins”. Robert and Sarah own an acre of land on the edge of town that they have turned into a small farm growing pumpkins, squash and corn. The courtyard is decorated with what must be several truckloads of their pumpkins. “I noticed that your boots were kind of dirty and I assumed you were hikers but I guess you are farmers.” I say. “Yep!” they say, nodding their heads. Their venture is called Wagon Wheel Pumpkin Patch. They plan to sell some produce to local restaurants this coming year.
As I leave the courtyard I hear someone say to a friend “You have to go see Ben Tuna. He’s done some really cool stuff with these old Porsches.” I have a new mission! I remember seeing that name on a big fence on the main road, so I head back in that direction. Shopping for my grandson and visiting galleries along the way, I notice a very strong opinion expressed in most of their windows.This one says it best.
This is the case throughout Marfa and Alpine. I’ll look for it in Austin.
Ben Tuna’s Porsches are the ultimate in found art. His main profession is as a stained glass artist in Los Angeles creating commissioned pieces for residences and businesses across the country. Commission work is great to pay the bills, but to express his unharnessed creativity he has been collecting Porsches that are beyond the hope of renovation, and also stained glass windows from old churches facing the bulldozer. He then re-works the shards of damaged windows into the windshield voids of the cars. The car below was a victim of the recent Los Angeles fires.
To Be Continued
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