Better to Lose Your Head Than Use It

Working with Ethnographic Fiction and a New Evidential Paradigm at Minimalist Donald Judd's The Chinati Foundation

Bibliographic Data

ID2289503
AuthorsEmily Verla Bovino (0000-0002-6834-8252, Savannah College of Art and Design)
Year2020
Volume43
Issue1
Pages60-76
Publication date2020-03-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMuseum Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0892-8339 • E-ISSN: 1548-1379
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/muan.12219
OpenAlexW3028590425
LanguageEN
References cited13

Writing through ethnographic fiction, art practice, and art historical research, this essay presents a study of minimalist Donald Judd's The Chinati Foundation/La Fondacion Chinati (1979-1986), a museum in West Texas designed by the artist. It explores Chinati in relation to its site-the Texas-Mexico borderlands-focusing on three objects of evidence found in and around it: a World War II-era German-language sign inside the former military complex that Judd retrofitted for the museum, and that he dated and autographed; a wall of a derelict adobe building graffitied with a denouncement of Chinati; and a granite gravestone with an Arabic inscription, marking the final resting place of Lebanese peddler Ramon Karam, whose death on the Rio Grande in 1918 was used as evidence in Senate hearings in support of increased U.S. militarization at the border. The essay shows how working with ethnographic fiction toward a new evidential paradigm shifts perspectives on Chinati, Judd's practice, the borderlands, and the relationship between scholarship and art practice

Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Photography and Visual Culture

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