Elmgreen and Dragset, Prada Marfa, 2005; Adobe, plaster, paint, glass panes, aluminum frames, MDF, carpet; 4.6 m × 7.6 m (15 ft × 25 ft)| image: Marshall Astor
It’s not easy to get to Marfa, Texas. From New York, you fly to Houston, change planes for El Paso, and then drive for three hours. Outside of El Paso, you pass American sprawl with a Tex–Mex flavor. After a while, there’s an enormous pecan grove, barbed wire fences, and occasionally, in the far distance, widely dispersed cattle. But soon, there’s nothing in the 360-degree view but the stubbly growth of the high, wind-swept Chihuahuan desert: scrubby mesquite and creosote, spiky agaves and yuccas, some with tall, battered, spent flower stalks, all keeping a polite distance from one another to minimize competition for the region’s sparse moisture. Mysteriously, this unpromising terrain is contained by well-maintained barbed wire fencing. Often, a railroad track parallels the road, almost always with an unimaginably long freight train, loaded with containers, brilliantly chromatic against the tawny soil and the dusty winter foliage.
For considerable stretches, the most interesting features are the power poles—actual tree-trunks, with the stubs of conveniently placed branches as crosspieces. Some have opposed stubs slanting upwards, some have multiple, sharply angled projections. Other configurations are blunt, many have dense prongs, and there’s a “poor relation” category—bald vertical trunks, usually set a little out of true. These ad hoc sculptures line the railroad tracks, occasionally veering
