This is one of the two or three interesting pieces at the Chinati foundation in Marfa TX — 100 identically-sized aluminum boxes with various random angles and openings inside. In the right light they turn into water or glass.
Aluminum Boxes
I can’t tell from this shot whether this is a photograph from the piece I’m thinking of, but there is an airplane hangar at Chinati which is filled with brushed-steel Judd boxes, and it blew me away. It remains one of my favorite places in the world. Someday I intend to see it again.
It’s hard to explain why the piece knocked me out the way it did, but the site has something to do with it. We were there on a bitterly-cold November day and the light was pale and watery and we were the only people in the room and it felt to me like a strange kind of holy sanctuary.
Yep — this is that same piece. I took another photo of the room as a whole, showing all the boxes, but I thought this was a more interesting image. (I may go back and post some of the pictures I skipped earlier, for fear I was clogging up everyone’s RSS feeds :)
The site-specificness of it is, yeah, something they do really well; I don’t think these boxes would work nearly as well in a regular gallery… they need the sunlight and the big echoey room and the slow pacing and the not very many people (we had only four people on the morning tour, which was just about perfect.)