Though Donald Judd was lively in ecological preservation and the mission of The Chinati Basis is multilayered and comprises political components, most individuals expertise the artworks there primarily by means of an aesthetic lens. The frisson of Judd’s concrete and aluminum containers reacting to the weather and panorama of West Texas is dazzling — resurrecting Walter Benjamin’s concept of Aura by means of the alchemy of supplies, course of, and setting. Chinati, and by extension the vacation spot and “concept” of Marfa, is an oasis of the refined good style of minimalism, a Lourdes in a cultural desert of slop and kitsch.
All the everlasting works within the assortment observe the zen concord of Judd: Robert Irwin’s religious mild and darkish scrims, Dan Flavin’s cascading but elusive neon, Roni Horn’s charged and monolithic copper sculptures, even Ilya Kabakov’s recreation of a Nineteen Forties Soviet faculty has such cautious intention that its first impression is certainly one of mise-en-scène over that means. Zoe Leonard’s spectacular and inexorably political exhibition Al río / To the River, on view by means of July 6, 2025, concurrently upends Chinati’s inventive serenity and appears proper at dwelling.
The exhibit chronicles migration on the Texas-Mexico border, a recurring and inescapable theme in Southwest artwork, however Leonard’s work stands out for its aesthetic precision, mental rigor, and deep melancholic humanity. The present is separated into three phases throughout three of the barracks at Chinati. The primary part, a sequence of shade pictures of the flowing Rio Grande river, is probably the most aligned with the aesthetics of Judd et al. The pictures are monochromatically brown and gray with white crenulations of the present, freezing the rivulets of the river right into a sculptural kind. They develop into nearly like summary marble sculptures, recalling the Rabindranath Tagore line concerning the Taj Mahal: “A teardrop on the cheek of time.”
Set up view of “Zoe Leonard: Al rio / To the River” at The Chinati Basis. Photograph: Alex Marks, courtesy of The Chinati Basis
These are probably the most “lovely” works within the present, and it isn’t by coincidence they’re probably the most illusory. Regardless of the fundamental and primal high quality of those works, we can’t view them naturally; it requires subtle high-speed cameras to catch and lacquer such a cut up second. Such magnificence isn’t merely momentary, it’s imperceptible. That such magnificence requires surveillance expertise to understand haunts the remainder of the present and rhetorically asks, what’s the culpability of magnificence? What lies behind it? What’s the remainder of the story exterior of this lapidary lower in time?
“Zoe Leonard: Al río / To the River” (element), 2016–2022, gelatin silver prints, C-prints, and inkjet prints. © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, and Hauser & Wirth
The second part is the biggest, taking everything of a horseshoe barracks, and consists of stark, excessive distinction black-and-white pictures of the Rio Grande river and the encircling space — farms and ranches, ICE outposts, border crossings, sections of Trump’s border wall, ferry crossings, and so on. A few of the pictures are totally pure and deeply resonant, nearly religious, recalling the ability of Sebastião Salgado and Ansel Adams. A lot of the pictures depict the latticework of borders, the supplies — metal, concrete, automotive, aerial, surveillance — required to make a border, a completely summary idea, manifest. There’s a deeply haunting and melancholic high quality to those pictures, nearly funereal, however properly avoiding gestures of pathos. Leonard accurately understands borders as intrinsically chilly and essentially unfeeling; in any other case they’d be porous. Relationships are outlined by compromise, exceptions, and good will. Borders eschew that definitionally, and so interacting with them turns into inevitably dehumanizing.
“Zoe Leonard: Al río / To the River” (element), 2016–2022, gelatin silver prints, C-prints, and inkjet prints. © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, and Hauser & Wirth
The ultimate part is probably the most aesthetically repellant and disturbing. Additionally it is probably the most highly effective and incisive. A sequence of pictures depicting laptop computer screenshots streaming the dwell surveillance cameras of border crossings, these works have the alienation of a triple lens — the lens of the surveillance digicam, the display of the laptop computer, and Leonard’s lens — replicating the angle of an ICE agent. In a time the place ICE brokers are rampaging by means of our cities, masked in Punisher emblem balaclavas and assaulting and disappearing pregnant ladies, kids at kindergarten graduations, the aged, and all different canonical innocents, the implication of those final works is stark and damning. All U.S. residents, with the privileges afforded to us by our birthright (at the very least for now), are ICE brokers, and our lives have this dwell digicam operating someplace within the vary of our imaginative and prescient, with a whirr of paranoia and complicity.
I’m of the opinion that almost all artwork with specific political topics not often effectuates precise materials political change; and the works that do (like Uncle Tom’s Cabin) are often blunt and treacly. The aim of political artwork is partly an act of witness and historical past, and partly certainly one of evaluation, inquiry, and one thing else — one thing ineffable that basically, solely artwork can do. What that’s might be referred to as alchemy or miraculous or another metaphysical or religious descriptor, however the result’s finally certainly one of readability and revelation. To cite George Orwell, “To see what’s in entrance of 1’s nostril wants a relentless wrestle.” However the alchemy of artwork permits one to see oneself seeing, on the set we’ve created, and to see the scaffolding behind the curtains, who’s pulling the ropes that elevate and decrease backdrops, and to glimpse, only for a second, who put the entire thing on and who paid for all of it, earlier than they slip out the again door into the evening.
Zoe Leonard: Al río / To the River is on view at The Chinati Basis by means of July 6, 2025.
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