Before I sat down to write about Nothing Beside Remains, Los Angeles Nomadic Division’s (LAND) current exhibition in Marfa, Texas, I revisited P.B. Shelley's "Ozymandias" (1818). The poem—from which Shamim Momin, LAND’s curator, derived the exhibition’s title—reflects on time, the impermanence of authority and dissolution. It is a sonnet on the hubris of permanence, a topic that circumscribes not only the exhibition, but also Marfa’s Chinati Foundation, a site whose “specific intention…is to preserve and present to the public permanent large-scale installations by a limited number of artists.”1 So, within the context of Marfa, the exhibition’s title begins a line of questioning into notions of permanence and illuminates the tenuous ligatures connecting the works to the areas where they appear. To appropriately evaluate the exhibition thus involves measuring it by the works’ appearances throughout the town as well as how well they disappear into their sites. Perhaps through this contrast will emerge a portrait of the mechanisms by which time affects the reality and the artifice of Marfa.

Nothing Besides Remains has taken over multiple locations throughout the town and one must travel to see everything (though one can walk to almost all of the exhibition sites). Ry Rocklen’s Search For Ironed Curtain may best embody the show’s sprawling ethos with its series of fabrics installed in various Marfa windows, the extent of which is best viewed from the top of the town’s courthouse. After climbing to the top of the courthouse, a 360-degree view confronts the viewer from the town’s highest point. Both work and title imply a movement toward something, but Rocklen’s subtle placement and limited arrangement does not compose a clear picture. Rather, Search For Ironed Curtain is a small constellation of windows dressed with the same faded patterned cloth. By making light of what we cannot see—what hides behind the cloth—Rocklen arrests Marfa from a typical narrative reading of the site’s history and present mythos. He poses Marfa as a stationary relief of itself, allowing for a pause to consider all the layers of the town’s allure, especially those out of sight. The artist’s subtle gesture alternates between appearing as pleasant coincidence or well-staged installation, the effect of which mirrors a lingering utopianism in Marfa. Though it requires a particular suspension of disbelief, there remains a great effort to preserve the town’s legacy for now.2

The works that succeed best in this show recede into the environment as much as they create it: to see the works requires that one look for art instead of allowing it to blend into its environment. I frequently ride my bike by the Blackwell School, the site of Andrea Bowers and Shizu Saldamando’s inspirational mural, but only when the exhibition opened did I realize it was something new.

Garth Weiser’s 8x20 ft., Marfa, December 2011 similarly implicates both work and viewer into the landscape. The lone blue wall stands in epic proportion to Antelope Hill where one must hop a barbed wire fence to closely view the installation. The work’s size recalls massive nineteenth-century paintings of the American West, but as opposed to Albert Bierstadt’s sublime depictions of the wild west, which created a mythologically expansive landscape, Weiser reverses the relationship of painting to the region. The environment and its radically shifting weather alter the painting over time, cracking, peeling away and dissolving the work’s International Klein Blue-like tempera; not Bierstadt’s luminous blue skies of yore. Exposing the work to the elements on disputed land (the ownership of which is contested by one local whose property abuts but does not contain the installation) places both the viewer and the work at risk.

Reliant on a similarly adventurous quality is Rob Fischer’s An Artifact Caused by a Bright Cloud, a steel frame trailer lined with glass painted by the artist. Fischer’s assistants towed the house-shaped trailer from New York, and it shows that wear. As the artist completes his residency at the Chinati Foundation, the work’s process(ion) from New York to Marfa currently finds it hoisted to the Ice Plant’s ceiling, remaining in motion for now.

The exhibition doesn’t make a grand statement but it doesn’t need to. It’s more interesting and important in its disappearance within the Marfa landscape. Through a tightly curated group of works along with an equally sensitive eye for site, Momin’s curatorial project fits well within Marfa as well as the larger mission of LAND’s site-specific and commission-based project. Marfa’s preservation is rare and it is not always clear where the pressure comes from—or the support—to remain someplace else. Through Nothing Beside Remains, we may step out of the narratives concerning this place, though with the hope that the weather does not change too quickly.

• 1. "Mission and History." The Chinati Foundation | La Fundación Chinati. The Chinati Foundation. Web. 17 Jan. 2012. <http://www.chinati.org/visit/missionhistory.php>.
• 2. As cited above, the question of permanence resonates not only within the Judd and Chinati Foundations, but also throughout Marfa. Judd chose this area for its relative isolation, a quality that attracts artists, transplants, holiday homeowners and tourists alike. For his statement, “The Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati” (1987), Judd wrote, “Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinum iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place. Otherwise art is only show and monkey business.” In effect, Judd attempted to create a utopian or ideal standard by which art could or should exist, which took place throughout the entire town and to which much attention, time, and money are dedicated. If Judd’s work can or will not change, does everyone here then live in a museum? Perhaps not, but certainly the town’s burgeoning culture and service industries depends on the preservation of that legacy. It is important both to understand the microcosm Judd created here and the world in which it presently stands.