- Marfa: The Transformation of a West Texas Town by Kathleen Shafer
In 1955 Texas novelist Bill Brammer, writing for the Texas Observer about the filming of Giant, described Marfa as "this bleak and blissful and totally unworldly little town." Marfa may still be bleak to some and blissful to others, but it is no longer unworldly. Kathleen Shafer's new book, Marfa: The Transformation of a West Texas Town, explains why.
Marfa, the county seat of Presidio County in Trans-Pecos Texas, is a town of 1,747 people that, due to the artist Donald Judd's residence there from 1971 to 1994, has become a minimalist art center and, more recently, an international tourist destination receiving 40,000 visitors a year, even though it is 200 miles from the nearest commercial airport. This is the transformation that Shafer explores in her book, which was originally written as a dissertation in geography at the University of Texas at Austin. It is refreshingly free of academic jargon and, unlike much recent writing about Marfa, is founded on solid research.
Shafer provides detailed coverage of events that have occurred in Marfa over the past twenty years, which she considers a crucial period in Marfa's transformation. She treats in depth the controversies surrounding the destruction of the hospital ruins at Fort D. A. Russell, the erection of the Playboy sculpture/advertisement on U.S. 90, the routing of U.S. Air Force bomber routes over the Big Bend, and the recent discussion of short-term rentals and the lack of low-cost housing in Marfa. Shafer writes, "I've read, watched, or listened to every piece of media focused on Marfa since 1983" (157). She has also conducted numerous interviews with Marfa residents, looked into the town's history, and surveyed the scholarly literature about Marfa, of which there is a surprising amount.
Marfa has actually undergone several transformations during its 134-year history. The Mexican Revolution brought a thriving and enterprising Hispanic population, refugees from the violence that swept Mexico between 1910 and 1920; World War II and the development of the army [End Page 468] air base caused the town's population to triple. Shafer acknowledges these transformations in her earlier chapters, saying that the factors that shaped Marfa's early history were ranching, proximity to the border, and the presence of the military at Fort D. A. Russell. Her main focus, though, is on Judd and the aftermath of his residence here. Her strongest chapters are chapter 4, about Judd's career and his complicated relationship with the Dia Art Foundation and the people of Marfa, and chapter 5, about the post-Judd marketing or "branding" of Marfa (exemplified by the fact that one of its most photographed landmarks, Prada Marfa, is not in Marfa but thirty miles away, a few miles west of Valentine). She cites the United Kingdom-based publication Marfa Journal and J. Crew's leather Marfa Bags (not made in Marfa) as examples.
In chapter 3 Shafer attempts to apply to Marfa three academic concepts utilized by geographers: landscape, space, and place. This is the most complicated and least successful chapter in the book (which is another way of saying that this reviewer had difficulty understanding it) but, paradoxically, it yields Shafer's best insight. Shafer is wrestling with the question of why visitors come to Marfa and what they expect to find there. She writes, "Place in Marfa can be experienced in countless ways, based on the needs and desires of the inhabitant or visitor. It is experiential perspective, where the experience is the culmination of sensation, perception, and conception" (71). In other words, the ranchers, ranch hands, artists, retirees, Border Patrol employees, and others who live in Marfa all lead their own lives, tourists bring their own expectations, and there are as many Marfas as there are Marfans and visitors to Marfa.