Land art the kind that requires entire volcanoes to be made came about largely because it could not be contained within museum walls. Even painters like the American Ed Ruscha have got in on the act. It was not meant as an act of homage. As so often, Gertrude Stein, an avant-garde American writer, put a sturdy finger on the problem. It is possible, she noted at Moma s opening, to be either modern or an art museum but not both.
Contemporary artists see themselves as new.
They see museums, by contrast, as old. Of no artist was this truer than American minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. And so it was that the irascible sculptor was travelling through west Texas in 1971 when he happened upon a redundant army base called Fort Russell in the tiny desert town of Marfa. One look at Fort Russell s artillery sheds and Judd knew that his prayers had been answered. The sculptor set about winning over local townsfolk by buying a large chunk of downtown Marfa, building a 10-foot adobe wall around it and then refusing to talk to them.