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Lookup NU author(s): Giles Bailey
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Brief description: I Bought a Little City is a performance work that uses a collaging principle as an innovative critical strategy to consider the contemporaneous, and never previously compared, figures of minimalist Sculptor Donald Judd and writer Donald Barthelme. The text of the Barthelme story, after which the project is named, was staged as a monologue live in the cupola of the Presidio County Courthouse in Marfa, Texas, home and workplace of Judd since 1972. This project originated while participating in a residency in Marfa, Texas during the Summer of 2012. Its impact and reach has been extended through unfolding iterations at OUTPOST in Norwich, KW, Berlin and was resolved as an installation pairing it with a video work shot on location in Marfa and developed in dialogue with John White, an intern at Judd’s Chinati Foundation. This final version of the work was exhibited with a series of printed posters that serve as footnotes at CCA, Glasgow.Additional information:Using performance as an expanded art-historical process, the work maps biographical and creative interrelationships and satirises the reverence in which Donald Judd’s legacy is held by underlining themes of gentrification, hubris, excessive wealth and the process of constructing the stories that come to constitute history. It also aims to question the reductive tendencies in the production such legacies while prompting a new vantage point on Judd’s questionable impact on the town of Marfa.In order to question the heroic narrative of Judd’s presence in the town, it is paired with the Donald Barthelme short story I Bought a Little City, published in the New Yorker in 1974, about the time that Judd himself was moving West. This short work of fiction is a can be read as a wry, absurdist indictment of proprietorship and urban regeneration. In the story an unnamed and fabulously wealthy protagonist who buys a city and begins to make a series of absurd changes with the vague and abstract impulse to somehow improve itThis research identifies its singular resonance in the context of the town and proposes Judd as much as a megalomaniacal real-estate playboy and cultural dilettante as canonised US sculptor. The project builds on previous projects by foregrounding the liveness of the work. This offers audiences a unique space to evaluate and interpret the particular and complex context being examined.
Artist(s): Bailey G
Publication type: Exhibition
Publication status: Published
Year: 2015
Number of Pieces: 1
Venue: CCA
Location: Glasgow, UK
Media of Output: Video installation, performance, printed matter
