This essay was first published in Issue 1 of San Francisco Review of Whatever, in February 2025. The issue is now sold out, but you can (and should) subscribe now to recieve future issues.
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In 2021, the second year of Covid, with love and hate in my heart, I visited Marfa for the first time, compelled by the heavy gravitational force of Donald Judd’s big desert rectangles. Now that’s a man who believed the world was there for his use. He moved to Texas to be alone with the horizon, but capital was drawn after him, buzzing and felicitous. Someone to pay for all that concrete. I visited his compound, and it was a compound, shielded behind a high fence and turned inward on itself. We (me and the other fifteen assorted assholes assembled for the tour) perched on splitting and weather-wrecked Judd chairs around a rickety Judd table in the expansive gravel yard, waiting to go inside and look at the better-preserved indoor furniture and Judd’s collected stacks of nineteenth century Navajo textiles. Must be nice, I thought.
Later, I walked the length of a large field (the grounds of a former military base) where his 15 untitled works in concrete, 1980–1984 assemble and disassemble themselves across the space. WHAT??? I asked the concrete forms. Talk!!! Here are three open-sided concrete boxes arranged in a rough triangle, hulking and silent. Repetition and variation, figure and ground, light enabled or blocked. Yes yes. But they refuse to speak. The anecdote with which Anna Chave begins her essay “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power” came back to me in that moment: Chave is at the Museum of Modern Art looking at a gleaming brass Judd floor box, and two teenage girls approached the work and kick it. Then they laugh, then they use its reflective surface to check their hair, and finally they kiss their own image in the box. The nearby guard watches but does nothing. Chave wants to know what it is about such an object that might elicit this response—a kick, a kiss, a shrug.
I know what it is. Standing in front of the looming shapes I was like an ancient ape apprehending the gleaming black monolith, out of my mind and ready to bonk my brother over the head with a bone club and accidentally kick off some world-historic chain of events. Stanley Kubrick was a genius for how he directed those monoliths: he knew that a big blank rectangle will make you go insane.
Later still (a few weeks ago in fact, the fourth year of Covid), I was in Berkeley, it was the first week of class, and I saw something that reminded me of Judd. Freshmen streamed in a disorderly gorge down Telegraph Avenue, still wearing the fashions of their regional hometowns. Half a block away, a fortress. People’s Park, for fifty-five years a site of freedom and foment, had been secured by its on-paper owner, the University of California, Berkeley. They built a seventeen-foot-high wall of shipping containers around its entire perimeter, ensuring no activist, no crustpunk, no sunbather, no student cutting a diagonal desire line across the grass, no unsanctioned person at all could set foot on the hallowed ground. The dead look of the containers, their “plain power” (as Judd described his own rectangles in his 1964 essay "Specific Objects") felt like an insult. Two students walked past me as I stared, one commenting to the other “if you were a freshman just arriving and you didn’t know what used to be here, you’d see this and think ’what the fuck.’” What the fuck indeed.
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People’s Park was birthed out of the university’s neglect. The university purchased the land in 1967 to develop for campus use, but funding issues halted their plans and left the lot a muddy and derelict dumping ground. In 1969, a call to action by Berkeley Barb correspondent Stew Albert (writing as “Robin Hood’s Park Commissioner”) declared “a park will be built this Sunday between Dwight and Haste. The land is owned by the University which tore down a lot of beautiful houses in order to build a swamp… Bring shovels, hoses, chains, grass, paints, flowers, trees, bull dozers, top soil, colorful smiles, laughter and lots of sweat.” People’s Park was born—a spontaneous act of community manifesting. Only weeks later, the university announced development would restart, prompting protests and pushback from students, community members, and activists who declared the park belonged to those that built it. The university sent in law enforcement from around the region to clear the park, bulldoze it, and surround it with an eight-foot chain link fence. Riots ensued, and the police shot tear gas, buckshot, and beat protesters by the dozen. One bystander was killed. In the years since then, the park has remained mostly open but always contentious, with repeated attempts by the university to move forward with development projects, and ongoing pushback from activists, community groups, land trusts, and others who propose more democratic uses of the space.
All of which is to say: People’s Park, for over half a century, was a site of struggle and contestation, where the authority of the university and even the police was never certain. I didn’t always love spending time in the park—I encountered some of Berkeley’s more annoying denizens there. And so what. The park’s value as a sometimes-frustrating laboratory where people claimed the right to green space to use as they wanted, and demanded access in the face of ongoing enclosure by the university and its business interests, was infinite.
The steel wall put an end to the long argument. It offers no point of entry, no line of sight. Chain-link fences can be climbed or cut (the chain-link fence surrounding People’s Park after the ’69 riots was torn down by activists in 1972), crowd-control barricades can be removed or detourned, and most other barriers offer some permeability or at least a partial view of the proceedings inside. For decades, the activists of People’s Park demanded what visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff calls “the right to look”—that is, the right to look into others’ eyes and express solidarity or understanding, the right to be seen by others on mutual ground. The right to look counters the authority of the university or the state that seeks to separate, categorize, and control the world, and to naturalize its own power. The container wall is a clear statement that the right to look, the right to hear what’s going on, the right to engage, now belongs only to the university and its developers. Now, the only people allowed to look are the security guards posted up on every corner of the fortress and the unseen watchers who review the footage from security cameras mounted ostentatiously around its perimeter.
All that’s left to see is the repeated block-length grid of rectangular steel containers, tessellated yellow red yellow yellow blue green red. This is the provisional architecture of globalization, the product of earth-degrading systems of extraction and logistics washed ashore and installed as a weapon. The container shows that money can move, commodities can move, but people’s freedom of movement can be controlled and curtailed. “What disturbs viewers most about Minimalist art” says Anna Chave, “may be what disturbs them about their own lives and times, as the face it projects is the society’s blankest, steeliest face; the impersonal face of technology, industry, and commerce.” The university may not have intended to make such a literal statement, but it showed its hand here, with the silent declaration that it has the power of capital, and the authority to call upon state (and private) violence when needed.
The container barricade is an eerie echo of another logistical battle fought nearby. Throughout the 1960s, the port of Oakland roiled with tense negotiations between unions and management, as the rise of containerization and automation (ushered in by the 1960 Mechanization and Modernization Agreement) threatened to upend the livelihoods and lifeways of port workers. The tension culminated in a 1971 ILWU strike, which shut down fifty-six West Coast ports for 130 days. The union won most of its demands, but the longshoremen came out demoralized and the total containerization of ports continued—a long-term victory of logistics over labor power. Not coincidentally, this is the same period in which Judd and other Minimalists conceptualized and refined their own unspeaking, unseeing rectangle art. An era of violent shapes offered up as provocation or destroyer of worlds.
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I didn’t notice the bird until it was right in front of me. After schlepping around the field looking at 15 untitled works in concrete, 1980–1984, I arrived at the former artillery shed housing Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982–1986. I hadn’t booked a tour, so instead circled the building, which is mostly glass. The bird was dead, laid out forlornly on the concrete ledge immediately below one of the windows. I imagine it mistook the glass pane for the open sky and flew smack into the deadly surface. Dead birds are an occupational hazard for buildings, but still I was depressed at the murder. Who gets to erect a shed—to store weapons, or even worse, to store art—and block the passage of birds, pronghorn, and people migrating across West Texas and neighboring Chihuahua fast and slow?
Soon after the Marfa trip, I learned from poet-ornithologist Rebekkah LaBlue about mist nets, which are another thing birds can fly into. The mist net is a field ornithologist’s tool of the trade, a multi-tiered nylon or polyester mesh net suspended between metal poles which can be set temporarily in the path of migratory birds to catch them for banding or other research purposes. About six feet high and up to sixty feet in length, they look like diaphanous badminton nets. From a bird’s perspective, the mist net seems far preferable to the glass-paned shed or the container barricade. Temporary, non lethal, and generally erected under the strictures of a federally-authorized permit.
Knowledge of the mist net saved me from my Judd bird death spiral. Here is something beautiful and fleeting that cuts across the landscape, shimmering in the breeze and making migration visible (first by capturing the birds on the wing, then by releasing tagged birds that will continue to be visible to researchers) without disrupting the lifeways of the birds above or the creatures ambling along the ground. It’s a fence of sorts that doesn’t function as a fence—it doesn’t demarcate a border or boundary, and it doesn’t prevent movement from one part of the land to another. Instead of the industrial fortitude of the concrete barricade or the concrete form (“I didn’t make a drawing; I just picked up the phone and ordered it,” said artist Tony Smith on the production of his 1962 sculpture Die, an early Minimalist monolith and exemplar of the artist-as-industrialist turn), the mist net is a lace curtain of a thing—barely there, and not for long.
Back in California, back in 1976, a different kind of soft barrier cut a temporary ragged swath across the landscape. An hour’s drive north of People’s Park, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence slivered white and billowing through Sonoma and Marin counties, following the roll and dip of the hills and eventually dropping down into the Pacific at Bodega Bay (where The Birds famously took their revenge). Eighteen feet high and twenty-four and a half miles long, Running Fence was famously the first artwork to have an environmental impact report drafted as part of its planning process. The 450 page document lays out the risks to wildlife, including migratory birds, potential damage to the landscape, and other possible impacts related to increased visitor traffic. An estimated two million people visited Running Fence during its two-week viewing period, making it a kind of mist net for public attention. Catch and release-style.
Running Fence was an inverse to the plain power of the shipping container or the Minimalist object—its genesis and planning so intensely conversational and relational that it reads like a parody of socially-engaged art practice. Christo and Jeanne-Claude negotiated access and easements with fifty-nine ranchers through whose property the fence was to run, and held eighteen public hearings where locals could air concerns and hear about the project’s scope and intentions. Four years of preparation and collaborative planning for two weeks of sculpture, after which the fence was dismantled and its valuable parts given away to the local ranchers.
Photos of Running Fence’s terminal dip down into the ocean recalls, to an uncanny extent, the western edge of the present-day US-Mexico border, where a steel fence thrusts into the ocean at the point where Tijuana meets San Diego, drowning itself in salt water and drowning thirty-three migrants between 2020 and 2023. On the one hand, a steel and rust wall, the violent manifestation of state and industrial power to control the movement of people and enable the movements of commodities and capital. On the other hand, a temporary fence of little utility, dismantled almost as fast as it appeared, a product of discourse where the neighbor, rancher, traveler, viewer, and bird’s “right to look” (a right that Mirzoeff notes is underpinned by the first principle of the “right to existence”) are ennobled and enshrined.
Ephemeral as it was, Running Fence was in no way removed from the logistical infrastructure that enabled both the mechanized port and the Minimalist rectangle. As scholar Shane Boyle notes in The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism, Christo and Jeanne-Claude enlisted (pre-automation) dock workers as laborers for their early oil barrel sculptures, and they later teamed up with the emerging logistics sector to facilitate their famous large-scale works. However, instead of reproducing the inhuman power or blank authority of container and its art brethren, Christo and Jeanne-Claude created what Boyle calls “monuments to wasteful logistics labor”—a recognition of the human efforts required to facilitate the global movement of commodities and capital.
I returned to Berkeley this week, to check on the wall and the security guards whose blustering surveillance labor shores up the borders of what was the people’s park. They didn’t want to talk to me. Not surprising. The security guards and their security cameras are brute force emissaries, acting in service of the same system that erected this barricade and others to block the movement of people and animals through space that rightfully belongs to all of us. There was no need for them to say a word.
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