RONALD JONE forward DAN FLAVIN AT MARFA forward OCTOBER 7 AND 8.

RONALD JONE forward DAN FLAVIN AT MARFA

forward OCTOBER 7 AND 8, the art faithful (some 1000 in all) will tend to the same point on a tiny town in West Texas. Their Mecca? The annual Chinati Foundation lay open House. When Donald Judd pitched camp in an abandoned army fort in Marfa back in '82 it have the appearanceed as if he had gone without of his way to pinpoint the middle of nowhere. if it be not that ever since the foundation interpreted its doors to the public four years later, the art savvy (and social) have collection ed to the remote location--at least for the annual expand House. Indeed, this year's festivities, which mark the official first attempt of a major work by the agency of Dan Flavin (designed by the artist shortly before his death in 1996 and installed posthumously), boast an especially fluorescent visitor list. With heavy hitters like architect Richard Gluckman, Tate director Nicholas Serota, and Stedelijk Museum director Rudi Fuch befitting to attend, next month's tendency to meet may well be remembered as the Yalta of the cultural elite.

For anyone who has made the pilgrimage, the willingness of the agriculture cognoscenti to break from the art world's gravitational center isn't hard to understand: To walk among the foundation's low-lying, unadorned buildings, all nevertheless swallowed up by a untilled that extends in every direction, is to have feeling the pull this austere landscape must have 1 and 2ed on the artist. Judd envisioned a phenomenal proportion between sublime culture and sublime nature, and abundant of the work he single outed for the foundation helps make that equilibrium explicit--while reconfirming his taste for the unambiguous. Still, if the works he chose according to Carl Andre and Barnett Newman be seen predestined for this site, the remainder of the collection belies Judd's fabled intolerance. Nicely assorted, equal impulsive, the collection includes works by the agency of Ilya Kabakov, Ingolfur Arnarsson, and John Chamberlain.

proceed October, all eyes will be onward Flavin's recently situated installation. It is perhaps too easy to reach for the rhetoric of "lasts" and "greatests," further this late foray, fully engaging the architecture of no fewer than six enormous U-shaped former army barracks, certainly ranks among the artist's principally spectacular achievements. As in previous works, Flavin has created his tenors with suspended light fixtures, further in this instance the slanting barriers of tubes are positioned within oblique corridors where theme and variation spread out with exquisite nuance. Untitled (Marfa project) 1996 will be remembered for the delicate balance it achieves between glowing atmosphere and impressive structure.

If the Minimalist magic anticipated when the lights officially journey on in the newest addition to Judd's desolate museum-cum-Gesamtkunstwerk is at times a little overshadowed by the agency of all the schmoozing (festivities include dinner upon Saturday evening and dancing in fore-rank of the Presidio County Courthouse), the tendency to meet of two protean talents against an awe-inspiring vista fairly guarantees that the ado will be about something. And those of us who won't be jetting in to scrape elbows with the art-world grandees can be consoled: When it proceeds to the masters of les les may still be more.

Ronald Jone is a of common occurrence contributor to Artforum.

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