Rattlesnakes? Them's nothin'.

It's open house weekend in Marfa, Texas. Over the next few days the Chinati and Judd Foundations will welcome hundreds of art world city-slickers into far West Texas. With that in mind...

On my first visit to the Chinati Foundation, I was talking with one of the interns about Donald Judd's 15 untitled works in concrete. You know the piece: It's the series of square, open-ended boxes that point the way south, down Highway 67, and toward the Chinati Mountains. The young man told me that a few weeks before, an antelope or a deer had given birth in one of the boxes.

"No..." I said, vaguely disbelieving. Then I felt bad about questioning the guy and I tried to turn my faux pas into a joke. "Did you see it? I mean, does that often happen during the 10 o'clock tour?"

He laughed, mostly politely, and tossed his head at the forms. "No. I'm the one who had to clean it up."

Visiting Chinati back in August - yes, I like Marfa best when it's empty - I thought of that story and that birth. As I was applying sunblock in anticipation of the morning tour, I saw about 10 deer a ways off in the distance. The concrete forms were to my left, the deer were down a road to my right. To my urban eye, they all looked to be solidly middle-aged. I wondered if one of them had been born in a Judd.

I've been to Chinati a few times now and I'm over the unlikelihood of the place. I think that just like any works of art, you have to get past the shock of awe, you have to settle in before you can begin to consider the work. When I'm walking around Chinati, I don't worry about the rattlesnakes anymore, and if that isn't comfort I don't know what is.

What Donald Judd did in Marfa sure isn't earth art or land art. His installations in Marfa make no attempt to measure themselves against geologic time - the walls around his downtown residential complex, The Block, are made out of mud, which ensures that they won't stand more than a few decades worth of thunderstorms - and none of the installations at Chinati try to stand up to geography created over the epochs the way Sun Tunnels does, or the way Lightning Field does.

But Judd's Chinati pieces sure do exist within nature. The way the morning light races horizontally across the open desert before glancing off of Judd's 100 untitled aluminum pieces is nothing like the way 75 watts hit a Judd in a white cube. The desert light lifts the pieces, turns them into something of a wispy solid. Same with the way the light in the evening hits the untitled concrete forms. The low, late light seems to infuse the grey concrete with the dried-out yellows of the tall grass around it. Judd's hard edges, those thousands of right angles, exist better in nature than 90 degrees seems like they should. Who knew minimalism could be landscape art?

Well, actually, a lot of minimalists did. Robert Irwin's scrims make us think about how we see light. Anne Truitt's plinths are infused with the strange colors and with the unusual geography of Maryland's marshy Eastern Shore.

Before I make my next trip to Chinati I'm going to re-read Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. I'm going to find some books on the geologic history of west Texas, and some about its flora and fauna. I've seen how Judd & Co. exist within nature. Next I want to know about how nature exists with them.