Better to Lose Your Head Than Use It: Working with Ethnographic Fiction and a New Evidential Paradigm at Minimalist Donald Judd’s The Chinati Foundation

Abstract

Writing through ethnographic fiction, art practice, and art historical research, this essay presents a study of minimalist Donald Judd’s The Chinati Foundation/La Fondacion Chinati (1979–1986), a museum in West Texas designed by the artist. It explores Chinati in relation to its site—the Texas-Mexico borderlands—focusing on three objects of evidence found in and around it: a World War II–era German-language sign inside the former military complex that Judd retrofitted for the museum, and that he dated and autographed; a wall of a derelict adobe building graffitied with a denouncement of Chinati; and a granite gravestone with an Arabic inscription, marking the final resting place of Lebanese peddler Ramon Karam, whose death on the Rio Grande in 1918 was used as evidence in Senate hearings in support of increased U.S. militarization at the border. The essay shows how working with ethnographic fiction toward a new evidential paradigm shifts perspectives on Chinati, Judd’s practice, the borderlands, and the relationship between scholarship and art practice.