Giles Bailey, I Bought a Little City
Performance on Tuesday 23rd April 2013, 6pm
I Bought a Little City is a presentation of material accumulated in Marfa, Texas, a peculiar cultural outpost in the Chihuahuan desert. Taking its title from a short story by Donald Barthelme published in 1974 the performance uses this text, along with video, stories and cocktails to examine the legacies of Donald Judd and American Minimalism
When we want to construct a sentence, we think about the vocabulary in our sentence and how to balance it with eloquence and coherence. The subject of our sentence is the focus, the protagonist; and verbs are used to describe its movement or state at any given time. We try to conform to the rules of language, we are speaking, yet within these confines we are free to express ourselves, it would seem, with more or less unlimited complexity. Language offers a path to unknown territory, able to communicate unique thoughts, constructing unique seed to by the language users. But convention is always invention’s servant, its boundaries are elastic, there to be contorted and punctured with inflexions and syntax suitable for communicating the subtlety and ambiguity of what there is to be communicated. This tension allows for eloquence.
In the Summer of 2012 Giles Bailey spent two months in Marfa, the small, West Texan town to which the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd relocated from New York in 1971. Over the following two decades until his death in 1994 he transformed what was little more than a remote outpost in the Chihuahuan desert into the home of a landmark collection of 20th century sculpture and a hub of cultural activity. Judd’s identity pervades the town, now a popular tourist destination and host to a large community of galleries and creative endeavours, leaving a complex, entangled legacy of philanthropy and megalomania.
I bought a little city is the title of a short story written by Donald Barthelme in 1974. It gives a first person account of the whims and vagaries of a individual following his purchase of the city of Galveston. The protagonist’s immense wealth and consequent power leaves him in a moral quandary, torn between an apparently benevolent impulse to improve the city for its populous and his own myopic self-interest. Strange and darkly comic the text can be read as a wry, absurdist indictment of proprietorship and urban regeneration. Barthelme’s story became a tool to assist me in unpicking Judd’s weighty and canonical lineage but also address more broadly the lens that such figures provide as a means to view ambition, culture and the writing of history.
At OUTPOST Bailey will attempt to invoke the panoramic vista from the cupola of the Presido County Courthouse (Marfa’s highest point) where he performed his adaptation of I bought a little city. Alongside this Bailey will present the project he developed as a resident in the town together with performances that informed it.
Giles Bailey is an artist based in London who makes performances that attempt to rethink conventional approaches to writing histories. Born in York in 1981 he studied at the Glasgow School of Art, Royal College of Art and the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam where he received his MFA in 2011. He has presented projects at The Chisenhale Gallery, London, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Van Horbourg, Basel, Etablissement d’en Face, Brussels and CAGE, New York. In July 2012 he was a researcher in residence in Marfa Texas for Fieldwork:Marfa at the invitation of ESBA Nantes Métropole, HEAD-Genève and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
Photo credit: Rehana Zaman
