Installation view of Willie Binnie’s “Marfa”
While the subject matter of Willie Binnie’s Marfa appears to be entirely relevant to our current political situation, appearances are deceiving. Despite the fact Binnie has asserted that his works can be understood as expressions of either hope or despair, it is not necessarily the case that he is referring only to our emotional response to the issues that plague us — climate change, immigration, rural poverty, the decimation of Gaza — and the criminal evisceration of the means to deal with them. Even as the structure of this exhibition tempts the viewer to read the room as a narrative, the story being told has many facets. Marfa is arguably an account of Binnie’s impressions of a place, but his curious, compelling images and objects point to something else.
That “something else” goes to the core of the problem of artistic production, as seen from the point of view of the artist. At first glance, this may be difficult to perceive because our spontaneous habits of perception demand that we find patterns in any field of disparate things. When I first viewed Marfa, I felt like I was in the presence of a lengthy set-up for a stand-up routine. I searched in vain for the punch line. A sense of disorientation and perhaps a bit of panic overtook me; slowly, the sense that I was able to grasp the meaning of Binnie’s work gave way to another thought. I began to relax, suspending the desire to fix the meaning of any specific work in the exhibition.
Willie Binnie, “Black Sun (Pink),” 2024, acrylic stain and walnut ink on canvas, 87 x 87 inches. Photo: Todora Photography, courtesy of Keijsers Koning.
I dove deeper into the intuition that the way in which the entire body of work was being sequenced pointed to the true subject matter. I began to see the whole as a winding, hesitant, and uncertain beast. I began to enumerate the exhibition’s strengths: nothing was too literal, there were several works depicting variations on a theme, and others that seemed to be studies for more ambitious renderings, all of which indicated the breadth of Binnie’s expertise. The structure of the installation suggested a particular musical form, the sonata, where themes undergo development, expansion, and decomposition. For example, the series Black Sun punctuates the exhibition, sometimes as fairly large works on canvas, at other moments as smaller works on paper: “Black Sun (Amber),” 2024; Black Sun (Pink), 2024; and Untitled (Black Sun), 2024. This motif introduces the promise of an “apocalypse” when our sun burns out, some billions of years hence. It’s a puckish updating of the Vanitas genre, a sign not only of human mortality, but of the impermanency of the Earth itself.
Willie Binnie, “Snowman,” 2024, acrylic and acrylic stain on canvas, 66 x 78 inches. Photo: Todora Photography, courtesy of Keijsers Koning.
Another recurrent motif is the snowman, present as a large painting on canvas — Snowman, 2024 — and a diminutive sculpture of the same image. The subject, I learned, is a concrete snowman, a comment on the trap of appearance and the artificiality that blights our contemporary environment. Other works in the exhibition play a similar game, such as the verbal pun displayed in the two images of ice dispensers outside a ubiquitous rural discount store, evoking the threat of random deportations. (Ice (No Ice), Dollar General, September 2024 I, 2024; and Ice (No Ice), Dollar General, September 2024 II.)
Willie Binnie, “Spray Wash (Marfa),” 2024,
watercolor and ink on paper, 10 3/5 × 13 4/5 inches. Photo: Todora Photography, courtesy of Keijsers Koning.
Other examples of recurring motifs include depictions of smiley and frowny-faced decorated hot air balloons — Balloon I, II, and III, 2024. The aesthetic quality of all the acrylic wash paintings on paper is particularly engaging in the way they do the work of depiction. These precious, vignetted images estrange representation, aestheticizing the tragic as mundane, presumably in the service of a more objective depiction of the subject. Examples include a series of images of missile craters in Gaza (Missile Crater (Gaza) I, II, and III, 2024) and a series of images of vernacular architecture of nearly uniform structures housing self-service car wash facilities sited in and around Marfa (Spray Wash (Marfa), 2024; Spray Wash (Alpine), 2024; and Spray Wash (Fort Davis), 2024).
Willie Binnie, “Spray Wash (Marfa),” 2024,
watercolor and ink on paper, 10 3/5 × 13 4/5 inches. Photo: Todora Photography, courtesy of Keijsers Koning.
The symbolic focus around which all the other works orbit is the arrangement of nearly 200 Polaroids on a table situated at the center of the gallery. Alongside the Polaroids are bits of the geology of the region in which Marfa exists — red flint, chert, jasper, and lava — and other small objects that the artist picked up during his forays into the countryside over the course of several weeks. The photographs — The Chihuahuan Polaroids, 2024 — reveal a host of unassuming aspects of the town and its environs that caught Binnie’s eye during his excursions when the temperature in his studio reached unbearable levels. Binnie remarks that those journeys of up to 60 miles from Marfa were a way to gain an understanding of the town and its surroundings. While these photos were taken on more or less random journeys throughout the town and the surrounding region, the images are not the result of an entirely aleatory process. Subjects were selected by the artist with the intent of avoiding anything suggesting a stereotypical view of Marfa. According to Binnie, the aim was to represent subjects that, in their ordinariness, would negate the overwhelming cultural noise generated by the fact of Donald Judd’s colonization. In keeping with the autographic works in the exhibition, Binnie’s Polaroids also avoid picturing explicit signs of the political, like the border patrol headquarters in the region, or sites of decay — “ruin porn” in his words — or well-known highlights of Marfa’s cultural tourism circuit. The accompanying rock samples, mischievously echoing Robert Smithson’s aesthetic of non-site and entropy, create an epochal closure for the photos.
Marfa presents itself dialectically, communicating a profound truth about the conditions and possibilities of artistic production. Binnie’s luminous and intelligent exhibition is driven by a personal — private — meditation that is relevant beyond his particular experience of making work framed by a world in turmoil during a residency at The Chinati Foundation. The brilliance of this exhibition is how Binnie negotiates making this experience public. As every artist knows, there is nothing quite like the gift of time. For Binnie this meant the time to reflect on a multitude of issues that have been piling up around us since November and the luxury of being able to explore Marfa and its environs at ease. These circumstances nourished what I have always imagined to be Binnie’s approach to depiction: rendering his subjects with an agency flowing from a style of representation that is fluid and allusive.
Taken as a whole, Marfa reveals the barely acknowledged, nuanced side of the commonplace assertion that art alters our perception of the world. What Binnie’s exhibition offers is the opportunity for a fresh understanding of the challenges involved in the public display of private, and possibly provisional, reflections on the current state of affairs. Of course, when we say private in the context of an artist’s expression, we mean anything but solitary, isolated, or estranged from history. The very resources of expression at the disposal of the artist are marked by convention, history, and the real conditions and possibilities of creative production. Imaginative longings manifested as objects of art are framed by these realities, yet we insist on linking them exclusively to the subjectivity of the artist.
For Binnie — for any artist — the prospect of producing a body of work is never cut and dried, because the artist faces many choices in the course of figuring out how to depict their subjects. The viewer trying to make sense of Binnie’s work is performing a public act. Yet the questions that the artist poses to themselves in the studio may remain invisible to the public’s gaze. Such questions include, “What competencies are to be employed in this venture?” “What modes of depiction are available?” “What historical precedents must be acknowledged, which ones disregarded?” Most significantly, “To whom is this work addressed? These choices are complicated by the fact that experimentation, uncertainty, contingency, and a sense of unknowing are important attitudes to be cultivated in any studio practice. Yet the charge to address an audience remains the most vexing.
Above all, the viewer is compelled to do the work required to adequately consider the context in which the works were made and in which they are endowed with their initial significance. In this regard, it is one of the signal joys of this exhibition that we are given a sort of entry into the scene of artistic self-reflection. It takes work to get to the core of Binnie’s project, and the remarkable structure of the installation is our principal means to achieve that. The viewer should avoid thematizing Marfa and deciding too quickly what the works are “about”. Instead, consider what is involved in the transformation of the subjective into the objective in the course of mounting a public exhibition. What is required for that trajectory to evoke the sense of freedom and uncertainty out of which the art emerged? Binnie’s exhibition goes against the grain of entrenched cultural expectations. The task Binnie set himself is how to outflank the translation of the artist’s “expression” into an objective fact; how to win a modicum of time and space for reflection, how to put the brakes on absolute certainty, how to gain some space to think things through. We owe it to the artist — to every artist — to dig deeper and consider the contradictions and complications arising from the trek between the studio and the showroom. This exhibition is certainly a step in that direction.*
Marfa is on view at Keijsers Koning in Dallas through February 8, 2025.
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* This is a theme I explored earlier; see “From the Pandemonium of the Studio to the Order of the Showroom,” in Michael Corris, Leaving Skull City: Selected Writings on Art. Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2016: pp. 143-145.
