3 over-sized postcards shot at the Chinati Foundation,
Marfa, Texas (June 2009)

Wondering where the unmade work of Ana Mendieta and Hannah Wilke might have been located had there been a desert site, funded by DIA.

"The Chinati Foundation is located on 340 acres of land on the site of former Fort D.A. Russell in Marfa, Texas. Construction and installation at the site began in 1979 with initial assistance from the Dia Art Foundation in New York. The Chinati Foundation opened to the public in 1986 as an independent, non-profit, publicly funded institution. Chinati was originally conceived to exhibit the work of Donald Judd, John Chamberlain and Dan Flavin. The collection was expanded and now includes 15 outdoor concrete works by Donald Judd, 100 aluminum works by Judd housed in two converted artillery sheds, 25 sculptures by John Chamberlain, an installation by Dan Flavin occupying six former army barracks, and works by Carl Andre, Ingólfur Arnarsson, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, David Rabinowitch, and John Wesley. Each artist's work is installed in a separate building on the museum's grounds. Temporary exhibitions feature modern and contemporary art of diverse media."
(2009. 27 August, http://www.chinati.org/visit/missionhistory.php)

The works of Ana and Hannah's troublesome exes (Claes Oldenberg and Carl Andre) are installed at the Chinati Foundation. The rumors that swirl around these spoiled sexual unions range from art co-option (aka theft) to murder. But I am not so interested in framing Chinati as an art crime scene or haunted house because Wilke and Mendieta's once crushed bodies don't ghost Chinati; they aren't there and they aren't crushed anymore.

These postcards have an indexical mission- to point away from Chinati and towards a (Utopian?) perfect past/future site of works to be made by a broader cast of participants. What could have been made by these canonical female artists, if parallel support had been provided? Who would have joined them if they had invited another coterie of makers or would it not have been as circumscribed? Pointing towards the evacuation of one world towards another. When Margaret Cavendish wrote Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World in 1666, she not only penned the first work of science fiction by a woman, but a utopian tract where a woman from our realm seduces the Blazing-Land by way of 'her blazing virtues' , and then organizes an invasion back into our world with an army of hybrid man-animals. She does this to right the wrongs, but she does this, not with bitterness or sex or might, but with fantasy and fearlessness. My fantasy starts slow; it begins with a salutation.