photos + essay by randy lewis, chair and prof in the Department of American Studies, about one of the many exciting things going in UT American Studies: think of it as an invitation to create similar projects on other topics and in other places…

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Do you ever think about the endless intricacies of the periodic table? You do? Well, not me!

Yet lately I’ve been wondering if humanities scholars have something worth saying about helium, nickel, copper, lithium and the rest of the elemental stuff we haven’t investigated since high school chem? Can we write something vivid and meaningful about the elements that emphasizes the power of culture, history, and identity in areas far from our usual expertise? My answer is firm and clear: definitely maybe!

At least that’s what I was half-seriously thinking when I joined a new collaborative writing project on the elements dreamed into existence by anthropologists Marina Peterson (UT Anthro) and Gretchen Bakke (Humboldt University, Berlin). In the past few months the dozen or so members of the project have each selected a single element to write about, with others expected to join in the months ahead. Then with initial funding from a Texas Global Faculty Seed Grant, we met in Marfa for two days of fieldwork, planning, and workshopping, with the ultimate goal of producing a short essay on every element in the periodic table. Imagine 118 tiny books on the cultural lives of the elements and you’ll get the idea.

On the sublime road from Marfa to Fort Davis, home of the McDonald Observatory (all photos by author)

Well known for their research on various kinds of infrastructure and atmosphere, Marina and Gretchen planned out a judicious blend of structure and chaos for the weekend (an overly structured event is deadening; pure chaos is disorienting). The long stretch of communal time allowed for something that’s rare on campus during the Zoom age: we got to know each other a little bit. Marina rented a small architectural gem of a house where we met up with a pile of books, electronic gear, basic bookmaking equipment, and posters of the periodic table. My first thought is wow: this is cool but what the heck are we doing?

pile of books on the a wooden floor, folded rug beneath — Some of the books Dr. Marina Peterson had brought for our collective inspiration

And that’s not a bad question to ask yourself at the beginning of any research project. In fact, this positive perplexity is why my favorite work happens in situ and especially in places like Marfa. As a grad student in the early 1990s, my first trip to Marfa hit me like a meteor of possibility. Back then Austin was much more shaggy than cosmopolitan, very far from the slick global brand that it is today—so much so that Marfa seemed like Soho in the desert on one particular weekend in 1991 when I showed up in my little Ford pickup. Claes Oldenburg was strolling around the grounds of the Chinati Foundation, Gus Van Sant’s short films were projected inside an empty swimming pool, random bagpipers wailed like angry cats in the dark, and a smattering of local ranchers stood around a bonfire gripping Shiner Bocks and wondering what to make of all the wildly dressed art students. Everyone was mingling at a free annual party held by the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, who had been remaking the town since relocating from Manhattan in the 1970s.

This wonderful weekend planted a seed in my mind that Marfa was a special place for creative experimentation, while also giving me hope for a kind of lone star transformation that often seems out of reach. Because my own family has been in the state since the 1830s, mostly not transforming, not finding an easier way forward (for instance, this is my wonderful but excessively hard-working aunt), I am incredibly invested in ways that Texas can change for the better—and watching my sleepy slacker Austin becoming a glitzy Technopolis with an Apple campus, million dollar condos, and a massive Tesla factory is not really what I had in mind.

My own aspirations are closer to what I found in Presidio county ever since that initial trip in 1991. If dusty little Marfa can go from a sleepy ranch town to a global art mecca (not without its drawbacks, to be sure), then perhaps our state can evolve into something other than heat-baked sprawl, CRT-phobic suburbs, struggling small towns, and an ever-widening interstate system that eventually swallows us whole.

Happily, the elements project has a perfect crew for imagining something better, if only in a preliminary and exploratory way. Some familiar faces are in the room in our little Marfa HQ-–Lindsey Freeman (Simon Fraser U) is one of the most perceptive and graceful writers now in academia. Craig Campbell was there in his old Mazda pickup with Queen Elizabeth waving ironically from the window: if you are doing something at the nexus of art and anthropology, or anything that is just plain novel, cool, and brilliant, Craig is probably in the mix (as he was for the Carceral Edgelands Project earlier this year, and the Ex Situ Collective, which has met for similar projects in Austin, Windsor, Athens, and here in Marfa in 2014 for which we had to create work while in transit). Fusing art and scholarship into a collaborative and often accelerated process is always a revelation, and these academic experimenters are my core peeps, intellectually and temperamentally speaking, as much as American Studies.

Dr. Craig Campbell, UT Anthro, with his regal co-pilot

Looking across Marfa’s main drag with some ironic commentary for academics who love to talk!

So what was the experience like? I rolled into town, dusty and tired in the late afternoon. Within 30 minutes, I wandered into the coolest shop ever, run by a wonderful guy who I interviewed for my film on Prada Marfa last fall, whose interior designer partner told me mind blowing stories about the contemporary art scene in Mexico City; then I walked into a photo shoot for a catalog where they let me sit inside a 1953 Studebaker Commander; and was told that Lady Gaga was in town for a Dom Perignon shoot (alas, untrue!), while a friend was emailing me that Grimes and Chelsea Manning are dating back in ATX. That’s how Marfa is. If I walked around a corner and bigfoot was playing banjo with Miranda July and Harvey Keitel with Beyoncé at the conductor's podium, I would have been like “sure… that makes sense.”

Marfa is heaven for people who love old trucks and cars (as the author does!). The elements (in another sense) weigh heavily on machines, houses, and people in West Texas.

For the next 48 hours I worked alongside various participants, watched a dirt devil rip off a big section of a roof, and prayed for the wind to die down because the swirling ragweed was hitting me like a thousand hangovers. At night we donned six layers of clothing and drove to the McDonald Observatory, which is one of the greatest appendages of the UT world. I peered through telescopes and saw Orion’s Belt, lunar close ups, and hazy nebulae, while the astronomers nerded out on our dopey questions. So many brilliant minds in the Davis mountains figuring out the universe—astronomers have to have the souls of poets, right? Perhaps the question for our gang is the obverse: do poets have the souls of astronomers?

An oblique form of inspiration bubbles up as we approach helium, hydrogen, lithium, and the rest of the cosmic stew in our own cult studies way, hoping to create micro books on individual elements. Mine is dedicated to lithium, about which I knew nothing last year. Now I is expert! (I’m riffing off an old engineering joke). For weeks I've been reading about its applications: the batteries of Elon Musk, the mental health of Brittney Spears, the music of Kurt Cobain. It’s in fireworks, pacemakers, lubricants, hydrogen bombs—everything seems to need it nowadays.

We kicked around another element in the morning, driving an hour south to take notes around a dead silver mine in Shafter, Texas, almost on the border. Megan Gette, a talented graduate student from anthropology with a creative writing background, used hydrophones and contact mics to record the ghostly sounds of metal and dirt. She let me listen to her headphones and I was shocked: a metal fence sounds like a didgeridoo when you tap it softly.

Group work is messy by necessity. Back in town we gently argue for an hour about what to call the publications. Over the course of two days we plan, write, design, cut and fold dozens of prototypes (one participant says it’s a bit like elementary school). It’s not all forward progress and it may not yield a consistent neoliberal knowledge-nugget with quantifiable “impact factor,” and yet I look around the room and see my favorite model of academic life. Anthropologists, humanists, sociologists, and poets. Lots of movement, lots of dialogue, lots of snacking. A lot of group work, DIY fashioning, and a handmade product that is about the creation of new forms of knowledge.

Co-organizer Gretchen Bakke from Berlin, along with Megan Gette and Monti Sigg from Austin

Not surprisingly, I start thinking of it as “artisanal academia.” Chaos and brilliance simmering on the stove together: it’s exhausting but convivial work that will yield an atypical academic “product.” Given the overproduction of standard journal articles that often go unread or quickly obsolete, I’m fascinated by our embrace of the ephemeral: we are in the realm of experimentation, collaboration, and innovation in form (which often happens when artists are injected into academic settings, or when you work with academics who are also artists/poets).

The trailer park that never happened, near the ghost town of Shafter, which has an amazing local history center with fascinating information on display. Only a few people live nearby where once thousands lived and died in pursuit of silver (atomic number 47).

The reality of Marfa is a profound visual inconsistency in the built environment. It’s a rapidly gentrifying town where a NY investment banker might own a million dollar third home that they almost never visit—and it’s often right across from a house like the one above in the heart of town. Hyper-modern homes with lap pools and fragile leftovers are juxtaposed on Marfa’s streets, more so than anywhere I’ve ever been in the US. See Kathleen Shafer’s book on Marfa for more on the town’s history.

So that’s what I did for the first few days of Spring Break. People hear the word Marfa and they probably think minimalist art vacation or something—and it was in the sense of being out of the normal traffic and hustle of the violet crown.

Near the abandoned silver mine of Shafter, searching for inspiration and/or a cell signal

But it’s also not nothing to drive 1000 miles in four days and take part in an ambitious collective experience, sustained mostly by the quality of the minds and the idealism of the people around you. I was exhausted when I rolled back into ATX, immediately sprinting to catch a bullet train of bureaucratic obligation. Squeezing back into my little work silo to manipulate symbols that flicker across multiple screens with endless continuity, simultaneously dulled and jittery, social but alone, I’m already thinking about the wildness and possibility in the elements of Marfa.

Experimental American Studies and the Elements of Marfa