In December 2012, five students from the Work.Master programme – Julia Burns, Pauline Beaudemont, Chloé Delarue, Simone Holliger and Quentin Lannes, supervised by Mai-Thu Perret – made a study trip to the desert of the American south-west, following in the footsteps of the American avant-garde movements Minimal Art, Land Art and Fetish Finish in the 1960s and 1970s, and focusing on the relationship between work and landscape, site and non-site, space and artistic community.

The whole of the small town of Marfa in southern Texas bears the mark of Donald Judd, who moved there in the early 1970s in search of space, peace and quiet. From 1973 until his death Judd continued to buy up land and buildings, first to live there with his children and later to create permanent installations of his own work and that of artists he liked, on a large scale – a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, a unique opportunity to see minimal art in situ and understand Judd’s ideas about architecture, design and display. His studio, his library, the small houses he bought to hang up his works among his own furniture and the furniture he collected form a strange cross between a home (an idealized domestic space clearly created to be looked at rather than lived in – most of the houses he renovated to install his works in no longer had a kitchen, and often no bathroom either) and a museum designed for one man, a mausoleum dwelling of the kind built by Chinese emperors, an ideal home that would last after their deaths. The presence in Marfa of the Judd and Chinati foundations has put this middle-of-nowhere town on the map of tourist destinations. Today it is a liberal enclave in the midst of Texas, with its bar where you can meet colourful personalities who have lived in New York or even Europe, its film festival and its studios belonging to artists who have gone there in search of not just peace and emptiness, but also a sense of community. From Marfa we moved on to New Mexico to meet the artist Charles Ross and visit his Star Axis, a Land Art project on which he has been working ever since 1971. Situated on top of a black sandstone mesa, and eventually eleven storeys tall, it is a stone pyramid from which you can observe the movement of stars and their relationship to the earth’s axis. The final stage of the trip was a visit to Larry Bell’s studio in Taos, a small mountain town where Agnes Martin also lived.

Furniture in collaboration with Harold Bouvard