Dan Flavin at Marfa

ON OCTOBER 7 AND 8, the art faithful (some 1,000 in all) will converge on a tiny town in West Texas. Their Mecca? The annual Chinati Foundation Open House. When Donald Judd pitched camp in an abandoned army fort in Marfa back in ’82, it seemed as if he had gone out of his way to pinpoint the middle of nowhere. But ever since the foundation opened its doors to the public four years later, the art savvy (and social) have flocked to the remote location—at least for the annual Open House. Indeed, this year’s festivities, which mark the official debut of a major work by Dan Flavin (designed by the artist shortly before his death in 1996 and installed posthumously), boast an especially fluorescent guest list. With heavy hitters like architect Richard Gluckman, Tate director Nicholas Serota, and Stedelijk Museum director Rudi Fuchs due to attend, next month’s convergence may well be remembered as the Yalta of the cultural elite.

For anyone who has made the pilgrimage, the willingness of the culture cognoscenti to break from the art world’s gravitational centers isn’t hard to understand: To walk among the foundation’s low-lying, unadorned buildings, all but swallowed up by a desert that extends in every direction, is to feel the pull this austere landscape must have exerted on the artist. Judd envisioned a phenomenal symmetry between sublime culture and sublime nature, and much of the work he selected for the foundation helps make that equilibrium explicit—while reconfirming his taste for the unambiguous. Still, if the works he chose by Carl Andre and Barnett Newman seem predestined for this site, the remainder of the collection belies Judd’s fabled intolerance. Nicely assorted, even impulsive, the collection includes works by Ilya Kabakov, Ingólfur Arnarsson, and John Chamberlain.

Come October, all eyes will be on Flavin’s recently situated installation. It is perhaps too easy to reach for the rhetoric of “lasts” and “greatests,” yet this late foray, fully engaging the architecture of no fewer than six enormous U-shaped former army barracks, surely ranks among the artist’s most spectacular achievements. As in previous works, Flavin has created his effects with suspended light fixtures, but in this instance the slanting barriers of tubes are positioned within oblique corridors where theme and variation unfold with exquisite nuance. Untitled (Marfa project), 1996, will be remembered for the delicate balance it achieves between glowing atmosphere and eloquent structure.

If the Minimalist magic anticipated when the lights officially go on in the newest addition to Judd’s desert museum-cum-Gesamtkunstwerk is at times a little overshadowed by all the schmoozing (festivities include dinner on Saturday evening and dancing in front of the Presidio County Courthouse), the convergence of two protean talents against an awe-inspiring vista fairly guarantees that the ado will be about something. And those of us who won’t be jetting in to rub elbows with the art-world grandees can be consoled: When it comes to the masters of less, less may still be more.

Ronald Jones is a frequent contributor to Artforum.