limmoraliste Editorials

Better Shopping Through Living IV: Mise-en-scène for Robert Irwin — Frank Garrett

Photograph: Handwritten and typed letters to unknown people, scattered among gallery guides and brochures from Marfa, Texas, along with fossils, miniature sculptures, a wasp's nest, pine cones, and dried flowers.

Evening

Slowly the evening strips from his finest cloth,
that for him a circle of ancient trees holds up;
you survey: and the realms from you withdraw,
one skywarddarting and one that drops;

and leaving you to wholly belong to none,
not so very dark as the house that keeps quiet,
not so very sure the Eternal to summon
like what becomes a star each night in flight—

and leaving you (to unspeakably disentangle)
your life afeared and ripening and vast,
so that it, now bounded but presently grasped,
by turns becomes stone in you, a constellation.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, my translation

Photograph: A ribbon of COR-TEN steel slices through a grassy hillock in a park in downtown Dallas, Texas. On the horizon sit several skyscrapers. On the right, a raised highway swerves out of frame.
Robert Irwin’s Portal Park Piece (Slice), Carpenter Park, Dallas, originally installed 1981, repositioned 2021; an article and short documentary about the piece can be found here

Writer and translator Frank Garrett shops in Dallas, Texas, and is essays editor at Minor Literature[s]. His series Better Shopping Through Living will appear monthly. He was transfigured in Marfa by Irwin’s untitled (dawn to dusk) in January 2020.