Late in 1994 I found myself in Marfa Texas (see entries passim) making a film about the magical Donald Judd. This was a trip of a lifetime – somehow we’d managed to get access to every single building Judd owned in Marfa, including his home, strewn with minimal sculptures, tartan and bagpipes (!) This had been arranged through Judd’s son Flavin, who he’d named (of course) after his great friend and contemporary Dan Flavin.
Now it’s one thing to name your dog Marfa, quite another to name your son after another artist – and Flavin (Judd Junior, that is) revealed that Don and Dan had been inseperable mates and each other’s greatest admirer as artists, but that as with almost everyone Judd knew, they’d fallen out at some stage around the 1980s as Judd’s megalomania and sheer irascibility alienated him from everyone around him.
On several previous occasions I’d tried to get an interview with Flavin, whose work I love almost as much as Judd’s, but every time he’d refused, being something of a man of few words himself. However, this time (with the considerable assistance of his younger namesake) he said he’d be delighted to talk about Judd and invited us to his house in upstate New York.
And so it was that a few days before Christmas we arrived at Flavin’s place. A housekeeper ushered us upstairs to an attic room, where Flavin was sitting upright in an armchair in a dressing gown with a series of blankets across his lap. He was actually really quite ill at this stage, had a dialysis machine by his bedside and was quite obviously medicated. It was more like visiting an elderly patient in hospital than setting up for an interview. There was a TV next to him with a baseball game on and a giant Christmas tree that threatened to swamp the space and push itself through the roof, and at the base of the tree was a Santaland model railway on permanent rotation playing Christmas songs. Flavin sometimes sang along to the songs with a mumble, and sometimes chanted the name of one of the baseball players, Bobby Brewster. Once we’d set up and got our lighting in place I explained to him that for the purpose of the interview I’d have to switch off the television and the train – he looked devastated, as if I’d just taken away his toys, and I felt that after all this time this was not the way I’d expected meeting him might be.
And then, as soon as the camera was rolling, he was lucid and sharp as a pin. He was brilliantly on the button about Judd, both as an artist and as an individual. He claimed that Judd was the greatest artist America had ever known, and explained that Marfa was symptomatic of Judd’s approach to art: “You make it difficult for people to get too, yet the pilgrims are crawling on their hands and knees.” It was obvious that after all those years his love for the man had never quite gone away. This was a magical half hour, and I knew there and then that I had the contribution that would elevate my documentary to another level.
Once we’d finished Flavin seemed to lapse back into pre-interview mode, tired and run down. At the end of filming it’s standard practice to do a ‘wildtrack’, which is just basically the sound recordist recording the ambience of the room for the purposes of editing the interview, and at these times everyone is asked to be quiet and still. And as we recorded the (non)-sound, Flavin took one of the plastic pee bottles from the bed, put it under the blanket, and weed into it.
We thanked him profusely, and switched the model train back on, and the television, and left him to his baseball game which we’d sort of rudely interrupted. And though it had been a strange and bizarre set-up, I felt genuinely honoured to have been granted that time with him. I’m not sure that Judd is America’s greatest artist ever, but wherever he is on the running order, I don’t think Flavin is that far behind.