Prada Marfa: An art outlier perseveres in the Texas desert

A 15-by-25-foot adobe cube known as Prada Marfa appeared on a desolate stretch of Texas highway in 2005, and ever since most of the focus — and no undue amount of discussion — has been on the art side of this art-meets-retail installation. This fashion season, which has showcased images of near-cartoonish consumerism, seems like a good time to revisit the faux-luxury outpost in the middle of nowhere.

It’s jarringly disconcerting, as one zooms through the otherwise-deserted, scrub-covered Texas ranchland, to happen upon a cute-as-a-cupcake boutique, complete with awnings and a black-and-white “Prada Marfa” sign but with the door sealed.

Something about the juxtaposition of landscape and luxury rising out of the earth like a fashion fever-dream makes you want to reach for your credit card and your gun at the same time. It feels positively post-apocalyptic. Is it a message from a future where luxury brands have conquered every parched corner of the planet? Or is it the chain-rattling ghost of a bricks-and-mortar retail past? If you stop your car and turn off your engine, will you hear a cautionary whisper as the wind whips through the nearby ranch fence: “The Internet did this to me ....”?

Berlin-based artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have said they conceived the installation as a “pop-culture land art project,” a snapshot in time that would not be maintained or changed, gradually succumbing to the ravages of time and weather, degrading into the desert.

Thanks to $100,000 raised by nonprofit contemporary art gallery Ballroom Marfa and the New York City-based Art Production Fund, it was built on this particular stretch of U.S. 90, some 37 miles northwest of the arts town of Marfa. Milan-based Prada, which has a long history of supporting contemporary art, gave permission for its name to be used, and designer Miuccia Prada even handpicked the items that would never be sold from the store shelves: a half-dozen handbags and 20 women’s shoes from the luxury label’s fall/winter 2005 collection.

It might have been built as art, but it was vandalized like retail. Within days of completion, the sealed door was yanked open and the contents were stolen from the shelves (they were quickly replaced).

In 2013, the Texas Department of Transportation floated the idea that the art installation should be demolished because it might qualify as an illegal roadside ad, a stance that led to a Save Project Marfa page on Facebook and an email from Galerie Nicolai Wallner, which represents Elmgreen and Dragset, seeking support to save “a poignant critique of our contemporary consumer culture.”

In March of this year, an activist artist vandalized the cube, using blue spray paint, fluttering blue and white flags and a half-dozen Toms Shoes to briefly turn it into “Toms Marfa.” “Blended with narcissism and unethical hedonism, this is the society’s apocalyptic theater,” read part of a lengthy manifesto left at the scene.

My visit to the site a few years ago was brief, but I find myself back at Prada Marfa at least once a day, transported to the same vantage point.

That’s because a framed photograph of the outpost hangs at the end of the hallway outside my bedroom. It was sent to me, frame and all, by someone I had never met but who had discovered my business card among the dozens left at the site, lined up on the narrow molding-like ledges on the sides of the installation, jettisoned like abandoned albino butterfly wings by fellow Prada Marfa pilgrims.

That was some seven months after my Texas trek. Equally astonishing was an email I received less than 24 hours after I’d dropped my digits in the desert. It was a friendly, just-for-kicks message from another passerby. “I just thought it’d be funny to do,” the email read. “We left business cards too, so maybe someone will harass us one day.”

Like all good art, the installation has provoked and inspired commentary and discussion. And even though the door of Prada Marfa never opens, it turns out that it’s a lot like a good shopping experience, offering, among other things, the possibility of connecting strangers wandering in the desert.

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