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A memorial for ‘The Hill’ of James Magee [1]
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Date: 2024-10-07
By Lawrence Welsh
The news arrived via text from Bogota, Columbia. “The artist James Magee has died,” it said.
Instantly numb, I didn’t know what to do but realized I couldn’t control death, and that I’d have to let Magee go. But how far?
After I steadied myself, the last three decades in El Paso shot through my mind, and I came to a conclusion: Of all the talented, driven, wild, erudite and charming people I’d met on the border, Magee shaped up as a contender for the top spot.
And, as with many things in life, I discovered his world and work by accident. Never did I dream back then that a renowned artist of his caliber would both change and rearrange my life, but that’s what happened.
Without question, it all started 27 years ago. That’s when I stumbled into the Adair Margo Gallery in El Paso and found the paintings of Annabel Livermore. By that time, I had already fallen in love with El Paso and realized I might spend the rest of my life on the border. In many ways, I needed a break after 34 years in Los Angeles, and I realized I could get one in El Paso.
Livermore’s paintings of Big Bend in West Texas hypnotized me. They glowed in browns and yellows and transcended realism and modernism at the same time. They appeared as spiritual epiphanies grounded in a rustic cacophony with minimal artifice. It all lacked pretension. I was hooked.
On the way out, I learned that Livermore was a retired librarian who had turned her hand to painting. A few weeks later, an old-timer told me that Livermore was, in fact, a fictional character created by the El Paso artist James Magee.
Fascinated, I filed that information away and went on with my life.
Lawrence Welsh, the author of this article, and artist James Magee at El Paso’s Istanbul Cafe in 2017. (Photo courtesy of Lawrence Welsh)
Ten years later, I rediscovered both Livermore and Magee’s work at the El Paso Museum of Art. This time, the show featured his rusted steel slabs of old-car hoods. They had been shaped, cut, treated and welded to form faces, perhaps, of the living and the dead. And Livermore’s mountains glowed again under new lights.
This time, I wouldn’t let it slip away. I took out a notebook, wrote down the names of the work and headed home for some light research.
It didn’t take long to discover Magee had created “The Hill,” one of the nation’s most significant outdoor art projects, and it remained only 68 miles from El Paso, near Cornudas, a Wild West almost ghost town of 15 residents. But I also read that only a small number of folks were ever allowed inside “The Hill,” certainly less than 150 during the past 30 years.
I remained fascinated, and I found a mailing address for Magee. I was also intrigued because I guessed Magee, due to his last name, possessed Irish roots, and since my mother was born and raised in Ireland and my father was an Irish-American, we’d most likely share some cultural similarities.
I went to work then on writing a letter and getting it in the mail. I figured, of course, that he’d blow me off and never write back, but in a week he sent an email that said he not only wanted to meet but that an insider’s secretive gig was happening at “The Hill.” He sent the information and said he looked forward to meeting me.
He also let me know that “The Hill” would be taken over that day by Peter Brötzmann, a jazz saxophonist who shaped up as one of the towering figures in European free jazz. I knew his work. I also discovered that U.S. jazz legend Don Cherry gave him the nickname “Machine Gun,” due to his savage approach to the saxophone. Brötzmann would fly in from Berlin, Germany, to perform at “The Hill.”
That October day 11 years ago remains a pivotal testament to life’s possibilities and the transformative power of art, music, landscape and language.
As directed, my wife and I parked a few blocks away from the hidden “Hill.” A car soon appeared and carried us up an incline.
James Magee’s installation “The Hill” sits in the desert in Cornudas, Texas, about 70 miles east of El Paso. (Photo courtesy of Adair Margo)
Laid out in cruciform, the shale rock and four steel buildings stood over 15 feet in height and remained connected by causeways that ended at massive steel doors. It could have remained at home in a sci-fi novel or movie set, or, perhaps, a Middle Ages temple to the resurrected Christ. We almost trembled when we arrived, and soon met guests from Houston, Dallas, El Paso, New York and Shanghai.
At “The Hill,” Magee captured the healing and wild Chihuahuan desert in its proper place; a memorial, in a sense, to spirit, West Texas, the border and stories told or not told in a shape-shifting Bible.
Tour guides and Magee took us into the four buildings or galleries that spread out on each end of the cross. In many ways, the fall sun and slight breezes placed shadows on and in the structures and causeways, and Magee forbade any cameras or recording devices. No one was allowed to “post” anything anywhere about the experience, almost like a totemic/sacred ceremony that would be destroyed by corrupted images spread across the Internet.
Each building shaped up as a tomb, but each opened to the light as the steel doors were pulled back, and then the shadows, too, creeped in.
In each room, totemic structures or sculptures made of steel, rust, spices, and glass stood and offered glimpses of the past and some future reality that might wait for us 200 years from now. A few of the pieces could have served as remnants of altars, but to what god or deity one couldn’t ask. Nothing needed explaining. It just was as we walked the walkways of the cruciform. Some people, I’m sure, thought of the crucifixion and others of a resurrection; other folks, I’m positive, of no such things at all.
See Also An appreciation of James Magee, an artist who made El Paso his home for 40 years James Magee’s journey began in Michigan and took him to Paris and New York, but the artist settled in El Paso.
Magee let us know that the fourth room’s visibility shaped up as a rarity, but we could glimpse it that day. He had worked on the building for 30 years, and it would take another 30 to complete. With the help of his team, which included several full-time artisans that he employed for decades, steady progress occurred. Everyone spoke fluent Spanish, and I’d often listen to Magee as he talked about the work and the weeks ahead.
When he finally pulled the massive steel doors back to the final building, I almost passed out. It shaped up as a mausoleum of chains, broken glass, pulleys and smooth glass overlays of steel and rust and light, and it became a document to a tortured industrialization, in a sense, that is unraveling. It also seemed masochistic and grounded in a new life, in a way that I knew and left in Los Angeles: the ultra violence of the streets; the discrimination and reversed discriminations and the heavy machinery and metal of the harbors and docks of Wilmington, Long Beach and San Pedro.
It all coalesced and crystalized, and I started crying. My emotions overpowered everything, and then I realized Magee was comforting me, that I’d be OK, that everything was all right, and he let me leave the fourth structure because the “show” was about to begin.
All the guests left and stood just outside the structures as Brötzmann, the legendary free and avant garde saxophonist, came face to face with “The Hill.”
Brötzmann, whose reputation had grown steadily since the 1960s, walked out and stood in the center of the cross and started blowing improvised solos into the Chihuahuan air. He walked to the shale-rock walls and blew to them, the reverberation bouncing into the desert, and then disappeared in a building while still blowing. He then turned his attention to the giant steel doors, which served as a new-age mute and reverb machine in a way.
Saxophonist Peter rötzmann, shown playing in Germany in 2018, played at James Magee’s The Hill in 2013. (Photo by Harald Krichel, via Creative Commons license)
The crowd stood or sat in stunned silence as Brötzmann merged with The Hill. He played, cried, honked and spat out a relentless stream of notes. He sounded like both a wild and tamed desert animal at the same time. It remained rooted in partial reality, but took on the textures, too, of a desert hallucination.
I carried a journal into the gig, and started writing as the music continued, seeing if my words could also play off of the sand, sky, rock and steel.
When Brötzmann finished, folks stumbled around in a desert haze sundown and eventually left for the private cars to take them back down to the bottom of the hill. One also had the option of walking down and processing the entire day on foot. My wife, Lisa McNiel, struck up conversations with three women from Houston who eventually waved us over to their car. They popped the trunk, got out bottles of wine, and showed us the new cowboy boots they bought at the Tony Lama and Lucchese stores in El Paso.
See Also Q&A with ‘The Gangs of Zion’ author Ron Stallworth The new book by the author of “Black Klansman” explores gang investigations in Utah, and the broader life of the El Paso writer.
We soon joined them in leaving and found a sign on the road for the old ghost town of Wallace Town. The sign said “Revival” and “Fried Chicken.” We gathered with the locals then in a donation-only dinner and stuck around for the revival.
The next day, I wrote a letter to Magee and thanked him. I soon received a letter back where he invited me to lunch, and then everything went into high gear, in a sense. I soon learned that Annabel Livermore had “her” own studio and home, and he took me there in Central El Paso. The smell of oils and acrylics and other paints almost overloaded my senses, and the place remained packed with canvases in progress.
Magee let me know that he painted daily for decades, and that once or twice a week he made the trip to work on “The Hill.” He also said that Horace Mayfield, another alias, had his own home, right across the street from the Concordia Cemetery in El Paso, and we could also visit “his” residence and studio if I wanted.
“Yes,” I said, “of course.”
Over the next decade Magee continued to open up his world to me, including the industrial warehouse in Central El Paso where he worked on structures, sculptures, and assemblages. Old cars were dismantled, and the steel and parts and glass all went into his art.
A portrait of El Paso artist James Magee by San Elizario artist Gaspar Enriquez. (Photo courtesy of Adair Margo)
I’d often get telephone calls too where Magee said he wanted to share a “title,” which shaped up as first-rate slices of monologues and poetry. Often these recitations captured his love for Juárez, El Paso and West Texas.
On other occasions, I was knocked back to memories of New York City and Michigan. The language and execution were always fresh, and one knew immediately that he had spent countless hours devouring the masters of poetic intent to achieve his own voice and style.
One time, when we traveled to The Hill on a work trip, we discussed his Quaker roots in rural Michigan, his deep faith in Christianity and the power, tragedy and ecstasy of Jesus Christ.
He didn’t belong to a church in El Paso but deeply knew and embraced the presence of the spirit world without ever preaching or proselytizing about it. On another trip to “The Hill,” Magee asked me to stand in the south building. I did as I was told.
The desert light and shadows mixed with a sculpture triptych of glass, steel, rust, cinnamon, paprika and what looked like the innards and codes of a primitive computer. I took a deep breath, and Magee recited a title in back of me. In the end, I broke down in tears. Magee walked away and let me gather myself.
“I’m sorry,” I later told him. “It’s all so intense, and I feel like I’m home.”
He then let me know that “The Hill” was my home, in a sense, and nothing about it needed to be quantified.
Related ‘Blood, sweat and tears’: Gaspar Enriquez Cultural Center to open in San Elizario Renowned El Paso artist Gaspar Enriquez is partnering with UTEP’s Rubin Center and the Paso del Norte Community Foundation to turn Mi Casa Gallery into a regional cultural center.
The last time I met with Magee, I brought along Howard Campbell, the esteemed El Paso anthropologist. Magee cooked lunch and let us know he was having new medical issues that might slow him down but just a bit. As a cancer and AIDS survivor, he was grateful that he’d turn 80 on his next birthday. He also reminded me, as he had before, that all work would stop at “The Hill” upon his death. After 40 years of continuous work, he needed at least another decade to complete “everything.” He then picked up a 500-page binder that would serve as his will and testament.
This July, while driving to Lubbock, I snapped a picture on my telephone of the West Texas desert land that both surrounded and hid “The Hill,” and I sent it to him with a note, letting him know how much his life and work meant to me. That it had changed me.
He immediately wrote back and said he was in the hospital and watching a documentary about Ireland. He was thrilled, he said, to get the note and photo.
Once in Lubbock, I sent him a picture of my wife and son at the Buddy Holly Center. “What a blessing,” he said. “Your son looks just like you.”
I thanked him for the kind note, and that was the last I heard of Magee.
In the end, I know the years ahead will be kind to Magee, and they should be, as he takes his place amongst the greatest artists of his generation.
I also know that Magee found his promised land in El Paso and Juárez 40 years ago, and he never let it go. Indeed, he built a life of hope, dreams and art that won’t be easily forgotten, for even if the desert shifts and changes year to year, it will still honor its own at “The Hill of James Magee.”
Lawrence Welsh is an El Paso author and English professor at El Paso Community College.
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http://elpasomatters.org/2024/10/07/james-magee-the-hill-lawrence-welsh-el-paso/
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