The Terlingua Chili Cookoff

In far west Texas, the official culinary emblem of contemporary desert sprawl or ghosttown suburbanism, is a "bowl of red" — what Will Rogers used to call a "bowl of blessedness" — more commonly known to the rest of us as "chili." Texan connoisseurs of this cowboy staple will quickly remind the uninitiated: "No beans in our chili, no chili has no beans. Ours is just meat — meat, and whatever it sits in."

Though chili had been cooked by rangeland cocineros at cattle roundups since the beginning of the 20th century, and sold by sidewalk vendors in San Antonio as early as the late 19th, it was a campaign designed by two Dallas writers in the 1960s that managed to make the dish protagonist to a radical though understated land development scheme.  In the early 21st century, this conjuring trick has managed to effectively banalize one of the most sublime locations of American isolationism.

In 1958, artist Allan Kaprow predicted that the "alchemies of the 1960s" would be, not ordinary things made extraordinary but, the discovery out of ordinary things of the very "meaning of ordinariness."

"People will be delighted or horrified," wrote Kaprow, "critics will be confused or amused," and art would be defined as "how deeply involved we become with elements of the whole."

Meanwhile, as the '60s progressed in the Texas borderland, towns deserted after World War II by former military and mining outposts became destinations for individuals looking to "get off the grid."

It's still possible to get off the grid and even "the cloud" in Terlingua.

Though "grid" may have once been used to recall electrical lines and water pipes, in recent years it has been employed as a metaphor for refusing general convenience and facile connection. In these remote locations, electricity and running water are never givens, and even "getting off the cloud" (of cloud computing) still appears possible, as failing cellular connections prevent self-tracking with GPS.

In their desire to evade the ubiquitous micromanagement of everyday life and 21st-century self-promotional culture, a varied group of escapists have found themselves building an unintentional collective since the 70s. Retired corporate managers, idealistic academics, disillusioned hipsters, and aggravated hippies have made their way to one such location, Brewster County's Terlingua Ghosttown, living amidst gentrified ruins of a former cinnabar mine at an entrance to Big Bend National Park.

It is of no coincidence that the ghosttown rush of the late '60s and early '70s was contemporaneous with the work, "The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art." For this event, artist Tom Marioni, under the pseudonym Allan Fish, invited 16 friends for beer at a closed museum, then called the remaining debris an "exhibit." In the same span of time, legendary characters like pirate radio producer "Uh Clem" and popular porch therapist "Dr. Doug" populated Terlingua Ghosttown, then site for the annual World's Chili Cookoff since 1967. Also in 1967, Allan Kaprow would declare in his essay "Pinpoint Happenings" that simply "assigning a new or multiple set of functions to a situation normally bound by convention" or at the very least, a "consciousness of this possibility," could transform a situation into a Happening, or purposive activity. Happenings, for Kaprow, would be the "best efforts of contemporary inquiry into identity and meaning," for they would "take their stand amid the modern information deluge."

The original idea for the 1967 Chili Cookoff was for legendary Hollywood restaurateur Dave Chasen — whose chili actress Elizabeth Taylor loved so much, legend has it she had him send her ten quarts on dry ice when on location for Cleopatra — to be matched against the chief cook of the Texas Chili Appreciation Society International, Wick Fowler. When Chasen became ill, H. Allen Smith, who was living on a goat farm near Mount Kisco, N.Y., was selected as his substitute. Smith was the author of an anti-Texas article "Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do" (Holiday Magazine, 1967), in which a chili recipe, blasphemous for Texans, listed the heathen ingredients of sweet bell peppers, canned tomatoes, onions, and kidney beans.

As Chili Cookoff founder Frank Tolbert writes in his definitive history of the "chili wars" (A Bowl of Red, Texas A&M University Press, 1994) the whole operation was "prankish." At the heart of the game was the extent to which talents in persuasion and manipulation could be pushed to get people as far as Dallas, out to Terlingua: Tolbert was a newspaper columnist, and co-founder Tom Tierney, managed a public relations firm. Thus, the first edition of the cookoff invented a New York-Texas rivalry, while the second promoted a good old duel with the state of California. The popular magazine Sports Illustrated was present to report.

Watch the sunset over the Chisos Mountains (photo James Stoddard) from the "Terlingua porch," and stories about the cookoff are guaranteed within earshot before nightfall. The gathering space referred to as "the porch" — a raised platform in front of a vast landscape of rolling foothills, mesas, and buttes — serves as the entrance to recently remodeled ruins of a former theatre and trading post, now restaurant and souvenir shop. The shaded concrete and wood construction is a rare manifestation of semi-public space in Texas, whose singular ribbons of road both guide and confine movement through tract after tract of private land. On "the porch," amateur and professional musicians play accompaniment on guitar and harmonica to songs of salvation that only the silver haze of a desert moon would dare match in sentimental glory.

In Terlingua, the cookoff has always already just happened or is soon to be around the corner: a bumper sticker, a T-shirt, a string of "chili beads," a reference to the welcome economic relief after a slow summer season of infernal temperatures, complaints about the upcoming chaotic descent of thousands upon the otherwise isolated community.

The sentimental glory of a desert moon over Terlingua.

In popular accounts, Terlinguans get more specific about what Tolbert calls his "prankish operation," or what others of us might call in Kaprow's terms, his gamelike, ritualistic and contemplative, "Activity Happening." Stories relate that the history of chili and desert land-development schemes are inextricably linked at the Ghosttown: the first Terlingua Chili Cookoff was nothing other than a ploy to get new Dallas wealth investing in remote areas near the United States-Mexico border.

"It was all a gimmick to get people out here to sell land," recounts John Goforth, one of the directors of the "Krazy Flats" cookoff hosted by the Chili Appreciation Society International. "All they were doing was playing little games, then people start taking it seriously."

The judges' table for the cookoff "behind the store."

Tolbert's account confirms this version of the 1967 event: "a tongue-in-cheek local promotion" that grew into an "international sport." This, keeping in mind, that "international" in Texas, means the republic of Texas, plus a complementary five or six locations in the greater United States mentioned for lipservice to the claim to cosmopolitanism.

"original cookoff" or the cookoff "Behind the Store" — has set up camp each year, since 1984, in a vast rolling plot of dusty land that is located, as one might imagine, behind the store.

As a child in the early days of the cookoff, when the "chili wars" were staged amidst ruins of the now semi-restored Ghosttown, White sold her mother's tamales to spectators and cooks. This pairing for the occasion of the "Behind the Store" cookoff, has become tradition. 

The "wild" one, otherwise known as the "Krazy Flats" or "CASI," an acronym for the Chili Appreciation Society International, is five miles down the road, past a cluster of constructions resembling a marooned pirate ship and a metal sign incised with the phrase "Passing Wind." 

Ask anyone from other towns in Brewster or the neighboring Presidio County about the Terlingua cookoff and they will nudge you with a chuckle: "Krazy Flats" is known for its "wild women." For an irridescent aluminum chili pendent on a string of beads, women of all ages will pole dance topless while flatbed trailers carry them through desert arroyos. "Over there, don't bring your wife, don't bring your kids and don't bring small animals," jokes one chili cook, who prefers to remain anonymous.

"Krazy Flats" and "Behind the Store" are so committed to their respective differences they have established identical schedules to prevent cooks from participating in both. Inquire as to the reason for the split and experienced judges, cooks, and spectators first cite a disagreement among organizers over rules, then elaborate upon critical differences in organizational style.

"I'm on a mission to cook in all the states," explained Debbie Turner.

Debbie Turner, awarded 10th place among 21 cooks at the finals of "Behind the Store," has been participating in the Terlingua Championship for 25 years. According to Turner — whose "mission to cook in all the states" has her culinary trek mapped at 43 — in 1983, the chili cooks decided they wanted to control organization of the cookoff and hence split with the original Tolbert group. As White puts it, when the cookoffs "divorced each other," they even went to court.

"Over here, the cooks and the spectators all cook together," explains Turner, whereas "five miles down the road, they segregate them." This is "good for the chili cooks," asserts Turner, "because, they don't have to put up with the craziness." 

"I don't cook, I just show." explained Wayne Turner, Debbie's husband. "I hug the girls and I drive the bus." (Photo courtesy Jim Stoddard)

the CASI Terlingua Championship funds local scholarships, none of the concerns about indecent behavior or rowdiness of spectators at "Krazy Flats" are likely to register as anything more than complaints anytime soon. (Left, Wayne exhibits "Behind the Store" champion showmanship, photo Jim Stoddard)

while neuroscientists test the effect on the brain of capsaicin, the compound responsible for the burning sensation of chili peppers, the cookoff "Behind the Store" donates its proceeds for research on ALS, a high-profile neurodegenerative disease. Indeed, it was only a year after the founding of the first chili cookoff that the Harvard Ad Hoc Committee on Brain Death established a new neurologically based definition of death, which we now take for granted as simple fact: "brain death." (Left, Wayne exhibits his "exposed brain" hat, photo courtesy Jim Stoddard)

But, beyond the neuroscience of chili and the performance politics of cookoffs as "Event Happenings," a crucial question begs asking: What makes a championship "bowl of red"?

According to pilot Jim Stoddard, this year's winner of the Tolbert quintennial "cookoff of champions," the key is salt content. Judges pass around numbered styrofoam cups of chili and taste single spoonfuls, cleansing the palate with carrot sticks, beer, or saltines. (A "bowl of red," photo Jim Stoddard) For Stoddard, a salting that would be too strong for a chili bowl, heightens the aroma of cumin, spices, and chili powder in bite-size portions. Stoddard also grinds his own meat and uses tri-tip, a bottom sirloin. However, the purposiveness of Stoddard's approach to chili was unusual as the response of spectators, judges, and competing cooks at both cookoffs tended to repeat one word: "balance."

Surprising? Fowler's book speaks of a history of secret beef formulas, spice concoctions, half-moon-shaped cooking pots, and the arduous process of home-grinding chili powder. But when considered within the broader canvas of a cultural shift that is swiftly replacing the American calvinist twist on meritocracy with a social networking conditioning to mediocracy, the chili inquisitive are reminded that cookoff culinary discourse is but an affirmation of the current lackadaisical state of critical habits.

In the consensus-driven culture we are all complicit in affirming, the slogan "think outside the box" has come to urge nothing less than a fear of agonism and the complacency of actions within established parameters. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that the championship "bowl of red" aims at replicating chili-in-a-can. And though the canned chili being referenced is, indeed, the legendary "Famous Wolf Brand Chili" — once promoted around the Southwest in a picturesque campaign of Model T Fords, now a ConAgra consumer foods brand — whatever happened to the thrill of the avant-garde?

Breakfast-chef extraordinaire, Truett Airhart, explains what
happened to "integration" and "innovation." (Photo Jim Stoddard)

An octogenerian breakfast-chef extraordinaire for a camp of chili cooks "Behind the Store" claims he knows the answer. Truett Airhart has yet to retire and is currently developing an emergency response system for the refineries of two major corporations he calls "King Kong" and "Godzilla." "We are surrounded by processes that don't work anymore," he declares. "The rate of change caused by technology has exceeded our ability to adapt... and no one is talking about it.... See, capitalism isn't dead, it's changing from tangibles like factories and land to intangibles like intellectual property... Our constitution, our faith in the capitalistic system brought us where we are...." 

Spoons, post-judging.

If it is "faith" that has resulted in the depressive climate of a culture of "balance" (and a cookoff championship where the majority of competitors aim to replicate chili-in-a-can to a background of the once iconic landscape of intrepid individualism), then it is perhaps a call to irony that is required.  As artist Donald Judd once wrote in a 1962 review of Wayne Thiebaud's cupcake paintings, "A little grossness, like a little cynicism, is a little impossible."  But, how to proceed from here: a Miltonian desert of Cimmerian air despite the pepsters and showmen in tutus?

Airhart suggests a return to process. In 1990, as the Bush Administration declared the "Decade of the Brain," Allan Kaprow pronounced that the "experimental artist" of today was an "un-artist." "Un-arting" meant divesting of nearly all the features of recognizable art so that "art, for a while, lingers as a memory trace, but not something that matters."

For Kaprow, "artlike artists" look for the meaning of art, "lifelike artists" would play at life's daily routines and hence find its meaning in "picking a stray thread from someone's collar," or, in this case, in the consistency of grind in a "bowl of red."

As American anarchism makes its final concessions to its neoliberal hyphenation, "anarcho-capitalism," the Terlingua Chili Championship Cookoffs perform capitalist culture and its discontents: a culinary microcosm of neo-imperialism that has finally "trickled down" as far as the desert sprawl of a ghosttown suburb. As Kaprow would say, the only way to change something is to pay close attention to it.

(This article was originally titled On Life-like Art and a Bowl of Blessedness: Thoughts on the Terlingua Chili Cookoff).

This article is part of the series: What We Should Do With Our Brain, Some Suggestions. Emily Verla Bovino (1980) is author of the fictional character, the hyperthymestic RK, and facilitator of encounters between RK and the world. Artistic fieldwork in preparation for this all-encompassing project involves composing suggestions entitled "What We Should Do With Our Brain," a response to philosopher Catherine Malabou's work, "What Should We Do With Our Brain."