Seeing minimalists in a maximal space: An innovative gallery
celebrates two years in upstate New York
by Robert Fulford
(The
National Post,
28 June 2005)
BEACON, N.Y. - Art has a tendency, nowadays, to make its home in abandoned buildings that were marooned by cruel changes in the history of commerce. For its own excellent reasons, art has mounted a kind of architectural rescue mission, demonstrating that unloved old structures can bring districts or towns back to life by the alchemy of inspired sculpture and painting.
In London an old power station, in Paris a redundant railway terminal, in Toronto a former whisky distillery -- these and hundreds of other survivors of the 19th century have been clutched to the bosom of the art world.
Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y., an hour or so north of Manhattan, recently celebrated two years of success as the perfect example of this movement. Before the art arrived, Beacon was a run-down Hudson River Valley town, best known as the place where Paul Newman played a beer-swilling ne'er-do-well in Nobody's Fool.
More permanent renown came to Beacon when the Dia Foundation decided that an empty building, constructed in 1929 to make packages for the National Biscuit Company, might be transformed into a roomy display space where major artists could be exhibited at their best. Dia put something like US$49-million into making that plant a gargantuan museum, with about twice the exhibiting space of the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art. As a result, the town has turned into a pilgrimage destination for admirers of Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Andy Warhol, Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Agnes Martin, Robert Smithson, Fred Sandback and several others.
Dia:Beacon doesn't try to deliver an overall history of modern art. It keeps its interests narrow, so that it can enshrine a few carefully chosen figures, giving each enough space to breathe. It specializes in Minimalists, Post-Minimalists and Earth artists, but allows into the magic circle a few stars (such as Warhol) who don't fit into those categories.
When Dia:Beacon opened, a New York Times headline said, "A New Museum As Unconventional As Its Collection." That missed the point. The collection is not unconventional, and for the most part not even literally contemporary. Its contents were certified as important by critics when the Beatles were still making records. Many artists venerated at Dia:Beacon are dead -- Smithson since 1973, Warhol since 1987, Judd since 1994, Flavin since 1996, Sandback since 2003, Agnes Martin since last December. This is a museum of art history.
Rightly so. The history it contains deserves exposure. As I discovered last week, a visit can be crammed with unexpected experiences. Michael Heizer, who has spent three decades constructing in the Nevada desert a vast project that may be the biggest sculpture ever built, appears at Dia:Beacon with four examples of what he calls "negative sculpture," meaning the space left when you dig a hole. His "North, East, South, West" consists of four geometric holes cut 20 feet into the museum floor. They're beautiful and at the same time oddly terrifying. You are allowed close to them only under supervision. Heizer doesn't want anyone to fall in, but the prospect of falling (or jumping) becomes part of the experience.
Rightly so. The history it contains deserves exposure. As I discovered last week, a visit can be crammed with unexpected experiences. Michael Heizer, who has spent three decades constructing in the Nevada desert a vast project that may be the biggest sculpture ever built, appears at Dia:Beacon with four examples of what he calls "negative sculpture," meaning the space left when you dig a hole. His "North, East, South, West" consists of four geometric holes cut 20 feet into the museum floor. They're beautiful and at the same time oddly terrifying. You are allowed close to them only under supervision. Heizer doesn't want anyone to fall in, but the prospect of falling (or jumping) becomes part of the experience.
There are moments when it seems that the work of Fred Sandback would justify a visit all by itself. He had a way of using the simplest possible materials, always store-bought coloured yarn, to question our ideas about material objects and our ability to see. He stretched the yarn from walls, floors and ceilings, creating perception-challenging illusions. When he went somewhere to mount an exhibition, he carried all the material he needed in a small bag. He would make viewers think they were looking at a long wooden plank when they were seeing only some yarn stretched according to the plank's dimensions. Last week his work made me think I was looking at sheets of plate glass when I was seeing only yarn cleverly extended across a clear white surface.
At Dia:Beacon Flavin looks gorgeous, Warhol takes on a certain grandeur and John Chamberlain, famous for crushing cars into sculpture, seems engaging and charming. Richard Serra gives the most powerful performance with four enormous pieces, each about twice the height of a tall man, occupying what started out as the factory's loading dock.
The word dia, from the Greek for "through," expresses the foundation's original plan to serve not as a museum like others but rather as a selfless connector between great artists and their potential audience. Dia imagines itself as eliminating barriers that might interfere with what the artists have to say.
Dia's founder, Heiner Friedrich, a former art dealer from Berlin, says art objects "speak for themselves, very clearly and very powerfully." That's nonsense, of course. They often mutter rather than speak, and they don't speak at all until someone shows them. Dia, while undoubtedly unique, functions like other museums in the most crucial sense: It makes choices that it places before the public. It suggests what we should see. It says: "We have, for our good reasons, chosen these objects for your attention. Have a look."
Remarkably, what we see is almost entirely in the natural light that streams down through the rows and rows of skylights designed 76 years ago. Most museums, using combinations of track lighting and spotlights, surround their collections with an unvarying wash of soft light, in rooms carefully constructed to keep out damaging ultraviolet rays. Dia, like a few other museums today, returns to the 19th-century system, arranging its exhibits to avoid UV rays but otherwise filling its rooms with brilliant sunlight when it's available. The arc of the sun dictates closing time; in winter Dia:Beacon closes at 4 p.m., two hours earlier than in summer. It also means that if you spend all day in the museum, the art looks one way in the morning and another way in the afternoon.
Even though there's something oddly inconsistent in its choice of artists, Dia:Beacon is an event in the history of taste. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the Minimalists and others made their first work and announced their conceptual innovations, the world (especially the art world) reacted with solemn admiration but not widespread enthusiasm. People expressed wonder and respect, then set them aside. Now those artists are moving (posthumously, in many cases) into a new period. Given a proper home, their quality freshly affirmed, they could end up being loved as well as admired.
