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| View of Dia:Beacon on the Hudson River, from Wikipedia.com |
Step through sculptures made of strings, see yourself reflected in what seems to be a volcano of glass, walk through a towering rusted spiral, gaze into huge, endless geometric pits, and imagine who wrote each of a set of 4,000 vintage postcards. Where else can you do all these things but at the amazing Dia:Beacon?
I’ve attended college in the Hudson Valley for four years, and only now, in my final semester, have I at last managed to visit Dia:Beacon, the sprawling contemporary art installation museum in Beacon, NY (located about an hour or so from New York City). Dia:Beacon has all the greats of contemporary art, including Richard Serra, Gerhard Richter, Donald Judd, and Agnes Martin, as well as a number of artists I’d never heard of before, but whose art fully engrosses you.
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| Fred Sandback, Untitled from Dia:Beacon website |
The museum is a playground of optical illusions. The stark white galleries immediately present you with the eye-numbing neons of Dan Flavin and then the meticulously layered pencil murals of Sol LeWitt, who seems a Dia favorite. Throughout your journey through the huge, echoing Dia warehouse, you constantly wonder: What is real? What am I looking at? What is this space?
Fred Sandback’s string sculptures (a view, at left) ask these questions playfully, creating larger-than-life rectangles and triangles that you know are flat and empty, but at the same time have deceiving depth, leaning against gallery walls as if discarded by the artist. On Kawara’s room of dated paintings from his ongoing Today series is a pristinely executed inquiry into time that manages to be both intimate and distant; the air is even ionized, and it feels somehow lighter as you inhale and exhale within the space.
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| Michael Heizer, North, South, East, West, from Dia:Beacon website |
Meanwhile, the gaping holes of Michael Heizer’s North, South, East, West (right) are an exploration into illusions of infinity, simultaneously mesmerizing and terrifying. And one could spend hours in Zoe Leonard’s You see I am here after all exhibition — reading the text and studying the subtle differences in printing of the 4,000 vintage postcards of Niagara Falls, collected by the artist over the course of the year, getting lost in the stories of this place and forgetting any sense of space around you altogether.
(Not to be missed, by the way, is their bookstore, which, though small in size, houses a treasure trove of books on art, design, and theory from around the world.)
All in all, the collections of the Dia, much like the installation art in general, defy description, and beg instead to be experienced. And after all, isn’t that the point?
Dia:Beacon, Reggio Galleries, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon NY 12508 | Zoe Leonard’s You see I am here after all exhibition is on view until September 9, 2009
Great review.
BTW, you have Sandback and Heizer’s names right in the text, but incorrect in the captions.
Hi Steve — Thanks for catching my oversight (which I’ve now corrected). Thanks also for your kind comment!
There are close relationships between publicly funded contemporary art organizations and the commercial sector. Rather, the title refers to the way contemporary art has developed over time as new kinds of media have emerged. Tnanks or article!
The institutions of art have been disapproved for standardize what is designatedas contemporary art. Corporations have attempted to gather themselves into the contemporary art world: exhibiting contemporary art within their premises, organizing and sustaining contemporary art awards and building up extensive collections of corporate art. There are close relationships between publicly funded contemporary art organizations and the commercial sector. From one perspective, contemporary art is the art of the immediate present.