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.

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.

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

A view of the street…	…and a closeup.

View more, read the blog, and buy the book at the Little People blog.

The Telectroscope in Brooklyn. Photo by Gabrielle

A few weekends ago, I went to see what appeared to be a giant telescope at the Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn, NY, near the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. The Telectroscope, a giant contraption that looks like it was imported straight from Disney’s Tommorowland, was an exhibit created by artist Paul St. George to connect viewers in London and New York by giant video screens inside what appears to be the end of a giant telescope. A “connecting” Telectroscope was also installed in London, and both ends of the Telectroscope were positioned so that viewers on the other side of the ocean could see picturesque views. In back of New Yorkers, the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyline could be seen, and the London Bridge rose up in back of Londoners looking through the giant lens.

According to Wikipedia, French writer and publisher Louis Figuier first used the term “telectroscope” in 1878 in regards to an invention of Alexander Graham Bell that Figuier wrongly interpreted as real. According to Figuier, Bell had invented a device in which people anywhere in the world “could be seen anywhere by anybody” – something like a combination of television and video-conferencing, on a larger scale. In reality, such a device never existed. But Paul St. George picked up on this idea of visually connecting people in creating the Telectroscope exhibit, and even created a fictional back-story to go along with it. (On the official website of the Telectroscope, the device is presented a giant telescope running beneath the Atlantic Ocean connecting London and New York, originally started by St. George’s fictional great-grandfather, Alexander Stanhope St. George.)

The view from inside the Telectroscope in Brooklyn. Photo by Gabrielle

The exhibit was a little disappointing when I saw it in person because the screen was pixelating, so there could be no illusions about it being a real telescope. Nevertheless, I really liked the idea of a giant “telescope” through which you could see people in real time in London. Through a giant glass lens, you could see a screen across from you and wave to people in London, who were waving back at you. Without sound, there was no way to speak to each other, and so these people on a screen became part of the artwork as well. The most fascinating part is to consider that for them, you are the elusive person on the other side of the screen.

The exhibit took the act of people watching, a hobby of both city residents and tourists, to a whole new level. Each viewer was aware that the people on the opposite continent were seeing him or her as part of the exhibit. There was a very blurry line between observing and interacting, which people really seemed to find intriguing.

The Telectroscope exhibit could be seen in London and New York from May 22nd–June 15th, 2008.

Every four years, the Carnegie Museum of Art in my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, hosts a huge exhibition that takes over most a large part of the art museum in order to showcase what they consider the best contemporary art today.

I visited the CI08 on Tuesday and have to say that I was a little less than impressed, although there are some standout pieces that really made the exhibition for me. Perhaps the reason why I liked it less was because at the last Carnegie International (04-05), I was drawn to a greater number of the works, and even remember a lot of those works much more vividly than I realized as a friend and I went through this year’s show. There are a few things that I think took away from the International this year, and I’ll talk about them below, along with some of the pieces I really loved.

The Theme

I see where they’re going with the theme of “Life on Mars”, but what first comes to my mind is aliens and sci-fi. Of course, when you read the explanation, the intention becomes clear: “Are we alone in the universe? Do aliens exist? Or are we, ourselves, the strangers in our own worlds? We are not alone.” The idea of looking at our culture from the viewpoint of an utter outsider is intriguing, but I wish there was a way to take away the odd, almost humorous connotations that I get immediately — which quickly disappear after you read that introduction.

The Selection

Simply put, there are a LOT of German artists. I have nothing against German artists (my favorite artist of all time is Albrecht Durer), but for an exhibition that prides itself on being — obviously — “international” and representing many countries, I was surprised at their choice of artists. Eight of the forty-one artists are from Germany, and an additional four more work in Germany (but weren’t born there). A handful of others are from Austria or Switzerland, and almost all of the rest, except for seven, are American or British. As we walked through the galleries, it seemed like every room had at least one German artist in it — same with American or British.

Again, nothing against the artists they chose; but why weren’t there more Asian artists? Not just Chinese or Japanese, but from the middle eastern countries? Or South America (I believe there’s only one)? One glance at the advisory committee for CI08 seems to hint as to why this happened (click here and scroll down). Half of the committee, which comprises only four members, work at contemporary art museums or centers in Frankfurt, Germany; the other two work at the New Museum in New York City. I won’t say any more on this topic, since I hate being negative — but I will say that I think the previous International did a much better job of having artists from much more diverse places.

The Standouts

There were two works that, walking out of the doors of the museum, I knew would stick in my mind for a long time. Each, in a very different way, rely on viewer interactions to get their message across.

Preparation photo from Thomas Hirschhorn, Cavemanman, 2002, at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (Photo courtesy CMoA’s Flickr stream)

Thomas Hirschhorn‘s Cavemanman installation (right) was utterly engrossing and extremely powerful. As my friend and I decided, this is the way installation art should be done. This series of huge rooms made of brown packaging tape, cardboard, and found materials engulfs you in the dull quiet of a huge, multi-room cardboard box fort. Your footsteps stick to the tape on the floor as you wander through the utterly still, unechoing spaces that Hirschhorn has created, among discarded soda cans that litter the floor, past groups of tinfoil people attached to dynamite and political books, through rooms with photographs, graffiti, and clocks on the cardboard walls. Don’t bother trying to decipher the guide; instead, develop your own opinion of why Hirschhorn would invite us into this near-post-apocolyptic space of images and words from our own culture.

Rivane Neuenschwander’s I wish your wish (2003) is a much more optimistic work, where you take a ribbon with a wish imprinted on it, sometimes in English, sometimes not — a wonderful nod to the “international” in the title, whether or not the artist intended it — and then tie the ribbon around your wrist (or where ever) and when it falls off, the wish comes true.

Preparation photo from Rivane Neuenschwander, I wish your wish, 2003, at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (Photo courtesy CMoA’s Flickr stream)

In return, you leave a wish in the hole in the wall, which might be turned into a wish itself. My friend and I ended our tour of the exhibition here, and it was a wonderful way to end a thought-provoking day at the museum. It’s a lovely way to “give back” and really feel like you’re participating in a work of art.

Also, kudos to the CMoA for a technologically-friendly exhibition website: incorporating thoughts from the blogosphere and even using tagging features, the website is much more fancy and interactive than one might expect from a large museum, showing that the curators really wanted to try to connect this exhibition to an ever-more-technologically-savvy audience. They even have a Flickr photostream of images from installing the exhibition, from which I borrowed the images in this post — absolutely fantastic.

To end, I want to note that not only the friend with whom I went to see the exhibition, but a lot of the people I’ve talked to about CI08 have really loved the show. In fact, many like it better than the last one — so go figure! The only way to really decide for yourself is, naturally, to get to the Carnegie sometime this year, and check out the exhibition for yourself (and then tell us about it here). Like both of the Internationals I’ve been to, it’s certainly sparked discussions and many thoughts about art and the world between me and my friends — which I think, regardless of the problems I do have with it, makes it, as usual, a success.

Life on Mars: The 2008 Carnegie International | Now through January 11, 2009 | The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA.