Backbone > Lucid Dreaming

A River Runs Through It Part TWO
By Beth Elaine Wilson.photo provided by Dia:Beacon

By the time the temples were erected,
the gods had already fled. —Martin Heidegger

On May 18 the new Dia:Beacon museum is slated to open to the public. With over a quarter million square feet of exhibition space (yes, you read that right), it will be the largest museum in the world dedicated to modern art, larger than the combined floor space of the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art put together. Like Mass MoCA, the museum is a disused factory space converted for the display of contemporary art, although by contrast with the series of smaller, semi-discreet spaces in North Adams, the Dia building commands an enormous sweep of continuous space, with sightlines of such scope that they may induce vertigo in less robust visitors.

The artwork highlighted in the Beacon museum is drawn from the permanent collection of the Dia Foundation, largely by artists from what New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman recently called America’s “greatest generation”—pioneering sculptors from the ‘60s and ‘70s, for the most part, who created Minimalism, Earthworks, and other aesthetic ideas that resonated throughout the international artworld so deeply as to irrevocably re-orient the art-critical compass in a way unmatched by any American art before or since.

One of the most salient features of much of this art is the way in which it controls, compresses, and manipulates the viewer’s sense of space, of existing in a body in space. Where a great deal of art focuses on playing with your consciousness in terms of its intellectual definition, some of the best works in Dia:Beacon work on the fundamental phenomenological relationship we all experience, but often put on the back burner—the fact that our wonderfully complex minds are carted around 24-7 by a physical body, one which not coincidentally provides all the sensory data that determines the content of our experience. Michael Heizer’s North, South, East, West, essentially four large, empty, 20-foot deep geometrically shaped holes in the floor, invokes the sense of danger—and the thrill—of standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses, towering walls of rolled Cor-Ten steel, invite the viewer to walk through and around them, but due to their continuously twisting, shifting relationship to the vertical axis, they disrupt the sensory cues you normally use to establish your physical equilibrium, quite literally making your head swim. On the whole, both the building and the artwork contained within it comprise a sort of fantastic theme park for eggheads—Six Flags no moving parts.
As great an achievement as much of this work is, however, I feel a nagging sense of something missing, a melancholy note in the cavernous atmosphere of the museum’s interior. I think back to a moment in a particularly deathly boring graduate class, when I scribbled in the margins of my notebook that “art historians are the funeral directors of culture.” The heady days of invention, the community of similarly inclined artists who got together in the mid–’60s to dream up all these fresh new ideas—all of this now lives in the past tense. Smithson, Flavin, and Judd are all dead. Yes, Serra and Heizer and Ryman are still alive and still making work, but they’re late-career artists now, working out baroque variations of their original insights on a scale that reflects both their historical success and the increased access to money and material that has come with it.

Dia:Beacon is a monument to a historical moment that has largely passed, a contemporary equivalent in both scale and ambition to the Temple of Carnac on the Nile. Once the crowds of the opening weekend have dwindled, I have a feeling that the atmosphere of the museum will be solemn, mystical even, but in the end a blanket of inevitable silence will settle down around the work, wrapping it in a muffled atmosphere of eternity that would have been quite familiar to the ancient Egyptians.

When they started this aesthetic revolution, the artists in the Dia collection were all young, ambitious, and mostly without funds to realize the grand scale of their visions. There are grainy black-and-white photographs of them at work in the open spaces of the American west, and in cheap ex-industrial loft spaces in the economically depressed neighborhood of SoHo in New York. Serra memorably created a performance/sculpture piece called Throwing Lead, in which he systematically cast ladle after ladle of melted lead along the base of a wall in his studio, molded by the perpendicular meeting of the wall and the floor. As one piece set up and cooled, he pried it away from the corner and shifted across the floor, ultimately making a series of similar—but not identical—rough, linear sculptures. The quasi-industrial character of this process seemed oddly appropriate for the working character of the space, a kind of continuation of the ethos of the place.

The hushed, church-like atmosphere of Dia:Beacon, however, turns its relationship to the industrial space on its head. Where Serra’s early career brilliantly contextualized his work, balancing the industrial/useful with the artistic/aesthetic, here the building’s functional history as a Nabisco box factory has been largely erased. In transforming it into a purely aesthetic space, the museum occasionally opens itself to unintentional, and apparently unwanted irony: during the press junket to the site last year, Cornelia Seckel of the local Art Times tried to joke with our tour guide about the placement of a series of Donald Judd sculptures—large, Minimalist plywood boxes—in a space where pallets of printed cracker boxes were formerly stored. The guide was, as they say, “not amused.”

It’s strange how really good ideas can turn themselves inside out, depending on their context. Dia’s chairman Leonard Riggio—the driving force behind this new museum, and one of the primary donors of its $30+ million price tag—recalled the original idea that created his own fortune in a recent New York Times article. Founder and chairman of Barnes & Noble, Inc., he mused that his “real intellectual awakening had come in the sixties. The concept then was the integrity of the individual, the potential of every human being. When I built my business, I was thinking about bookstores for average citizens, for the whole of society.” A fantastic idea, but as it has developed into the 800-pound gorilla of the contemporary book business, B&N’s superstores have systematically put hundreds of small, independent bookstores out of business across the country. It’s so big now that publishers are forced to make editorial decisions in terms of how or whether their books will be retailed in the chain, stifling small presses and contributing significantly to the corporate merger mania and bottom-line obsessions that have curtailed the free exchange of independent ideas that the publishing industry used to represent.

Dia:Beacon is something of the artworld equivalent of this phenomenon for me. The excitement and ingenuity of the artists behind the work it displays is undeniable. The experience of the work itself will be magnificent. I’ve heard some say that Beacon used to be rundown, full of crack houses, etc., and that since the Dia real estate boom, it’s so much better because all the galleries, the new businesses, and so on have turned the town around. But the sheer scale of the enterprise, in conjunction with the frighteningly narrow nature of the artworld’s focus on the work, displaces so much—the (mostly impoverished) people, many of them Latino, who’ve been forced to move due to escalating rents, and property values; alternative, home-grown, and non-Western European cultural expressions—I have to wonder whether something so grand and so beautiful really will improve the quality of daily life here or not.

A very different scene has been unfolding over the past few years in Kingston. Since 1995 the Arts Society of Kingston (ASK) has sponsored “First Saturdays,” the once-a-month coordination of gallery openings in town. From just a handful of venues, the event has grown to include more locations than are even possible to see in one night. ASK is not a well-endowed organization, relying on volunteer labor and leadership, with an inclusive membership that ranges from professional, full-time artists to Sunday painters and those who simply enjoy looking at art.
During April’s “First Saturday,” another former factory space debuted with a freewheeling exhibition of work by nine different artists, ranging from pottery, painting, sculpture to an intriguing conceptual/interactive piece by Lisa Alt entitled Manufacturing Dissent. The exhibition took place in the first floor of a former shirt factory on Cornell Street, a large 3,000-square-foot space featuring raw sheetrock and a rough wooden floor—just like the lofts first inhabited by Richard Serra and the others in the 1960s. Sigrid Sarda—an internationally successful painter who happens to hail from here and returned to this area a year and a half ago—helped to organize the show, which included artists who rent studio space on the upper floors of the building. Many of them conduct enterprises like stained glass or cabinet making out of their studios to make a living, creating the art that appeared in the exhibition for their own satisfaction.

There’s something pleasingly appropriate about the scale of both the art scene in Kingston in general and the economics of the Shirt Factory in particular. The situation is so much more alive and varied (if not always so awe-inspiring) when the artists are part of the fabric of the community, producing work on a scale and with cultural resonance that makes sense to the people who live and work in the same place. Perhaps this reflects a utopian desire on my part—but it gives one pause to think about the kind of world it’s taken to produce the overweening, univocal monuments that now pass for the “greatest achievements” of our culture. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

DIA:BEACON, OPENING MAY 18.
3 Beekman Street, Beacon. 440-0100/www.diabeacon.org.

THE SHIRT FACTORY, BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
77 Cornell Street, Kingston. 358-4659 x21.

ARTS SOCIETY OF KINGSTON’S FIRST SATURDAY.
May 3. 331-0331.