Dia: Beacon Riggio Galleries
My wife and I purchased a new car a week or so ago, and a major to-do for the Labor Day weekend was to drive north up the Hudson to see the Dia: Beacon Riggio Galleries in Beacon, NY. Dia is about an hour and forty-five minutes away from us in Queens, but the drive there on the Palisades Parkway is one long stretch of green until you re-cross the Hudson on the Bear Mountain Bridge just south of Garrison. I thought it was odd that both the Dia center and Yahoo! gave instructions for crossing the Hudson into NJ, up the west side of the river and then back across, but it turned out to the fastest and surely most scenic way in comparison with the way home, through Westchester.
The building itself is a renovated factory with, depending on who's telling, between a quarter and a third of a million square feet of exhibition space. With only two dozen artists, everyone gets plenty of room. The opening space, containing one of the sillier works, The Equal Area Series by Walter De Maria, is immense, stretching on for about 1/2 - 2/3 the total distance of the building. The ceiling lets in plenty of diffuse, natural light through stereotypical factory slanted windows. The day we visited was overcast so the lighting couldn't have been better. I found myself absorbed in imagining the work that must have gone on in the building at one time to have resulted in water stains here, burn marks in the floor there, odd scrapes and chalk marks on the walls. The conical support structures in the basement are reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's dendriform columns used in the SC Johnson corporate headquarters in 1939, though the Dia factory was built 10 years earlier.
Amongst the 24 artists displayed, the Bechers are the lone photographers. Nonetheless, photography plays a crucial role in a number of works, specifically Hanne Darboven and Joseph Beuys (I think.) As I'd seen other examples of the Bechers' typologies (though the images displayed at Dia are somewhat a different tact), I was comparing the Dia displays with last year's "Industrial Landscapes" show at Sonnabend, which was better in my opinion.
I will talk further about specific artists later this week, but I am a bit adrift in trying to bring something interesting to the table beyond my gut reactions. I simply don't have the background and education to full appreciate the connections and effort which went into each of the works shown at Dia: Beacon. Cursory Google research will eventually illuminate some of the corners, but even the densely written gallery essays only scratch the surface of the interconnected meaning that one could draw from a day at the galleries.
More excellent reviews, from Dia: Beacon's opening in 2003, on Artnet, Haber Arts, and New York magazine.
