Out of town: September 2004 Archives
I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon, but my wife says it's inevitable. First, I have to say I did enjoy the day at Dia: Beacon. Much of the work, even that which I found to be ridiculous, was thought provoking in some regard. The trip is worth it just to experience Richard Serra's gargantuan rusty steel plate sculptures. However, as we left the center in mid-afternoon, I had to conclude that the space is just a bobo version of Disneyland.
When I say "bobo" I'm using David Brooks' neologism, a contraction of "bourgeois bohemian". We arrived at the center a half-hour after it opened and the place was already starting to fill up with these types, that is to say, Upper West Siders. While certainly not the level of congestion one finds at the Met on a Saturday mid-afternoon, the center did fill with enough people that you were rarely alone in its 300,000 square feet. And glaringly, after leaving multicolored NYC, the crowd was overwhelmingly white.
Disneyland’s thrill resides in the gut, not the mind, and so does Dia’s. Without a Master’s degree in minimalist art appreciation, you’re left to simple emotional reactions to the installations. And most of the installations are about art itself rather than any aspect of the typical person’s life, such as, say, love or death. It seems that by mid-century art had tired of exploring the human condition and turned to navel gazing. The result is the inanity of Fred Sandback’s string sculptures. As an amusement park attraction they work, forming an imaginary pane you hesitate to walk through. But while I was able to sit and contemplate my own reflection in Gerhard Richter’s Six Gray Mirrors I couldn’t help but be reminded of a funhouse mirror. Most exciting are Serra’s arcing steel behemoths. It’s probably the only gallery or museum visit I’ve made where I heard visitors whistling, listening to the echo off the umber walls. People were having fun! Heaven forbid we see that in a Chelsea gallery.
This later lead me to an observation about the rise of photography in the art world that occurred as the artists featured in Beacon descended from their zenith. Photography, by the function of the camera, requires an outward view. The lens must be trained on something other than itself. Even a self-portrait, when viewed, is a view of someone else. It is very difficult for photography to fall into the same self-indulgent exploration the Dia artists followed. Of course, there is an argument to be made that every photograph makes a self-referential commentary on photography, but I think that argument is made by critics and not photographers.
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.
