Art - Richard Cork is impressed by a spectacular new museum devoted to contemporary art
Taking the train from New York's Grand Central Station to Beacon, where the Dia Foundation recently opened a spectacular museum devoted to contemporary art, is a delight in itself. Although the 60-mile journey takes a leisurely hour and a half, it travels up the Hudson River most of the way. The carriages, on a track positioned astonishingly near the water's edge, offer irresistible panoramas of the valley. I made the trip on an idyllic autumn afternoon, marvelling at the red-and-gold brilliance of the foliage on the hills beyond. Passing through stations with names as resonant as Yonkers, Tarrytown, Peekskill, Cold Spring and Breakneck Ridge, this hypnotic train ride helps to explain why the Hudson River became such a cynosure for American landscape painters in the 19th century.
Only two stops from the end of the line at Poughkeepsie, Beacon City occupies a strategic point between the river and the Hudson Highlands. Robert Irwin has designed the landscape and gardens around the museum with the aid of roses, lavender, morning glory and plentiful trees. They are interspersed with clean shafts of boardwalk, echoing the rectilinear formality of a steel, concrete and glass building erected in 1929 as a printing plant for Nabisco. Although Irwin has made some quiet alterations to the facade as well, the functional character of its industrial architecture is retained.
So is the immensity within. Walking into this prodigious structure, where three buildings and a train shed have been amalgamated into an area spanning almost 300,000 square feet, is a truly astounding experience. Even the most space-hungry artworks are given ample room in the titanic interior, which makes all other galleries converted from industrial use look puny. Dia:Beacon is a colossus, with generous skylights and noble rows of columns flanking wide expanses of floor. Its strong sculptural identity serves as an ideal setting for Dia's impressive holdings of classic minimalism.
Dan Flavin's selection from his V Tatlin series looks stunning in such a stripped, purist context. Paying ironic homage to the Russian artist's sadly unfulfilled proposal for the erection of his rousing Monument to the Third International around 1920, Flavin restricts himself to pale white tubes of fluorescent light throughout. Set out on a central zigzag wall designed by the artist, they amount to a sequence of austere, Bach-like variations on a distant revolutionary theme.
Colour makes an entrance in Andy Warhol's room, but the overall mood is far removed from the brashness of Pop. Shadows, a sustained, multi-canvas work from his later years, is an impressive ensemble. Even though the forms are occasionally reminiscent of bent arms or crumpled shorts, they evade recognition. Taken as a whole, Shadows is the most abstract and mysterious Warhol I have ever seen.
Walter De Maria, on the other hand, makes eloquent use of Beacon's mighty floors. In The Equal Area Series, he places pairs of gleaming stainless-steel squares and circles right along the middle of two neighbouring rooms. Leaving the rest of their gallery-space entirely empty, they have a crisp, vision-cleansing impact after the ghostliness of Warhol. Laid very flat, this metal geometry is the quintessence of minimalism. Each form grows larger by an inch, as they proceed through the vastness. But the size changes seem infinitesimal to the naked eye, and when visitors enter the rooms, they almost become part of De Maria's work.
The pared-down lucidity of his installation is flouted by Hanne Darboven's Cultural History 1880-1983. Her attempt to fuse the personal and the collective could have resulted in a stimulating, multi-layered work. But the 1,590 framed sheets covering wall after wall, from ceiling to floor, end up wearying the viewer. Anything and everything seems to be here, from old tourist postcards and news magazine covers to photographs of artists and Hollywood stars. A surprising amount of repetition dulls our responses even further, and I felt ridiculously grateful for her more limpid display of sculptural objects as simple as a rocking horse, a robot, a bust of Konrad Adenauer and two track-suited figures.
With relief, we find ourselves in a room devoted to Robert Ryman's Vector. These 11 panels are painted with such uniform whiteness that they almost merge with the walls behind. As ever, Ryman sharpens our gaze, allowing us to concentrate on the hue of the wood he has left unpainted.
In dramatic contrast, Blinky Palermo's To the People of New York City is positively heraldic in its flag-like proclamation of cadmium red, yellow and black. All 15 clusters of his aluminium panels project slightly from the walls, as if suspended in space like thin, multicoloured sculpture in relief. Rich, warm and not at all clinical in organisation, they have an air of outright celebration.
So do many of John Chamberlain's sculptures. Displayed with theatrical aplomb in window-lined galleries washed generously by the sun, his crushed car-parts have an exclamatory impact. In one sense, they smack of the junkyard. Many look mangled and some, including Doom's Day Flotilla, scarcely able to stand. But they end up looking stubborn and resilient, not abject. The title of one sculpture, Norma Jean Risen, suggests that Chamberlain is fascinated by the whole notion of miraculous renewal. And in a large-scale work called The Privet, tall metal strips surge up like flames from a bed of compressed, jagged fragments, as if involved in a jubilant, sumptuously coloured resurrection.
If The Privet appears to strive for the heavens, Michael Heizer's North, East, South, West makes us stare down deep into the earth. Like an inveterate land artist who refuses to change his working methods inside a gallery, Heizer has sunk four enormous forms far into the floor. Made of weathered steel, they assert the primal geometry of a cone, wedge, cube and conical section. But you experience them instead as shadowy, unfathomable recesses. The very opposite of sculpture as tangible presence, these dark recesses are mysterious and troubling.
Wandering through this vast building, we move from one extreme to another. The bleached subtlety of Agnes Martin's paintings, all grey in one room yet unexpectedly light and lyrical in another, gives way to the brooding bulk of a Richard Serra sculpture, beached like a great rusting ship whose surfaces appear, paradoxically, soft and sensuous. Gerhard Richter's Six Grey Mirrors, each one projecting from the wall and leaning at a different angle from its neighbours, could not be more tantalising. Even though they offer reflections of the room, these images confound our sense of space.
The most intense oppositions occur when we venture downstairs to Bruce Nauman and then upstairs to Louise Bourgeois. Nauman has the whole of a gigantic underground space to himself, lined with monumental columns like some Egyptian temple long since sunk in the earth. He re-creates the studio where he normally works, using an elaborate video installation to invite us in and even witness the intrusive mice that once disrupted his silent haven. Ultimately, though, Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) makes us feel distanced from Nauman's world. It seems a highly private and enigmatic place, whereas Bourgeois presents us upstairs with an unashamedly vis-ceral experience.
Emerging from the lift into this dim, desolate and apparently decrepit attic, we are confronted by a dangling carcass. Farther on, past an embryonic white growth bulging from one wall, a dense cluster of penis forms emerge from a rocky base. Never afraid to be scatological, Bourgeois then displays two brown turds unaccountably sprouting nipples. But her most eerie encounter occurs at the end, where an enormous spider rests its body on top of a metal cage, its long, thick legs dangling down menacingly. The spider seems to be defending the cage's interior. Here, a solitary and mournful old armchair covered in tapestry fragments speaks of some unexplained trauma, far removed in time yet still horribly alive in the artist's own haunted imagination.
Information about Dia:Beacon can be obtained from info@diaart.org and www.diaart.org
Richard Cork's four books on modern art, including essays on many of the Dia artists, were recently published by Yale
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