Dia:Beacon Visit

Hello All,

I am writing to you today in a renewed state of mind and awe after my visit to the Dia:Beacon yesterday.

The Dia is a museum located in Beacon, New York, which is about an hour drive from the residency I am at.  It is this amazing kind of space.  At first, when you receive a map of the space, you look at it and think "well, this is going to be a breeze to get through," but an hour or so into my visit, I realized that I was in a vast warehouse and I had 2 choices: 1. Look at everything, but make it quick OR 2. Pick the several pieces I knew I wanted to see and look at them closely.  I chose #1 and am very glad.  Because with this choice, I got to see things that I didn't expect, pieces that I wouldn't have chosen to look at based solely on the name of the artist.  The Dia does not allow photography, so I will try to find pictures of the highlights from yesterday on google.

The first highlight are these pieces by Michael Heizer:



These pieces are large holes cut into the ground of the museum.  Perhaps they do not have the same feeling in photograph form, but in person they really scared me, they were like a hole that one could fall into and never get out.  I also love the ideas of Heizer's work, the concept of creating a "negative" sculpture.  Mostly, when we think of sculpture, it tends to be something we add to a space.  These sculptures were created by removing something from the space.  Because of this, the works speak so much about the idea of absence, and perhaps that exact sentiment is the reason why you should see them in person, because there is something inherently sad about them.  And this, my friends, is the true power of art.  How can a circle/square/ellipse/rectangle conjure up feelings of absence and sadness?  It's magic, what we do.....

Another highlight were sculptures by Joseph Beuys:

These sculptures were made by stacking pieces of felt on top of one another.  They are about the height of a regular person.  As a very short person myself, I felt kind of dwarfed by them.  However, the most interesting thing about these pieces is how they are both sculptural and sound pieces at the same time.  The Dia is a large, open area, which means that when anyone talks, it can be heard for miles.  Yet, when I walked amongst these pieces, the felt deadened the noise in such a beautiful way.  I have a true appreciation for silence, so I was very grateful for these piece.

Let's face it, I was like a kid in a candy store at this museum, and I want to mention everyone there, but I will just do a couple more.  There was an entire room dedicated to Louise Bourgeois, and seeing that she is one of my absolute all time favorites, I almost had a nervous breakdown:

What I loved about this room, especially in this museum, is the fact that it is such an amazing contrast to the other works in the museum.  Most of everything else in the museum was so geometric, and then there was Bourgeois, who makes these very organic, bodily forms.  They were an amazing relief after looking at squares, rectangles, circles, and ellipses for hours.  I also love her work in this brick room, it has this "artist workshop" kind of feeling about it. I also love the fact that some of the pieces are suspended.  I tend to think of gravity being one of the most important formal elements in sculpture, and most of the work that I saw in this museum was so strongly anchored to the ground, and these pieces are much more weightless, they float above the viewer's head.

Then, there is Richard Serra and I always have an emotional reaction to his work, so I have to write about it.





Serra makes these huge metal structures that (as in the case of the above photograph) the viewer can often walk into.  My friend Andrea Ferber once told me that Richard Serra is the perfect way to understand how phenomenology works in art.  Phenomenology is a concept that examines our body's relationship to space, and Serra's sculptures are the perfect catalyst to highlight the relationship between space and bodily awareness.  Often, once you get inside the sculpture, you find a maze of metal, with metal walls that get very narrow, almost making you feel as if the walls of this sculpture will swallow your entire body whole, and once they do, no one will ever find you again.  Such is the power of a Richard Serra.  I do not remember a time in my life when one of these babies didn't make my palms sweat and my heart beat faster.  To be completely honest, I feel like a terrified baby bird every time I enter one of these. On the top of my list of phobias is "Richard Serra sculpture."  Again, such is the power of art.

And then there were the rooms with Agnes Martin paintings, and of course, those get me every time:




Agnes Martin paintings are minimal, understated.  They almost look like they could have happened on their own, without anyone actually touching the canvas or paper.  They look fragile, and balance ideas of perfection and imperfection precisely.  At times, her paintings will contain a very tightly drawn grid on top, and the whole beauty of looking at them is finding that one little place that the grid is not perfect because at that moment, you realize that an imperfect human hand did make these seemingly perfect paintings.

Ok, I will stop now, but not before mentioning that there were also some amazing Sol Lewitt pieces and some amazing Fred Sandback string pieces, but I'm going to spare you the lecture on how some sculptures made of string stirred me so deeply, and let you experience that on your own when you will (undoubtedly) visit the Dia one day or another.

Monika