Dia: Beacon
Riggio Galleries
Winter Hours: 11am - 4pm, Friday through Monday

The ancient Greek word dia is variously defined as "through, between, across, of a motion through, in the midst of, from a beginning to an end, a conduit." In a former Nabisco crackerbox printing factory, located sixty miles north of New York City on the banks of the Hudson, the Dia Art Foundation has permanently installed their dazzling collection of contemporary art. Dia: Beacon opened to the public just three years ago, and serves as a monument to that moment in the 1960s and 1970s when minimalism, postminimalism, pop, and conceptual art demanded radically new paradigms for thinking about what art can mean, how this meaning is constructed in exhibition spaces, and how meaning might change over time. Isolated amid a bucolic, pastoral landscape with views of the river and the Catskills, this converted industrial factory offers a space, a destination, or perhaps more appropriately, a situation in which visitors can engage with these fundamental questions. What makes Dia: Beacon so powerfully affecting and so beautiful is that these questions about art and meaning defy themselves; polarized opposites seem to converge in this situation where nature, industry, and art are woven together.

Right from the get-go, the train ride up to Dia: Beacon opens up a dialogue between nature and industry. As passengers move from the industrial city up along the banks of the Hudson, the breathtaking countryside comes into view, but always from the moving vantage point of the zooming train. As one arrives in Beacon, Dia's factory building appears as an industrial anomaly between the wide, blue river and the forested hills. Nature and industry seem to chase each other. It might even be fair to consider this building a ruin of sorts, the remains of a time before offshore outsourcing when the landscape of the Hudson was seen as raw material for industry. With this on one's mind, the monumental collection of art�with works like Walter De Maria's flat circles and squares made of silver on the floor, Gerhard Richters' large grey mirrors, massive Richard Serra sculptures, a matrix of Sol Lewitt wall drawings, a room lined all the way around with paintings of a shadow by Andy Warhol�appears especially perplexing and enigmatic. How does this journey through the landscape prepare a visitor for the art inside?

Entering the museum, the site feels both brand new and, at the same time, storied and old. This particular collection of art is installed in this space and in this specific configuration indefinitely, and Dia announces its project of "permanent installation" with unusual vigor. History seems to be a peculiar issue for this young museum: it presents itself without explicitly announcing any information about the building's own history, the rich art history that is tied to the Hudson Valley, or even a general history of the development of minimalism. Museums have traditionally told the story of art through chronology or codified movements; indeed, places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art seem to metaphorically write history with their collections. But Dia's idea of installing these works permanently, and seemingly in situ, makes this set of galleries into a space that seems to hover above history, immune to changes in any curatorial perspective or new developments in understanding this work. One cannot imagine any of this art moving to a different location or being uprooted from this site. There is an important implication here that this art is not a collection of historical objects or artifacts, but instead is a collection of works installed with the intention to affect the viewer in a way that is always present. The rural riverbank site, the industrial building, the art in situ�these three extraordinary components work through each other, and through the visitor, merging and diverging as one journeys into this new kind of museum where meaning and beauty reveal themselves and are built with every step the visitor takes.

Allow me to lead a much-abbreviated tour, a quick account of a small constellation of four artworks to be found if one takes the stunning eighty-minute train ride from Manhattan to Beacon. First, Walter De Maria's silver circles and squares welcome the visitor into the museum, followed by Gerhard Richter's room of grey panels that seem more like mirrors than paintings. Donald Judd's grid of plywood boxes is installed just beyond this room, and behind them are hung string shapes by Fred Sandback. This will not be a stable story of art, nor can it even describe the whole endeavor of this museum, but a look at these four works, and the architecture that houses them, will offer up a little window through which we can see how meaning is made.

The main entrance of the factory delivers the visitor onto two identical, long rooms with the ceiling made entirely of saw-tooth windows that allow even a grey day to illuminate the space. All of Dia: Beacon is lit with only natural light--a feature from the original factory which, along with the wide open spaces, made it well- suited to house this large-scale art. This idea of natural, diffuse, consistent lighting is a shift away from the spotlights that illuminate the masterpieces in most museums. The walls in this hallway are a crisp white and totally bare. The warm maple floorboards are laid the long way, reiterating the directional pull and compelling movement down these twin concourse-like galleries. Naturally, one does what the space demands and begins marching in.

Donald Judd, Untitled (plywood boxes), 1976.


Gerhard Richter, Six Gray Mirrors No. 884/1-6, 2003.

It is in the course of this march that the art comes into view--Walter De Maria's "The Equal Area Series" from 1970-1990. The work lays flat on the floor, twenty-five pairs of circles and squares�twelve in one gallery, thirteen in the other�made of highly polished sliver plating. The silver is a five-inch outline of these shapes, circumscribing equal areas in the square and the circle on the floor. The reflective silver appears in striking contrast to the warm wood and the blank white walls, and materiality starts to take on meaning in these contrasts. The wood is scarred and scratched from years of pedestrian use, but the silver plating is pristine and returns the reflection of the viewer as he peers down onto it. The wall text tells that the first pair measures the square at six feet wide, with the circle six feet, eight inches in diameter. Each pair increases by one inch, a nearly imperceptible growth, down the gallery. Standing at the threshold of this axial aisle of a gallery, these silver shapes increase in size against the perspectival recession one sees. Looking into this one-point perspective, and then walking towards the imaginary vanishing point, the gleaming shapes on the floor actually get bigger as they appear to get smaller. The circle and the square — those basic building blocks of form — contain a kind of metaphysical trick in which their mathematical reality is imperceptible and opposite to the way the eye understands them. Appearance and reality are set against one another and right away, we cannot trust our senses.1

At the back wall of these long, nave-like galleries is an original industrial sliding door, beyond which polished grey concrete contrasts with the maple planks of the floor in the previous room. Beyond this door is a traditional white-cube gallery space designed for Gerhard Richter's "Six Gray Mirrors" from 2003. This room is one of the few places where the architecture of the factory was structurally altered by the Dia foundation, and this room appears as an aberration from the industrial spaces of the rest of the museum. Unlike in the previous gallery, the ceiling here is closed, but windows line the top of these walls, creating a clerestory lighting situation. The "Six Gray Mirrors" is composed of enormous rectangular panels made of glass-covered gray enamel, which each hang on the walls tilted at slightly different angles. Looking into them, one sees the familiar plane of a painting, but where one expects an image, these panels show only reflections�a viewer sees himself, the room, and the other panels on opposite walls�drowned in gray. These panels articulate something quite opposite of a painting, a picture plane where nothing can be represented or "pictured" at all, other than the constantly shifting reflections of the visitor as he crosses the room. No image can remain fixed, and no two viewers can see the same thing. Lynne Cooke, Dia's curator, makes reference to a note Richter made on a sketch of a similar project from 1966. He wrote: "Glass symbol (to see everything to understand nothing)." Cooke explains,

This brief note succinctly formulates his abiding doubt that perception will vouchsafe understanding, and, by extension, that light, with glass as its preeminent transmitter, can still serve as the embodiment of transcendental experience — in short, that the Enlightenment project has any viability today. Drained of memory, repulsing history, these penumbral surfaces obscure as they reflect.2

This suggestion of the death of transcendental possibilities, the death of the possibility of access to a spiritual realm apart from or above our lived world, resonates throughout Dia: Beacon. This anti-transcendentalism is curiously coupled with a lurking devotion to the idea that art can in fact offer some redemptive possibility or privileged perception. But Richter's "Six Gray Mirrors" hangs as an unequivocal funerary dirge to modernist painting and the possibility of representing a world other than the real, present, fleeting one we see reflected.

Leaving Richter's despondent sanctuary, one enters a wide, expansive gallery at the end of the building where the works of Donald Judd and Fred Sandback are installed before a brick wall with windows that offer a wide view of the rolling hills. Standing at the threshold of this space, the sense that this was a factory is unmistakable. The cement floor, brick walls, grids of the windows, and the geometry of the columns and ceiling beams all signal an architecture of regularity, repetition, order, rationality, and mechanicity. Donald Judd's "Untitled (Plywood Boxes)" from 1976 seems to be a perfect extension of this industrial environment, emphasizing the space, while the space emphasizes the boxes. In addition to the obvious pun of Judd's archetypal minimalist box displayed in an old box-printing factory, these fifteen nearly identical cubes suggest worlds of meaning to the viewer. Standing just about waist height, this field of boxes is like an inhabitable, dimensional grid, with streets and avenues through which one can wander and investigate the unique configuration of each block. Made of fir plywood, they initially appear uniform, but for their unique lids. The top of each box is positioned differently: some hover about the four walls, some tilt in one direction or another, some recede below the top, some tilt catty-corner from one top corner to the opposite bottom one. This variation never compromises the essential cube form that unifies this group. It appears like a species, each box with a unique formal identity.

But as a component in the larger context of Dia: Beacon, these boxes seem to annunciate a meaning beyond a formal investigation of box-ness and the grid. These works, with their incredible wood surfaces, tell something more. Plywood, of course, is an organic material processed by a machine, and the surfaces of these boxes bear this doubleness. The perfect smoothness and mathematical cube form is clearly the machine's doing. One can easily imagine the blade that slices the wood, leaving no mark. But the mesmerizing mark of the wood grain undulates in psychedelic patterns across this plywood, and these patterns are so intricate that they almost seem to be painted. This engagement between the natural and the industrial runs through the heart of Dia: Beacon, but these boxes take this relationship further. The bark, the visible surface of wood as it is in nature, has been discarded, and we see this grain in its place. The interior has been made into the surface, and this grain appears as nature's own abstract picture, a hidden interior design revealed in the industrial processing of the wood. But we remember that grain is a direct function of age, a record of growth, the accumulation of matter over years, an organic clock or marker of time. In being revealed, in exposing the self-made traces of its own history, this temporal, historical trajectory of the tree has been cut off. This surface image of the tree's own history becomes visible only with the tree's death. The suggestion here is that the grain patterns expose these otherwise neutral formal objects as possessing a history, or a life, that has been frozen or suspended. These boxes bear the marks of their own material history, and the problems of history, record keeping, and memory that defined post-war intellectual projects lay dormant in them.

Looking past Judd's boxes and their material history, we see the last area before the dead-end of the factory, a space just before the windows looking out from the brick walls and onto the expansive pastoral landscape. Standing by Judd's boxes, this space appears empty until one looks from just the right spot. There, Fred Sandback's string sculptures, "Untitled (Two Part Vertical Construction)" from 1977, seem to shimmer in all their subtlety. These large, two-dimensional shapes�mainly triangles and rectangles---are constructed out of nothing more than thin, brightly colored acrylic yarn fastened tautly to points on the floor, walls, and ceiling. Sandback's works show two perpendicular vertical planes of the same size oriented so that one rectangle stands just before the other, threatening to bisect it. As one approaches, these vertical, rectangular planes, seemingly empty geometric suggestions in space, become enlivened by the light from above and the polished floor reflecting them from below. The architecture behind them suddenly appears as if behind a sheet glass. Sandback's string convinces the viewer that he is looking at a surface, at some kind of thin veil of glass or plastic or mirror, when in reality it is nothing more than a shape implied by a string outline. One's eyes are not looking at the string, or at the architecture behind it, but at the space within. Looking at these, it is as if the world we know to be three-dimensional has been mapped out as flat planes, and one feels a bizarre vertigo and disease in their presence. Then looking away from these planes, a certain skepticism remains, a kind of confusion about what was just perceived. If illusionistic art offers a painterly perspective that allowed the two dimensions of the canvas to be perceived as the three dimensions of the world, Sandback seems to offer the actual, phenomenal world rendered mysteriously as two-dimensional. It is eerie, but it has the effect of allowing the beholder to wonder, question, and be titillated by his own faculty of beholding while very nearly forgetting the content of what is beheld. In other words, the particular space (the factory walls, the floor) disappears for an instant, and one feels like one is looking at space qua space. It is a trompe l'oeil in which being tricked means seeing a virtual, immaterial plane and believing it is a real one.

Fred Sandback, Untitled (from Ten Vertical Constructions), 1977.


Walter de Maria, The Equal Area Series, 1976-77.

Looking back now at Richter's and Judd's works in this old factory, it is clear that meaning emerges essentially in a consideration of the material, physical, historical world. Their art draws attention to the situation of its own viewing. Each work is grounded to its site; it has a complicated and mournful relationship to the past, and does not offer any indication or fantasy of a world beyond. The projects of De Maria and Sandback, however, approach an opposite model. Although their art may appear more grounded or tied to the gallery space, it seeks to orient the attention of the viewer inwards and indeed out of the site. Consider, in the case of De Maria's works, the rupture between perception and mathematical reality, in which the human perception of size and space works in opposition to the mathematical reality. For Sandback, a kind of quivering phenomenology gets the viewer to perceive shapes that appear out of thin air. The stability and reality of the material world has become suspect. For Sandback and De Maria, the phenomenal world can be shaken by perceptual tricks, but for Richter and Judd the phenomenal world can harbor no illusions.

Let me end my highly limited tour here. We have walked along the central axis of the factory, from the doorway, where you leave the views of the Hudson, all the way to the back wall where a window opens onto that same landscape. In this museum, the visitor's movements are what bring forth meaning; the works communicate their meaning as the viewer walks his course around them. The questions that flow from this situation point us back to the various ways we have seen artists treat the idea of transcendental possibilities for art. A quote from Thomas McEvilley's introduction to Brian O'Doherty's book Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space might offer some useful insight. Writing about the aesthetics of gallery display in the era when the "white cube" design came to dominate, he writes:

The white cube was a transitional device that attempted to bleach out the past and at the same time control the future by appealing to supposedly transcendental modes of presence and power. But the problem with transcendental principles is that by definition they speak of another world, not this one. It is this other world, or access to it, that the white cube represents. It is like Plato's vision of a higher metaphysical realm where from, shiningly attenuated and abstract like mathematics, is utterly disconnected from the life of human experience here below.3

As any walk through Chelsea or the MoMA clearly demonstrates, the white cube still holds as the predominant mode of display for most 20th century and contemporary artists. But Dia: Beacon offers a new model for art display that meaningfully complicates the environment of looking at art. This is art in a reclaimed industrial building that bears its own history (as a factory) juxtaposed with its present function as a museum. American industry, technology, labor and production are now thrust into conversation with the art of the last forty years, and the meaning of this is provocatively ambiguous. The binaries between history and eternity, the material and the transcendental, industry and nature, stability and flux: these are on display at Dia: Beacon. A pilgrimage to Dia sends a visitor whirling through, between, across, and in the midst of these extremes, and it's just a gorgeous train ride away.