MORE TO THE point, will they come more than once? That’s what everybody at the avant-garde Dia Art Foundation and a lot of folks in and around Beacon, N.Y. (a Hudson River town about an hour and a half north of Manhattan), are hoping. Dia:Beacon, you see, is the latest in a recent series of schemes to revitalize–if not outrightly rescue–urban areas via infusions of cultural tourism. (Think Milwaukee, Ft. Worth, Akron and Cincinnati in this country and Bilbao and the south side of London abroad.)
The new Dia:Beacon is a humungous (240,000 square feet of exhibition space!) renovated package-printing factory on a 31-acre site five minutes’ walk from the Metro North train station. The building–which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places–was designed by a Nabisco staff architect and built in 1929. It lay dormant for years, and its last owner, International Paper Co., donated the edifice to Dia. The state and municipal governments kicked in $2.7 million, Barnes & Noble chairman Leonard Riggio put an impressive $30 million where his mouth was, and Dia and various donors ponied up $18 million more. Then–voila!–a collaboration between renowned California “light and space” artist Robert Irwin and the progressive New York architecture firm OpenOffice transformed the place into what Dia director Michael Govan calls “a campus of [22] individual artist’s spaces.”
Dia needs architectural indulgence on this scale because of the kind of artists it favors as beneficiaries of its largesse. The foundation was started 30 years ago by transplanted German art dealer Heiner Friedrich and his wife at the time, oil-machinery heiress Phillipa de Menil, with the intent of giving the kind of patronage required by, but not gallery-available to, such physically mega-ambitious artists as sculptors Don Judd and Walter de Maria, earthworkers Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, fluorescent-fixture orchestrator Dan Flavin and mystically perfectionist composer LaMonte Young. In the 1960s, ’70s and into the ’80s, Dia underwrote de Maria’s awesome New Mexico “Lightning Field” (lots of metal poles that turn the landscape into a Tesla coil a couple of months a year), and his hypnotic “Broken Kilometer” and “Earth Room” installations in SoHo, Jim Turrell’s pharaohic metamorphosis of Roden Crater in Arizona, Judd’s sculpture-studded former Air Force base in Texas and Young’s sensorially perfect but money-pit endless New York music building.
The publicly paraded swollen egos of many of the Dia artists (who operated under the apparent assumption that if you want to be Michelangelo you’ve got to act Michelangelo) has caused a lot of critics–most recently the studiously hidebound Roger Kimball in The New Criterion–to miss the most salient truth about the best Dia-sponsored art. It’s simply beautiful–even Flavin’s store-bought lightbulbs, even de Maria’s metal tubes lying on a storefront floor and even his second-floor loft filled with dirt. (Note to Kimball, who wrote that he’d like to “witness the result” when de Maria’s “Earth Room” is viewed by a group of average citizens: My wife, an art professor at Hofstra University on Long Island, routinely brings field-trips of suburban non-art-majors into Manhattan to see contemporary art, and they almost always love that piece.)
Dia’s modern art isn’t the sort that your granny–or even Kimball–would say a monkey could have made. And most of the stuff at Beacon is as beautiful as “Earth Room.” Examples: Richard Serra’s giant torqued steel ellipses, Fred Sandback’s incisive drawings-in-space with stretched cord, Heizer’s yawning geometric floor cavities, and Sol LeWitts brain-teaser permutations on a skeletal cube. Moreover, Dia:Beacon lets you enjoy the art; there are no annoying wall texts “explaining” everything. Not all the art, to be sure, is great. Andy Warhol’s 102 commissioned “shadow” paintings, hung cheek by jowl in a floor-level frieze, miscast him as an abstract installation artist. It’s like George Carlin trying to play Hamlet. Amid the really good twisted-metal John Chamberlain sculptures is a freestanding ribboned wall that looks like decoration for a cotillion ball. The disposition of Imi Knoebel’s fiberboard and lumber, says Dia’s official description, “gives the impression that they await future development.” Amen. And Knoebel is one of a number of less-than-household-name artists–including Hannah Darboven, Blinky Palermo (a German who for some reason took the name of the infamous 1950s boxing promoter), On Kawara and Robert Whitman–whose inclusion at Beacon might give Dia the warm fuzzies but nevertheless acts as a slight drag on the vivacity of the place. So will, probably, the fact that what’s on view at Dia:Beacon will change from here on out only once or twice every geologic era.
While vivacity might not be the foremost issue for Dia–the foundation was simply looking for a way to preserve and make public the art it owned that could no longer be accommodated in expensive, tightly packed Manhattan–it will be for the civic and business movers and shakers of the Hudson River Valley. Artists and their families are moving in. Cafes, galleries and other tourist amenities are starting to pop up in Beacon and nearby river towns. The owner of a sculpture-casting foundry has said that Dia Beacon is “going to affect the town, not unlike the Guggenheim and how it affected Bilbao in Spain.” Whoa, hold on. Last time we looked, Beacon wasn’t the anchor of the Autonomous Region of Hudsonia, nor was Bilbao a short train ride away from a world art capital with many other more encyclopedic modern museums and hundreds of galleries where you can see some of the best contemporary art for free. The claims of box-office bonanza and job-creating spinoff given by proponents of new museums are the same arguments which, when applied to proposed football and baseball stadiums, are often rejected out of hand by art-world culturati. And with good reason: the supporting statistics are squishily malleable at best.
So what do we prophecize? Well, remember those kids my wife introduces to de Maria’s “Earth Room”? They might oooh and aaah when they’re plucked up and placed before a work with such rarified appeal, but most wouldn’t spring for the train fare and buy admission tickets to see minimalism in action. Picasso or Rembrandt, maybe, but not minimalism. Sure, a few do contract the austere-art bug and end up fans of Serra and de Maria along with the Mets and Nets, but not that many. And that, probably, is what’s in store for Dia:Beacon. First a rush, then a procession, then a straggle.
