Dia:Beacon

A year from now, there will be a major new cultural stop in the mid-Hudson Valley. The Dia Art Foundation, one of the world's preeminent contemporary art institutions, is now in the process of renovating the abandoned, former Nabisco box factory in Beacon, which will house its otherwise rarely seen permanent collection.

Founded in the 1970s, Dia has specialized in an almost Renaissance-style model of art patronage, taking a handful of the most ambitious artists from the '60s and '70s under its wing, and giving them long-term physical and financial support to develop bodies of work that are often epic in scale, sometimes ephemeral, that would otherwise lie outside the scope of traditional institutional support. While the Dia Center in New York hosts an ongoing program of temporary exhibitions in its Chelsea galleries, Dia is better known in many respects for its unusual emphasis on long-term, frequently site-specific installations. (One example is Walter De Maria's New York Earth Room, an interior sculpture comprising 250 cubic yards of earth, installed to a depth of 22 inches in a space of 3,600 square feet, which has been continuously on view in a SoHo building since 1980.) The new facility at Beacon will likewise feature mostly large works from Dia's collection, which will be installed permanently in galleries designed specifically to enhance the viewing conditions of the individual works.

Perhaps the first thing that will strike visitors is the sheer immensity of the place. When all the renovations are completed, there will be over 200,000 square feet of exhibition space-more than the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim combined. In arranging galleries in the space, the architects have preserved clear sightlines through the north-south and east-west axes of the building: upon entering through a very modest brick lobby addition, the viewer is immediately confronted with a 500 foot long sweep to the far end of the structure. A similar, if only 350-foot long, expanse crosses the center of the main building. (It's almost enough to give the average person a bad case of vertigo.) Illumination for the greater part of the space comes from long rows of north-facing sawtooth skylights, which create a surprisingly bright yet cool, even light throughout the facility, making it an ideal place to view the sort of sculpture that dominates the Dia collection.

With such vast square-footage available, the galleries and exhibition spaces are being designed so that visitors will only be able to see one artist's work at a time-in any given space, the work of, say, Agnes Martin or Blinky Palermo or John Chamberlain will stand alone, without the distraction of another artist's work penetrating the viewer's peripheral vision. The availability of this much space will also make possible the exhibition of expansive works that heretofore have never been seen as the artist intended. Chief among these will be Andy Warhol's Shadows of 1978, a series of 102 canvases comprising a single work, which will be installed edge-to-edge along 350 continuous linear feet of wallspace in a 9,000 square foot gallery near the museum's entrance. Dan Flavin's series of fluorescent light "monuments" for V. Tatlin from the early '60s are being installed on a series of obliquely angled walls, an exhibition strategy contemplated by the artist but never realized before his death in 1996. For those of you with little background in the history of 20th century art, the series is an homage to the brilliant revolutionary Russian Constructivist artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin, whose Monument to the Third International, a breathtakingly utopian concept for a monument-cum-building, was itself never built: its construction would have required more steel than existed in all of Russia at the time. But don't necessarily expect to learn this nugget of information from the Dia exhibit itself. One of the grounding principles for the foundation is the idea that art should be understood on its own terms, and that didactic wall labels get in the way of the true experience of the work.

Compensating for the dearth of information in the exhibition space, Dia is providing a small bookstore/library in the adjoining administration building, where visitors will be invited to read (if not necessarily buy) books at their leisure, with stock focused, of course, on the art of the 1960s and '70s that makes up the core of the collection. In addition, Dia has started an ongoing arts-in-education project with the Beacon school district, which will engage the art on display, the architecture, and the landscape as a resource for local children in elementary, middle, and high school classes.

If you've been to MassMOCA in North Adams, you'll have a sense of what it's like to experience art in a converted industrial building. Dia prides itself on having pioneered the practice of restoring and converting such buildings for the installation of modern and contemporary art, a practice that is rife with more than a little irony.
Built in 1929 by Nabisco as a state-of-the-art, modern printing facility (all those skylights were intended to enable the printers to more clearly scrutinize their work), the Dia:Beacon building will now house a collection built largely of work with a very industrial flavor, like the towering walls of raw Cor-Ten steel in Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses. But the beehive of activity normally found in places of active industry-the mechanical rattle of the machinery, the acrid smell of the printer's inks, the shouts of the workers loading pallets of finished boxes in the warehouse-will all have faded into distant memory by the time the museum opens next May. A decidedly different register of perception will take its place: contemplative, quiet, and clean, the aesthete will find a place to indulge in private moments of personal reflection, an experience carefully tempered and oriented by the renovated environs of the building itself.

At the press preview of the new museum, Dia director Michael Govan began to wax poetic about the landscaping-a parking lot featuring something called "grass-crete" paving (a porous concrete that allows grass and moss to grow through it), and flowering hawthorn and crabapple trees, whose character changes with the season, in order to provide a deeper sense of the natural context of the building. As he spoke, I was almost glad to hear his mellifluous description disturbed by the loud, industrial clanking and the whistle of a train passing by outside. It seemed a fitting, and hopefully ongoing memorial to the working class past now so irrevocably displaced by the image-conscious, aestheticized present.

—Beth E. Wilson