Dia:Beacon

Dia:Beacon showcases contemporary art, much of it site-specific, on 30 acres alongside the Hudson River.


The space is gigantic, luminous, airy, and welcoming --- it makes you feel glad to be there, especially on a sunny spring day.




The Dia's been here since 2003, but the building has been around since 1927, as a box-making and -printing plant for Nabisco. This history makes Donald Judd's boxes seem even more ironic than usual.


But the warm atmosphere created by the space often stands in direct contrast to the art itself, much of which is alienating and dislocating. Map of Broken Glass (1969) by Robert Smithson, for example, is exactly what it sounds like: a pile of sharp shards. An installation by Joseph Beuys features a pile of rubble and two fire extinguishers (he allegedly created the piece after first traveling from Germany to Manhattan "wrapped in felt," then spending a week in a hotel room with a coyote, which maybe explains a couple things).

The Gerard Richter on display was just two thick racing stripes.


Each gallery is devoted to a different artist. Louise Bourgeois gets the entire upstairs; Bruce Nauman gets the entire downstairs (and does lots of freaky things with the space. Think basement in The Silence of the Lambs).



We weren't the only ones there, but the space was so quiet you could hear the hum of Dan Flavin's tubes, giving the light sculptures an aural dimension you don't always get in other museums.


It's an ideal set-up for Richard Serra, who specializes in ginormous sculptures made from sheet metal. Their insides resemble fun house mazes, alternately narrowing and expanding. The effect is colossal and claustrophobic.





We kept coming back to one particular piece, Negative Megalith (1998) by Michael Heizer. We looked and looked, and all we could think was, Why isn't this thing falling over and crushing us?