Un Buen Dia

Today I went with Carl to the Dia:Beacon museum. The charge was $10, flat, with no “suggested donation” signs, which was refreshing to me (since “suggested donation” always actually means “enforced charge”).

There were a few particularly interesting installations. Everything was minimalist—for instance, the only paintings we saw were a room of painted-white canvases, for which the point was the installation process and gallery setting rather than the paintings themselves; a set of paintings from a series started in 1968 by an artist who paints the date (now in Futura font) in white paint on a blue/black background, but destroys the paintings on days when he doesn’t finish by midnight; a series of paintings done by a woman who left painting to build an adobe hut in the mesa and study isolation for ten years, and which were mostly two pastel panels, each—and most was sculpture.

The Richard Serra Ellipses were effective. When we entered the room (a giant warehouse room) where they were kept, I felt the forms were huge and, frankly, meaningless. Walls of apparently rusted steel rose up in front of you and curved gently to one side or the other, but the scale of the sculptures compared to the room was strange, making the room feel just wrong—exactly too big or too small for these four Ellipses, which crowded each other, but not quite enough to make a point.

To my delight (but not my surprise), Carl knew about these sculptures already and mentioned that you can walk into some of them. We went around one, found the “door,” and followed the paths to the center. The curving of the walls, which from the outside had seemed meaningless to me, became an expanding and contracting of the path we walked; the center had the feeling, as Carl said, of a ritual space. The height of the walls made perfect sense from the inside; this must have been what it felt like to stand in the keep of a castle or some other fortified structure. The rest of the room ceased to exist, though sounds were actually louder inside the Ellipses. The clacking high heels of one viewer, for instance, made me fear a collision as we followed the path out, long before we could see her, let alone bump into her.

The interior of Serra’s Ellipses reminded me of looking for the lee of uprooted trees or large rocks, as a child. (I used to plan where my brothers and I would live if our mother were ever finally taken away, unwilling to consider being placed in a group home or foster care, and my plots always involved living outside—usually near Willow Brook, where we could find fresh water and some protection from the weather. I know now, of course, that these were ridiculous plans. Still, I think: What a relief it would have been to know that something like Serra’s sculptures could have held us, safe, in its center.)

When we were leaving the room, I looked back at the four Ellipses huddled in the warehouse room.

“They look smaller now, from the outside,” I said, and Carl agreed.

The Ellipses--different ones, of course--are also showing at MoMA, but I'm glad to have seen them in Beacon.

There were two photo series, but only one of them was any good. The photos of factories—interior and exterior, from Europe and the US—by Bernd and Hilla Becher were striking black and white shots with no apparent art to them. I say “no apparent art” with a great deal of respect; bad compositions are obvious, and often, good ones are invisible. None of these compositions were bad, and many of them were fascinating. One photo featured the outside of what appeared to be a water tower, with a spiral metal staircase ascending up the center. It looked nice on the wall, but Carl and I both reacted to it as though we had been asked to climb those interminable stairs (“I wouldn’t want to climb those,” Carl volunteered, and I had been thinking the same), which I think is a sign of its strength as a photo.

Plus, I love old factories. (Love.)

Bernt and Hilla Becher have been photographing old industrial sites, exclusively, for forty years.

The exhibit that most appealed to me on a “I wish I could make that” level was a room of sculptures by John Chamberlain. Most of the sculptures, including a ribbon-like “wall” that looked to me like seaweed rising from a lake or ocean floor, were made out of old car parts. The information card informed us that Chamberlain had let his students and apprentices work on his art as well, encouraging them to twist and torque the metal into new and interesting shapes. Each “ribbon” of metal that rose toward the ceiling had been individually painted, usually using what the card called “raucous” colors, and in an almost tie-dyed style.

The exhibit also included a sort of teepee-looking sculpture made of boats, and an entirely black sculpture entitled “Norma Jean”—which referenced the notorious black-dress moment for which Marilyn Monroe is still famous.

If any single thing was annoying about the Dia: Beacon, it was likely not the museum’s fault. Most of the information cards, which were (cleverly) laminated and able to be carried about the exhibit, gave pertinent and interesting historical information about each artist—for the first two paragraphs. Beyond the second paragraph, language began to lose meaning as experts or the artists themselves attempted to give a justification for their work; Sol LeWitt, especially, whose work was extensive and on “series,” seemed unable to articulate why he felt the need to explore every single permutation of cubes and cube openings in a display that looked like a kindergarten cubby room (though I’m sure there was a good reason). The contortions of language that LeWitt, and other artists, used were amusing at best and frustrating at worst, and at times served more to obscure the art than illuminate it. The effect was similar to attempting to read the description of Scent of a Woman off the back of a Chinese bootleg DVD.

But overall, a good and worthwhile museum, and an excellent day.