Dia Beacon
I went up to Dia Beacon this past weekend. The space is so phenomenal! It’s just enormous and the light is incredible…it puts you in a state of awe before you even look at any art.
Because of the size of the space, there is a lot of very large-scale work. There’s a lot to be said for scale…there were many pieces that I didn’t really like, but they nevertheless had a certain power because of their enormous size. It also made me realize how hard it is for me to think on a large scale. Maybe it’s partly a risk thing — I feel more comfortable making small work because it’s less risky — but I think it’s also a space issue. I don’t think to make something huge because I just don’t have the space or resources to create somthing on that scale. But it would be good practice to begin to think of ways that I could work big — for example, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s work is huge, but often doesn’t invlove physical artifacts other than buildings, which are already built. So working in public space with large-scale digital images is one way around the space issue.
A couple of pieces I really liked:
My favorite piece by far was Louise Bourgeois’ Spider. Most of the work in the galleries was very antiseptic and cerebral, but this piece was incredibly visceral and powerful. The sculplture of the spider’s body was beautiful and organic, and the web/cage space really evoked a sense of female power — as if this was the seat of an old, powerful crone.
In the “didn’t really get it conceptually, but liked it emotionally” category, there was a Robert Smithson piece that consisted of a pile of broken glass that somehow really evoked water and the sea, and several enormous Richard Serra pieces made of textured/degraded metal — they reminded me of walking around the base of sunken ships.
Also a Sol LeWitt piece that consisted of grids and diagonals drawn in pencil on the wall. There were two rooms covered with these grids that procedurally explored every possible combination of these four types of lines (horizontal, vertical, and the two diagonals), resulting in what looked from afar like varying sades of grey on the wall. I really liked the precision and obseesiveness of this piece.
