When the Viewer Is Essential

February has been a confusing mash of weather patterns, most of which have left me wanting to be anywhere but outside. Having grown up in the Berkshires, I’ve seen all the museums in which I’d be interested within an 80-mile radius, or so I thought. Dia: Beacon, a massive former Nabisco factory turned contemporary art installation palace has been sitting right on the Hudson River for 13 years without me noticing. Armed only with a fading college semester of contemporary art in the back of my brain, I set off for a visit.

Immediately upon entering the first gallery, I was struck by the enormity of the space and how much of a say the building itself was going to have in my interpretation of the art. The building’s original sawtooth roof is intact, its zig-zag shape making the space dynamic and allowing plenty of indirect sunlight. Particularly visible in the room containing Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light pieces, the roof mirrors the temporary gallery walls. The sheer number of lines in the room as the space and the works combine in the viewer’s vision is stunning. 

Like Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA, a museum I am more familiar with, obsolete factory buildings seem almost destined to be converted into places for contemporary art. Their brick, wood, glass and concrete whisper about the labor they have seen, and echo the materials used in many of the minimalist works. These huge buildings can contain art large enough to dwarf the viewer. Richard Serra’s 2-story, hollow steel cylinders provide the strongest example of this. One can never interact with the art in these big buildings in the same way one would in a more conventional museum space with framed paintings lined up at eye-level on a white wall. Viewers are essential to complete the art in Dia. In works like Gerhard Richter’s, which are large, reflective gray panels, the viewer feels essential to the piece. 

There are many ways to take in these enormous pieces. One can try to appreciate them in their entirety, which can be a challenge when you can’t fit a whole work within your gaze. Or one can look at all the individual components and notice the intricacies in the construction. My first impression upon entering a new room in the museum was often altered by spending more time looking closely at the individual pieces there. I found this to be particularly evident in the works of Blinky Palermo and On Kawara. Palermo was a German abstract painter who spent a lot of his career exploring color by creating monochromatic paintings. My immediate thought was that the works were precise and consistent, perhaps machine made. Yet when I looked up close, I could see where the brush had strayed or where he had painted one color over another. These variations made the works come more alive because I could see that they were made painstakingly.

Kawara’s date paintings had a similar effect on me. The artist’s goal was to create at least one of these paintings every day no matter where he was in the world. He painted the date in white on a black background and would follow the language and date rules of the country he was in. So while at first glance the room appears to be filled with many versions of essentially the same painting, each work is entirely distinct. He did not replicate the colors exactly, the typography changed over time and the dates themselves contain different languages and punctuation. 

In addition to its permanent collection, Dia has an exhibition of “Excursus: Homage to the Square3” by Robert Irwin. Irwin is the artist who converted the old factory into the space it is today. Seeing this temporary, house-like structure within the amazing and solid building that he revived is stunning. The piece is well worth seeing. Large swaths of scrim create walls containing florescent lights with colorful plastic gels, giving a theatrical and almost fun-house feel. I could have spent much longer than I did wandering through the white rooms and spotting other museum visitors through doorways and the walls themselves. 

It is always exciting to me to visit works that I have read about or only seen pictures of. This is especially true in the case of these large-scale minimalist pieces of art.  A still image or even a video cannot measure up to standing in front of them. Walking around this museum I saw my own reflection in many pieces. I walked inside big artworks and felt tiny while the material closed in around me, and I heard changes in sound as I walked through the art. Reading the theory behind them and seeing pictures is valuable, but experiencing them is far better. To me it is what they were made for. Visiting the postcard section of the gift shop I realized this even more strongly. None of what I sensed in the galleries could be captured from these images. I was essential in completing each piece, as though my presence mattered and added to the works. In the same way that the work would be different in any other space, the work would be different for any other viewer, and Dia: Beacon showed me this more than any other museum has. 

Dia: Beacon, at 3 Beekman St. in Beacon, NY, is open Friday-Monday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Irwin exhibit is on view until May 2017. For information, call 845-440-0100.

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