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Located in a former Nabisco box-printing factory, an hour from New York City up the Hudson River, Dia Beacon showcases a breathtaking collection of works by American minimalists and their family and friends. Dia Beacon may be one of the planet’s biggest contemporary-art destination experiences, but, chances are, if you’re only in New York for a few days, you’ll skip it. But I’m here for a while and take the opportunity. It’s my third visit since the place opened in May 2003.

Dia Beacon feels insulated—air gapped—from Manhattan’s density, intensity, urgency. The experience starts with the train trip to tiny Beacon (population less than 15,000). On the way, you decompress, chill, and leave the big smoke behind. The building’s massive footprint enables appropriately epic installations by Walter De Maria, Dan Flavin, Michael Heizer, and Richard Serra, along with expansive selections of classic works by John Chamberlain, Mary Corse, Don Judd, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Blinky Palermo, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Robert Smithson, Anne Truitt, and others. To give a sense of the scale, a single newly installed work—De Maria’s floor installation 360˚ I Ching/64 Sculptures (1981)—occupies 10,000 square feet.

The artists may all be mavericks, but common ideas and moves ripple through the works on show, stringing them together like beads. The artists favour industrial materials and processes; the hand is minimised. Works involve permutations of basic elements (De Maria, Flavin, Heizer, Palermo). There are mounds of dirt (Morris, Smithson). There are mirrors (Gerhard Richter, Smithson)—and CCTV operating as a mirror (Nauman). There’s shredded rubber (Serra) and sliced felt (Morris). There are plays on negative space (Heizer, Sandback). There are circular and square voids (Heizer) and circular, square, and triangular protrusions (De Maria). There are crushed cars (Chamberlain) and shiny restored ones (De Maria). Etcetera. Everything seems linked in this hall of mirrors, this echo chamber. Everything is in register.

Psychology and sexuality are banished, except in the downstairs Nauman room and the upstairs Louise Bourgeois one, with Nauman reading as the gimp in minimalism’s basement and Bourgeois as the madwoman in its attic. Even here, these exceptions operate within the orbits of acceptable minimalist-related strategies. Barthes would have called it ‘inoculation’. When odd artists like Andy Warhol and Richter are admitted, it is with specific works that tie them to the company—Warhol’s Shadows (1978–9), Richter’s Six Grey Mirrors (2003)—parking the rest of their concerns and achievements.

Everything connects in a minimalist end game. Almost every work seems to be a major statement, as if it appeared fully formed (immaculately conceived) and could be no other way. Dia Beacon leaves little sense of how the artists got here or of other ways art might go. While appearing to be a temple to artists as individuals, it’s aggressively and consumately curated, with everything fitting together, almost seamlessly. First impressions (wide open spaces) conceal the reality (no way out, no way in).

Dia Beacon always feels the same. Exhibits change at a glacial pace, if at all. Any changes are reiterations or absorptions. Dia Beacon argues its centrality and its marginality simultaneously. On the one hand, it asserts the eternal supremacy of American minimalism; on the other, it nags from the sidelines as a decadent, pluralistic art world goes its merry way, exploring issues and identity, representing stuff and doing business. Dia Beacon excites me and frustrates me in equal measure. Its back-to-basics formalism feels so serious and consequential, but also narrow and humourless, privileged and prescriptive. It’s an art day spa: visit for a cleanse; don’t eat there every day.
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[IMAGE: Half of Walter De Maria’s floor installation 360˚ I Ching/64 Sculptures 1981, Dia Beacon]
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