360° I Ching/64 Sculptures, Walter De Maria, 1981Why are big rooms—the Pantheon in Rome, the concourse of New York’s Grand Central Terminal—so thrilling? Maybe it’s the pleasurable, paradoxical feeling of being outside in, or of being back in childhood, when everything was bigger. (And, no, I’m not going to stop using “big” and its relatives, just because of its use by a certain Tweeter.)
Big rooms share their bigness. And make you feel wonderfully small. Light. It’s not all about you. Step into a soaring interior, and you feel stimulated, liberated, and calmed all at once. Take a deep breath. Here’s breathing space, room to move.
Many a monolith was built to put the fear of God in you, but nowadays, lofty spaces are more likely to impress as examples of what humans can do. A stone’s throw from the Hudson, Dia: Beacon, in Beacon, New York, is a capitalist cathedral of sorts. It occupies a former Nabisco box printing factory, built in 1929, a place once full of din and hustle, where workers made real things–Ritz cracker and cookie cartons. (More on its history here.)
It’s become a quiet, contemplative temple of art from the Sixties to the present. Minimalism, Conceptualism, the Light and Space Movement… these were on the ascendant about the time American manufacturing, which powered small cities like Beacon and its neighbor, Newburgh, across the Hudson, was slipping off to Mexico and Asia.
High ceilings, clerestories and other sources of natural light, rooms so large it takes minutes to cross them, industrial construction materials, and industrial-strength scale make the building an ideal setting for big art. It makes a big first impression, prompts a whoa! reaction, and that’s before you even get down to the art.
In fact, before you get to the entrance, artist Robert Irwin’s dramatic landscape design might lead you down a garden path and into a formal, highly stylized forest of clipped hornbeams.
Once you do pass through the front door and lobby (also designed by Irwin), you’re among giants.
Richard Serra’s “Union of the Torus and the Sphere” looms in its narrow space like the beached hulk of a tanker.
Circling around it produces a claustrophobia-inflected frisson. It’s worth it to get up close to the textured surface.
Head in the opposite direction to see his “Torqued Ellipses,” standing like tipsy space ships. You can stand inside them; the day I was there, a child was singing in one of them. I don’t think you would want to venture inside Michael Heizer’s “North, East, South, West,” although surveying them might trigger l’appel du vide, or “call of the void,” also known as High Place Phenomenon: the urge to jump that some experience when standing, for instance, on the balcony of a tall building. The four pieces are calibrated voids, negative spaces, enigmas of emptiness.
In another airy room of major proportions, John Chamberlain’s “Three-Cornered Desire,” a sculpture the size of a Smart car, fits tidily. Other sculptures of his pose at intervals. the space feels oddly like a high-end car showroom, if the cars were pulled apart, bent, twisted, dented, crushed, and jammed back together. I’d seen Chamberlain’s work before, but here, his sculptures revealed themselves, made sense, were gorgeous. I got it in a way I hadn’t before.
In fact, I didn’t expect to like the art so much, something I’m embarrassed to admit. Conceptual art has often left me cold, but at Dia: Beacon, I seemed to see things more clearly. As monumental as their dimensions are, these rooms have a “reticent dignity,” in the words of the philosopher A. N. Whitehead; they don’t get in between you and an object.
In any case, I was happy to find Louise Bourgeois‘s work—I always get her—strikingly displayed, dimly glowing in natural light, on the third floor.
Compressed, heavy, ancient as rock formations, meticulously executed, and weighted with emotion, her work seizes something deep in the viewer. Other artists’ works produce a heady charge of their own. Robert Smithson’s “Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis),” 1969, attracts and repels in equal measure. It has the allure of a mythic sunken kingdom, and you can’t go there. (Sharp Place Phenomenon?) Disorientation, unease, even fear: contemporary art reflects its roots in an age of anxiety, as it pushes on our ideas of beauty and the nature of art.
If angst isn’t your thing, installations by other contemporary art masters might better match your mood: Walter De Maria’s “Truck Trilogy,” on exhibit through Summer 2019, or one of the many examples of Dan Flavin’s work. (BTW, the De Maria work at the top of the page is no longer on view.)
And when you feel overwhelmed, go small.
Beacon, New York, has blocks of restaurants and stores, including a great bookshop, Binnacle Books, and other attractions. Or take a ferry across the Hudson to Newburgh (pictured), which has parks, art galleries, coffeehouses, and shops to explore.
Earlier this month, New York City Marathoners were wending their way through the five boroughs. It was heartening to see how many thousands turned out to run and how many to cheer them on as they came through the warm drizzle, only five days after the terrorist attack in lower Manhattan. It was reassuring to see law enforcement officials of every stripe, the garbage trucks and dump trucks blocking access to the race route.
And it was cognitively dissonant, the contrast between the crowd’s roaring enthusiasm of and the somber effect of heavy-duty security everywhere.
That day, I wended my way down through the marshy, watery, sometimes wasted and stricken, sometimes strictly suburban, sometimes surprisingly lovely landscapes of southern Connecticut via Metro North, then from Grand Central up Fifth Avenue, around the fringes of the marathon, along the paths of Central Park to the Guggenheim.
At the southeast entrance to the park right now is Ai Weiwei’s “Gilded Cage,” just one of the artworks that make up “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” installed in 300 locations around the city. Beautiful and unsettling–what a gilded cage is all about–the 24-foot-tall sculpture, fitted with turnstiles inside and designed to let you look up through the opening at the top at a sky you can’t reach, comments on the current desire of some people to keep some other people out, and the effects on all of us within, e.g., the confining, stultifying effects of control and ignorance borne of insularity.
Meanwhile, as tourists explored the cage’s ins and outs, an employee of Bendel’s on Fifth Avenue got ready for the shoppers about to come through its golden doors.
The main show at the Guggenheim is “Art and China After 1989,” sculpture, paintings, videos, made since the year of Tiananmen Square. I get why it’s worth spending time with, but I felt mostly more dutiful than excited by the show, heavy on the Conceptual art, which try as I might to meet it halfway, often doesn’t do it for me. On a different day, in a different mood, I might have been more receptive. Some of the art goers that afternoon, though, were riveted by it, and their giggles and hoots of delight were contagious among the more “mature” visitors.
More art lovers.
My receptivity cranked way up when I got to the room of Brancusi sculptures and photographs and the exhibition “Josef Albers in Mexico.”
Brancusi’s “The Muse” is a serene, silken marble bust on a rough-hewn oak pedestal, an essential pairing. Its backstory includes a legal tussle with the widow of the Bulova watch magnate, confiscation by sheriffs, ownership by an art dealer who went to jail for tax evasion and evaded prison for much more heinous crimes, and a long-awaited reunion with the museum and its then-director in 1985. I think I’m glad I didn’t know all that when I was absorbing its presence. Another piece in the gallery, a sleek, seamless, stylized, polished, and perfect swish of marble, immediately reads “seal.” And what is its title? “The Miracle (Seal [I]).”
The Albers show (through Feb. 18) focuses on Josef and wife Anni’s love affair with Mexico and the influence it had on Josef’s art. (Anni was an accomplished, original artist; more about them both here.) They started visiting its sacred sites after emigrating from Germany in 1933 to North Carolina (after the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus), and over the next three decades, they made 13 excursions there. You can see Albers’ fascination/fixation with color evolving. I never really appreciated his paintings before–they seemed cool, in the service of theory. In this exhibition, they have warmth, they glow. They struck me as being less about control, more about discovery. “In order to use color effectively, it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually,” Albers wrote in Interaction of Color. These paintings’ combinations of colors are sometimes tricky, often startling and emotional, and seeing them “live” rather than in reproduction, you see the texture, not from the oils but from the pasteboard they were painted on.
You have to get in close to see what’s going on in his photographs of pre-Columbian ancient monuments, especially the collages of contact sheet images cut up and painstakingly arranged together. In a quiet way, they reveal that desire toward containment, organization, classification that becomes full-blown in the iconic Albers “Homage” paintings of squares of reds, yellows, blues.
All wonderful, but the best was yet to come. Next: Louise Bourgeois at MoMA.
High ceilings, clerestories and other sources of natural light, rooms so large it takes minutes to cross them, industrial construction materials, and industrial-strength scale make the building an ideal setting for big art. It makes a big first impression, prompts a whoa! reaction, and that’s before you even get down to the art.
In fact, before you get to the entrance, artist Robert Irwin’s dramatic landscape design might lead you down a garden path and into a formal, highly stylized forest of clipped hornbeams.
Once you do pass through the front door and lobby (also designed by Irwin), you’re among giants.
Richard Serra’s “Union of the Torus and the Sphere” looms in its narrow space like the beached hulk of a tanker.
Circling around it produces a claustrophobia-inflected frisson. It’s worth it to get up close to the textured surface.
Head in the opposite direction to see his “Torqued Ellipses,” standing like tipsy space ships. You can stand inside them; the day I was there, a child was singing in one of them. I don’t think you would want to venture inside Michael Heizer’s “North, East, South, West,” although surveying them might trigger l’appel du vide, or “call of the void,” also known as High Place Phenomenon: the urge to jump that some experience when standing, for instance, on the balcony of a tall building. The four pieces are calibrated voids, negative spaces, enigmas of emptiness.
In another airy room of major proportions, John Chamberlain’s “Three-Cornered Desire,” a sculpture the size of a Smart car, fits tidily. Other sculptures of his pose at intervals. the space feels oddly like a high-end car showroom, if the cars were pulled apart, bent, twisted, dented, crushed, and jammed back together. I’d seen Chamberlain’s work before, but here, his sculptures revealed themselves, made sense, were gorgeous. I got it in a way I hadn’t before.
In fact, I didn’t expect to like the art so much, something I’m embarrassed to admit. Conceptual art has often left me cold, but at Dia: Beacon, I seemed to see things more clearly. As monumental as their dimensions are, these rooms have a “reticent dignity,” in the words of the philosopher A. N. Whitehead; they don’t get in between you and an object.
In any case, I was happy to find Louise Bourgeois‘s work—I always get her—strikingly displayed, dimly glowing in natural light, on the third floor.
Compressed, heavy, ancient as rock formations, meticulously executed, and weighted with emotion, her work seizes something deep in the viewer. Other artists’ works produce a heady charge of their own. Robert Smithson’s “Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis),” 1969, attracts and repels in equal measure. It has the allure of a mythic sunken kingdom, and you can’t go there. (Sharp Place Phenomenon?) Disorientation, unease, even fear: contemporary art reflects its roots in an age of anxiety, as it pushes on our ideas of beauty and the nature of art.
If angst isn’t your thing, installations by other contemporary art masters might better match your mood: Walter De Maria’s “Truck Trilogy,” on exhibit through Summer 2019, or one of the many examples of Dan Flavin’s work. (BTW, the De Maria work at the top of the page is no longer on view.)
And when you feel overwhelmed, go small.
Beacon, New York, has blocks of restaurants and stores, including a great bookshop, Binnacle Books, and other attractions. Or take a ferry across the Hudson to Newburgh (pictured), which has parks, art galleries, coffeehouses, and shops to explore.
The Albers show (through Feb. 18) focuses on Josef and wife Anni’s love affair with Mexico and the influence it had on Josef’s art. (Anni was an accomplished, original artist; more about them both 
You have to get in close to see what’s going on in his photographs of pre-Columbian ancient monuments, especially the collages of contact sheet images cut up and painstakingly arranged together. In a quiet way, they reveal that desire toward containment, organization, classification that becomes full-blown in the iconic Albers “Homage” paintings of squares of reds, yellows, blues.
Faye Wolfe words photos 
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