Word: dias
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Robert Ryman. Others are less so: Blinky Palermo, On Kawara. History has by no means decided that all of them are keepers. Minimalism, earthworks, conceptualism, performance art--all have entered our history without always entering our affections. For the artists who came of age in the 1960s and '70s, Dia: Beacon may become the place that secures their reputations once and for all. It could also become the Lourdes of Postmodernism, a place where we converge to share in an illusion about the power and consequence of their work...
...Dia has what you can only describe as faith in De Maria. For his Equal Area Series, 1976-77, the museum is devoting two galleries the length of football fields. At intervals along the floor is a polished steel circle next to a polished steel square, different shapes but each encompassing an equal area: 25 pairs in all. Judd is represented by some of his dryest, most unyielding output: not his colored aluminum boxes, which can have their share of sunlit surface incidents, but the eat-your-spinach plywood of Untitled...
...Dia: Beacon consisted of nothing but that sort of thing, a long visit would feel like being swatted all day with the complete works of Hegel. But Dia also collects much juicier artists. John Chamberlain's hunks of automobile metal, cut and welded, crushed and painted, build multicolored bridges between Abstract Expressionism and Pop. Not far from his galleries, there's a mini-show of Agnes Martin's delectable paintings, broad washes of color over a rectangular gridwork of lines drawn with a slightly trembling pencil. Something sings across those shivering wires. Dia also has the space to present some...
Upstairs at Dia is what could only be called the lair of Louise Bourgeois, who inhabits the space like a crazy old aunt in the attic. Born in 1911, Bourgeois is one of the founding figures of feminist art, and what she does has very little to do with the sanitary composure of Minimalism. Nothing could be further removed from Judd's mute boxes than the psychodrama of Bourgeois's sculptural pieces, with their sources in the clammiest corners of the psyche and in the meat and moisture of the human body. In recent years she has been showing variations...
...Hudson Valley, where Dia: Beacon is located, is the place where 19th century American painters discovered the sublime in the natural world, the tradition that some of the Dia artists extend. As the museum settles in further, it can use its 31-acre site to display work outdoors. That is the setting in which Minimalist sculpture makes its most beckoning stand, flaunting its otherness against that worthy opponent, nature. Over the long, slow run, Dia: Beacon may be precisely the place to resolve the question of how to value some of our most imponderable artists. An important part...