1.22.06: Dia Beacon & MASS MoCA

Drove upstate to scope out MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass, where there is interest in my Playing The Building piece.

Stopped at the new Dia museum in Beacon, NY on the way — housed in an impressive renovation of an old Nabisco box factory, it is now filled with modern art.

In short, the space is spectacular, awe-inspiring, massive — and the art is, for the most part, BORING. The combination of such austere and generous accommodation for such boring stuff makes one, well, slightly angry. Or maybe jealous. Others made the pilgrimage as well; there is a train station nearby and solemn figures and art students from NYC stream over the hill to pay their respects at the biscuit factory building. Here are some typical rooms:

Here is a painting by Agnes Martin, which seems to be an empty canvas. (It’s not, not quite):

Backstory, as I know it:

Dia was founded by Heiner Friedrich, who had married Philippa DeMenil, an heir to the Schlumberger oil fortune. The money was not actually from oil — it is my understanding that the money initially came from the RENTAL of an oil drilling bit design. Wow. Domenique DeMenil, of the previous generation, was a big collector of surrealist art, and much more — she has her own lovely museum in Houston, where that branch of the family was based. Oil=Houston. There is also the Rothko Chapel in Houston, a small museum that finally makes explicit that modern art is a form of worship and that museums are the temples. These are the de Medicis of a certain kind of modern art.

Years ago I became acquainted with François DeMenil, as she was very supportive of Robert Wilson’s theatrical vision. She had a very cool Doug Wheeler light piece installed in her living room that made it seem as if the whole floor was floating.

Anyway, years later Heiner took a shine to minimal and earth art and decided to do something about it, as one can do when one has this kind of money. And why not? He created Dia Foundation and in the early 70s Dia funded huge earthworks projects out in the desert by various artists and gave these artists financial support, stipends and collected their work like mad. Very few of these massive earthworks, I would imagine, would ever have been realized without their support. Donald Judd moved to remote little Marfa Texas and made a whole compound that was a temple to his own sculptural vision. Walter Di Maria made The Lightning Field and one can visit BUT YOU HAVE TO STAY THE NIGHT IN A LITTLE CABIN — you can’t just drive by and have a look — NO HEAT OR ELECTRICITY EITHER. It really is a form of pilgrimage.

Jealous outsiders claimed that being anointed by Dia was a death knell for an artist’s creativity — maybe so, but it also made their work (in the collection) more or less permanently visible.

Anyway, starting in ‘87 Dia had a museum-sized space on west 22nd St. that had slowly, slowly rotating shows of artists and installations that someone somewhere decided were fit for inclusion. This is not meant to sound snide or mean, it seems to be just how it is — they were paying for it (though there was an admission charge) so they could decide who and what got included. Why not? The contents of art museums are never a matter of democratic vote. They are one of the few institutions in which we happily accept secrecy and elitism as the natural way of doing business. The Met may be supported heavily by the city — not sure how heavily — but we there is never a public referendum on whether Thomas Hoving should continue as president. Churches are not taxed, and are not subject to public decision making either. The Cardinals and Bishops don’t pay taxes, but we don’t elect them — nor do we have a say in how things run in the massive New Churches springing up out west, but that’s another subject.

In the late 90s the west 22nd St. area filled with galleries and foot traffic and Dia decided to move further afield — about 70 miles up the Hudson, to bigger and even more austere quarters. (A Manhattan branch will reopen in ’06, they say.)

Dia 22nd St. was famous, to me at least, for its quintessentially “modern” use of gray — typically they converted industrial spaces and refinished them in neutral gray cement flooring and gray hallways. It seems to be an unspoken rule. The gray is a way of articulating the implied rationalist neutrality of modernist display technique — white walls, gray floors and halls are ostensibly designed not to draw attention to themselves, but to allow only the art to speak. No one ever mentioned that that all that gray was screaming, but times change. Some years ago an artist names Jorge Pardo installed wildly festive tile work in the lobby and bookstore — and what a relief, though he did have the nerve to claim it as a work of art.

So now we have the massive ex-Nabisco building filled with the collection of an oil industry family. It’s nice to be King, and it’s nice when you are on the receiving end of the King’s largesse, as many of these artists are or were for many years. To each his own, I guess…if someone wants to build a huge temple to display his or her trophies then fine, no real harm done, they’re not killing anyone or exploiting anyone. Though any collector in collaboration with the museums not so subtly affects the course of what art gets made, which artists make a living, who gets massive shows and receives the attendant press. That may not seem entirely fair, but it’s just protecting your investment, and to be fair not everything they invested in has been applauded; some of the artists are seen, even after many shows, as just too damn minimal even for the jaded art crowd.

Moving upriver, and slightly east, to MASS MoCA, in North Adams, Mass, another massive arts center in a former industrial space — this one most recently was home to the Sprague corporation, maker of transistors, capacitors and electronics of all sorts (Heathkits, some may remember.) They missed the boat on integrated circuits and the town died soon after.

Here is where they are now: IC Semiconductors | C4/1, RakshaLekha Koregoan Park | Pune 411001, MH, INDIA

But there is a smidgen of a silver lining for North Adams, as this arts center — which has films, dance, concerts, a restaurant, and large exhibition spaces — has brought some visitors and employment back to this little town. The factory is massive — it dominates the whole center of town. Two rivers converge and the factory occupies this large V and all the area around and the arts center is little by little renovating these buildings.

Much of the place is not renovated yet — here is an old 3rd floor industrial walkway between buildings (not open to public — yet.)

And a massive V-shaped room above where the two rivers meet.

MASS MoCA is not built around a collection. It is more like a European Kunsthalle — a vessel for shows, events and performances. A show of drawings by the Iranian artist Kamrooz Aram had just opened and these were like trippy Persian miniatures. Another show was of a much written-about group of East German artists. Trained in vaguely academic painting skills, which were laughed at for years by the art cognescenti as being hopelessly outmoded, these guys are now seriously hot.

A third show was of animal-related art — a walk in a birdcage by Marc Dion and a video of an Armadillo cam, for example. Very entertaining and sometimes creepy.

Tonight’s opening was pretty spectacular. A European artist named Carsten Höller had filled a massive room with real (old) amusement park rides which he had altered to move very slowly. Maybe too slowly, in some people’s opinions.

The cocktail reception would be held in the Gravitron, the second ride down, a sort of flying saucer shaped tilt-a-whirl. Hold on to your drinks. Had to get back to the city so couldn’t stay.
Here’s another piece he did in Milan: