C105 article

Whispering Architecture

Does size matter? No, it's how you use it. Gemma Tipton is amazed at Dia:Beacon.

Exterior view, deck, Dia:Beacon, 2003; photo Richard Barnes; courtesy Dia Art Foundation

Probably the largest contemporary art museum in the world...and at close to 300,000 square feet (twice the size of Tate Modern) the new Dia:Beacon, which opened in May, is yet another giant on the scene. But notions of size make the mind expect excess, and as soon as thoughts swing to other behemoths of the art world - like the Guggenheim Bilbao, a close cousin in scale at 256,000 square feet - you start to realise that these two spaces actually represent polar opposites in the debate about how art spaces of the future might and ought to look.

Dia:Beacon is about an hour and half by train, up the Hudson river from Grand Central Station. Located in an old printing factory built in 1929 by Nabisco (National Biscuit Company) architect Louis N. Wirshing, Jr., Dia:Beacon is the culmination of the Dia Foundation's pioneering work in exploring contexts, boundaries and definitions for art. Dia focuses on the work of artists who came to prominence in the 1960s and '70s. Its founders, Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil, wanted to provide in-depth support to a handful of artists whose work was moving beyond the confines of galleries and the contemporary exhibition systems. The results of this patronage have included Walter de Maria's New York Earth Room, Broken kilometer, and Lightening field projects; all permanent installations, the first two in New York, and the last remotely in the desert of New Mexico. Then there is Robert Smithson's Spiral jetty, sited on the Great Salt Lake in Utah; and (although it is now separately administered) Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

Donald Judd: untitled, 1976, installation view at Dia:Beacon; gift of the Brown Foundation; photo Bill Jacobson; courtesy Dia Art Foundation

"Art is only an excuse for the building housing it," fulminated Judd.¹ "Somewhere," he said, "a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be."² Chinati is a permanent exhibition setting, based in abandoned artillery sheds and army barracks, for Judd's work, and for that of artists including Dan Flavin, Ilya Kabakov, Carl Andre and John Wesley.

It takes a great deal of time andthought to install work carefully. This should not always be thrown away. Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved again.³

Critic turned artist, Judd was convinced that only a synthesis of context, art and architecture could result in people being able to see art, or at least Judd's kind of art, as it should be seen. And whether you call it pared-down abstraction or minimal modernism housed in the Texas artillery sheds, Judd's 100 untitled works in mill aluminum sing.

At its Chelsea galleries, Dia employs this philosophy for their exhibition programme. Those used to the quick-change, quick-fix, attention-grabbing activities of galleries and museums anxious to get visitor numbers up and turnover growing find Dia:Chelsea a welcome respite. Invited artists work on installations which will be on display for up to a year. Visitors are invited to return, not to see new work, but to see the work anew. Applied to the creation of a brand new museum, Dia:Beacon arrives with a high set of expectations, and based on Dia's emphasis on position, permanence and process, these expectations are met.

Walter De Maria: The equal area series, 1976 - 77, installation view at Dia:Beacon; photo Nic Tenwiggenhorn; courtesy Dia Art Foundation

As with the trip to Chinati, although considerably less arduous, the journey out to Dia:Beacon becomes part of the experience of visiting. The train ride is exceptionally beautiful, as the track hugs the Hudson, and one can feel the chaotic distractions of the city being left behind. Leaving the train, one arrives at Beacon from a rise which takes you down through the landscaped carpark and across a forecourt to a tiny porch-type area whereafter, immediately, one is confronted with the art. This process of arrival has been carefully choreographed by Robert Irwin (also responsible for the Garden at Los Angeles' J. Paul Getty Museum), who was invited to live nearby by Dia (he is based in San Diego), to get a feel for the place, and over time to draw up a master plan for the renovation of the building and the design of the outdoor spaces. Irwin spent months in Beacon, "running my hands over the building. I don't work at a drawing board. I walked through that building a couple of thousand times, and in that way you learn what you need to address."

It was this process that lent Irwin the intuitive understanding of the space, scale, light and volumes of the building, which is central to his practice as an artist, and crucial to the idea of "conditional architecture" which he was striving for on this project. Thus he arrived at the design decisions "not architecturally, but more philosophically."⁴

There is no need, says Irwin, for a large atrium or foyer.

I think there is a good sense of arrival, and of a progression, as well as place. Beginning with the descent down the hill, you have the arrival in the orchard of trees, then there is the arrival in the forecourt with the crete grass, which I think acts in place of a lobby entrance and has a great sense of place. Then the transition in scale and light from the outside to the inside through the small-dark 'entrance' building, and the arrival on the threshold of the 'art' experience.

In fact, Dia:Beacon has it both ways, because the first 'art experience' to confront the visitor are two symmetrical football-pitch-scale halls containing de Maria's The equal area series. These are polished stainless-steel floor pieces, circles and squares just seven-eights of an inch thick which, while grabbing the opening space, also by their minimal height allow the exhibition hall to create that 'wow' of scale and wonder which architects dream of for their foyers.

For all its vast size, Beacon is neither exhausting nor confusing. Routes through the exhibition space are left up to the visitor, but somehow engender none of that anxiety you find in other nonprescriptive spaces. This is achieved by an adherence to a simple set of rules, which are the result of Irwin's master plan, then developed in collaboration with New York architects OpenOffice.

You enter on your own terms, not as a group - there isn't a bank of doors, you're an individual. Then, entering you are confronted with a choice, there are two sides of the de Maria piece, two choices of how to go through, so the experience of entering engages you as a thinking visitor, not as a passive one. This was something that was absolutely challenging to us as architects, and yet it's an amazing way to think of an entry sequence. Another is with such an enormous existing building, to not intersect the existing perimeter walls with any other material. And so you have islands of galleries in the centre. The central galleries receive indirect light from above and are designated for painting, and those on the perimeter which can receive western light on the left, and eastern on the right are designated as sculpture galleries.⁵

In fact, there is no artificial lighting at Dia:Beacon. The opening hours are timed to relate to daylight, and bear witness to the building's past as a printing factory, from the days when exacting work had to be done by eye, and electricity was a prohibitively expensive commodity. As Dia Director Michael Govan puts it:

This is what made the project work from day one. I was never worried that the building wouldn't work out - and when people say who was the architect of your building, I say "his name is Louis N. Wirshing, Jr, and he worked for Nabisco." He put together a building of enormous beauty and proper proportions, comfortable floors, light, air and space. All things for factory workers, which absolutely accommodate museum visitors in the best possible way. So in some ways, this printing building was the perfect conceit for the museum, it was one giant artist's studio.⁶

The external walls are kept to their original red brick, which give you a sense of the edges of the space. Then there are moments on your tour of the space at which you can see the entire space, at one point on the north-south axis, and at another on the east-west. This allows you to reorient yourself, and to reacquaint yourself with the sense and scale of the space.

The building's windows are opaque glass, relieved by four central panes of clear glass in each. This innovation echoes an installation of Irwin's at San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art, where the artist removed squares of glass from the gallery's grey-tinted windows. So does that make these windows artworks too?

No - one is, one isn't. The question was: how do you take a factory and refine its aesthetic so it becomes a museum? If all the windows were clear, the outside would intrude too much, if they were all frosted - well have you experienced walking through a space with unbroken opaque glass? This treatment left the steel-framed quality that is so typical of 30's architecture, and adds a museum quality, and I think we were all surprised by the effect.⁷

It was, as OpenOffice put it, a "luxury of time and of space" which allowed solutions like these to be arrived at and worked through. So can artists and architects collaborate? And is Dia:Beacon Irwin's artwork? Irwin is clear on the point that architecture is not art.

The word 'Art' now signifies so much that it now signifies nothing. When I give a lecture, I have to define the word 'Art' at the beginning, how I'm going to use it, what I'm going to use it to mean. You can't speak to a room of people and expect them all to have the same meaning for the word Art. To me the word 'Architecture' is still a descriptive term. It speaks to a discipline, a role, responsibilities, an ethic, etc. The word signifies something, it's not just an honorarium for good behaviour.⁸

Louise Bourgeois: Spider, 1997, installation view at Dia:Beacon; courtesy Dia Art Foundation; courtesy Dia:Beacon

"To be an artist, says Irwin, "is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception."⁹ For Irwin, it is the process of creating the master plan for Dia:Beacon that is his artwork.

The collaborative nature of the project extended beyond the parties of Dia's personnel, OpenOffice, and Irwin, to include as many of the artists who would be exhibiting there as possible in the selection and design of their own spaces. Most of the works are being shown on a permanent basis, and any changes will only happen every three years or so. Characterising the collaboration, OpenOffice describe it as a "suppression of egos," although with some of the names involved, one wonders exactly at the volume of ego that had to be suppressed... That said, no artist shares a space with another, and all the work has the space and scale to speak on its own terms. There is also a resistance to curation, in terms of imposing a chronology or narrative, on the main level of the museum.

A narrative is approached, however, in the location of Louise Bourgeois in the raw attic space, and Bruce Nauman in the moody, catacomb-like basement. On a vertical axis through the quintessentially macho and 'muscular' Torqued ellipses of Richard Serra, the sudden framing of relationships where in the main space there are none seems to over-emphasise the pseudo-subversive role allocated to these two 'marginal' artists.

It's hard to think of highlights at Dia:Beacon, like trying to pick your favourite course from a feast. Michael Heizer's North south east west and Fred Sandback's string drawings impress for different reasons, Heizer's vast voids sunk into the fabric of the building cause vertigo and wonder, while Sandback's optical illusions need the perfection of installation and of space that they find here to achieve their maximum effect. Gerhard Richter's Gray series, and the Warhol Shadow paintings (seventy-two on display) make you realise what all the fuss was about with these two artists. If a criticism has been levelled at Dia:Beacon, it is for under-representation of women artists, which strikes me as rather unfair. Given the era their collection represents and the type of art endorsed and collected by the original Foundation, any subsequent positive discrimination would seem to smack of the kind of palliative post-rationalising which doesn't do anyone any favours. But it is true that the overriding effect is very macho, Serra's cor-ten steel Ellipses being a case in point. And the mention of Serra brings us back to that original comparison with the Guggenheim Bilbao.

In the Boat Gallery at Bilbao, Serra's Snake is dwarfed, while at Beacon, the brooding, hulking steel is barely contained by the space - a sense which is not accidental, as it was carefully created by adjustments of floor height to produce the appropriate scale. And while the Guggenheim and Dia spaces may have similar floor areas, the designation of that space speaks of the concerns of the different institutions. Of Bilbao's 256,000 square feet, 112,000 (just under half) is given to exhibition space. At Beacon, 292,000 square feet produces 240,000 (over 80%) of room for the art. Interestingly, Michael Govan was deputy director of the Guggenheim at the time of the Bilbao project, although he insists that any comparisons are inappropriate.

First of all, projects are usually driven by client decision, civic imperative and money. If Bilbao want a Sydney Opera House, they're going to get a Sydney Opera House, they're driving it. Given that imperative and that structure, what Gehry did in Bilbao is amazing. From the outside it's one of the most important buildings of the 20^th century. And from the inside it may not be the most hospitable for every kind of art, but certain pieces, like Jenny Holzer's at the opening, have looked fantastic in it. But it's a whole different starting point... I don't think people are going to copy Dia. They might say it's wonderful, but most institutions are built on a whole different premise. Dia's mission to accommodate long term, large scale works and in-depth collections of a relatively small group of artists is unique.¹⁰

And while the architecture of Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao screams LOOK AT ME!, Irwin's collaboration with Dia and OpenOffice at Beacon results in an architecture of insistent whispers, that creates a simply unforgettable experience of looking at some unforgettable art.

Gemma Tipton is a writer and jury member of the Heritage Council Museum of the Year Awards 2003. The final essay in her series on the architecture of contemporary art spaces, supported by the Arts Council's / An Chomhairle Ealaíon's Bursary in Contemporary Architectural Criticism, will be published in the next issue of CIRCA.

 

¹Donald Judd, quoted in The Museum as Muse, Artists Reflect, Kynaston McShine, MoMA, New York, 1999, p. 230
²Donald Judd, quoted by Charles Darwent in ed. Barbara Minton, Writers on Artists, DK Publishing, London 2001, p. 336
³ibid, p. 335
⁴Robert Irwin, interviewed by the author, 10 July 12003
⁵OpenOffice, Art+Architecture Collaborative, interviewed by the author, 16 June 2003
⁶Michael Govan, interviewed by the author, 22 July 2003
⁷Robert Irwin, 10 July 2003
⁸ibid
⁹Robert Irwin, The State of the Real, Part 1, conversation with Jan Butterfield, Arts 46, no. 10 (June 1972), p. 48
¹⁰Michael Govan, 22 July 2003

Artists represented with works at Dia:Beacon

Bernd and Hilla Becher Joseph Beuys Louise Bourgeois John Chamberlain Hanne Darboven Walter De Maria Dan Flavin Michael Heizer

Robert Irwin Donald Judd On Kawara Imi Knoebel Sol LeWitt Agnes Martin Bruce Nauman Blinky Palermo

Gerhard Richter Robert Ryman Fred Sandback Richard Serra Robert Smithson Andy Warhol Lawrence Weiner Robert Whitman