Dia:Beacon: the imperturbables: with 240,000 square feet of exhibition space, Dia's new Hudson River facility shows off its permanent collection to suitably monumental effect, making the case for its anointed masters from the 1960s forward, presenting their achievement as towering, timeless and unassailable - Cover Story - overview of the works of several artists

Art in America, July, 2003 by Nancy Princenthal

Vast, open, illuminated almost entirely by natural light, Dia:Beacon is monumental in the way of cathedrals, or, in some of its deeply shadowed spaces, certain kinds of funerary architecture. A massive testament to the power of mostly big, abstract art, it is almost always glorious. And it flies in the face of conventions that have come to govern art-making and, even more, museum installation, over the past 10 years and more. "Comparison means nothing!" Dia cofounder Heiner Friedrich recently exclaimed to New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins. (1) So much for assumptions supporting exercises ranging from the Matisse/Picasso extravaganza at MOMA to the Tate Modern's reinstallation of its permanent collection. So much, too, for the fluidity of meaning, the interdependence of objects in the process of accruing significance, the formative role of social context--goodbye to all that, says the Dia ethos. The clever juxtaposition of thematically related work is anathema here. Even the accessories of current exhibition protocol, from extensive wall texts to catalogues so weighted with multidisciplinary critique they make the actual art seem ancillary, are noticeably absent. At Beacon, the curatorial voice--of Lynne Cooke, Dia's curator, and Michael Govan, its director--is tuned to a low murmur. What resounds are major works by anointed masters, enshrined individually, in august splendor.

Robert Irwin, who, along with Open Office, a young Chelsea firm, designed the renovation of the 240,000-square-foot former Nabisco box factory that is Dia: Beacon's home, did respectfully little to the interior. His bigger statements take place outdoors. Long-time dean of site work and born-again gardener, Irwin isn't shy of bending nature to his will. On the grounds at Dia, even the grass is made to submit to a tightly ruled grid, with small shaved squares of green alternating in a checkerboard pattern with concrete paving blocks; the effect, while eminently pleasing, looks something like a new hair transplant. Trees and hedges are similarly trimmed to geometric rectitude, and vistas regulated by chain-link fencing, reprising a material Irwin chose for early outdoor work because of its light-filtering approximation of the scrims he famously used indoors.

Irwin's most dramatic built statement is a mastaba-shaped main entryway, small as a confessional. It is followed by a cool white space of jaw-dropping immensity occupied by Walter De Maria's Equal Area Series (1976-77). In two parallel 330-foot-long galleries bathed in the northern light that pours down from saw-tooth skylights, this exaltation of geometry proceeds in stainless-steel circle-and-square pairs, the elements of each pair being equal in area. Though seen from afar the pairs seem unvarying in size, each pair increases by a one-inch increment, growing bigger as they recede on the left, and also as they advance on the right. As is the case with a number of the extensive serial works here, this installation is part of a larger series that comprises 25 pairs in total. Measured, stately and engaging over the long haul, Equal Area Series is a perfect set piece for the museum. Colossal but humbly low to the floor, it offers the inch-by-inch pleasures of close reading--and also the kind of visual exhilaration associated with such landscape vistas as those just outside Dia:Beacon's doors.

Proceeding to the left, the next gallery holds 72 of Andy Warhol's 102 Shadows (1978-79). These most abstract of Warhol's paintings all show a blurry pattern of pitch-black shadows against colored grounds ranging from mournful gray and purple to aqua, yellow and fire-engine red. Strikingly filmic in their repetitive sequencing, the Shadows' serial orchestration makes Warhol seem a kind of painterly Philip Glass, while also forging a link to Abstract Expressionism--the slashing black shadows strongly evoke Franz Kline.

An adjacent gallery holds two installations by Dan Flavin, including his 1964 "monuments" for Vladimir Tatlin. Twenty of these symmetrical configurations of mostly white, mostly vertical fluorescent lights are installed close to the floor on a long, accordion-folded wall. The arrangement, conceived by Flavin before his death, in 1996 (but carried out here for the first time), is such that you never see more than two consecutive examples at once. This slow unfurling helps connect the series to the sequenced rotation in Tatlin's famous 1920 proposal for a monument to the Third International, and also evokes the Constructivist ideals it epitomized. Further along in this gallery is Flavin's biggest work, an untitled "barrier" made in 1970 in an edition of two; the other is still installed in Donald Judd's SoHo loft building. Here, the big overlapping squares of fluorescent tubes--the verticals are red, the horizontals blue--flank a window wall. Stepped away from the wall, as square overlaps square, the lavender-haloed progression seems to curve gently, as the barrier's own tight peels away from the daylight it frames. It is one of the instances at Dia:Beacon when perceptual experience is shaped with a precision and grace that feel positively unearthly.