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

Nearby is Hanne Darboven's encyclopedic Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 [Cultural History], 1980-1983, a 1,590-panel assembly of postcards, magazine covers, textile patterns and other materials, plus 19 freestanding objects that include a worn teddy bear, a giant crucifix and a fake silvery robot. For all its overwhelming size and scope, this assortment of ephemera feels fundamentally at odds with the reigning esthetic, and indeed the Darboven installation, since it involves works on paper, is one of just a few not meant to remain on exhibit indefinitely. (Photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher, shown elsewhere, will likewise rotate.)

The roomful of wall drawings executed in an adjacent gallery according to Sol LeWitt's instructions of 1969, for black penciled lines going "in four directions in four different systems simple and superimposed," is a vanishingly delicate, maddening delight. It teases complexity from the simplest premises. Similarly, Fred Sandback's articulation of space by means of stretched lengths of colored yarn achieves a clarity only enhanced by its physical modesty. Carving big, jaunty shapes out of thin air, Sandback's lines describe parallelograms and trapezoids in blue and green, and open squares in black and red; parallel white lines angle out from wall to floor like driven rain; black ones descend in merciless perpendiculars that afford no recourse to metaphor. Vibrant, taut and patently irreducible, Sandback's work is a perfect tonic in an age of over-produced art.

Presenting an almost comic contrast is Michael Heizer's behemoth installation North East South West, conceived in 1967 (prototypes for two of the four elements were built in the California desert in 1968). It is fully realized here for the first time, reviving the Burkeian connection between sublimity and terror. Twenty feet deep, the yawning, rimless, metal-lined geometric forms comprise, in negative, a pair of stacked cubes (the smaller one on the bottom), a cone pointing down, a conic section pointing up and a wedge. Access to them is carefully regulated. With a prior appointment, the intrepid visitor can walk right up to the edge of the pits; otherwise, the view is from behind a low Plexiglas barricade. Either way, the elements are darkly awesome, like some bad-dream Neo-Classical fantasy: Etienne-Louis Boullee's visionary cenotaph inverted, perhaps. North East South West's alter ego is Heizer's 40-ton, 20-foot-high Negative Megalith #5 (1998), a boulder upended and nestled into a steel-lined recessed niche. This massive talisman, presented more or less in the raw (its surface was very slightly abraded and charred), is gripping but a little obvious in its drama--though what it lacks in finesse it makes up for in brute strength.

If Heizer's are the most spectacular installations at Dia:Beacon, the museum's animating spirit is Donald Judd, honored throughout by references large and small. His Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Tex., originally conceived as a Dia project, not only showcases individual artists in depth in industrial spaces, but also provides a paradigm for the kind of installation practices followed at Beacon. Judd's own work is celebrated at what feels like the museum's heart in a room that has a newly lifted ceiling and clerestory lighting. Beneath are 15 of Judd's plywood boxes of 1976, signature works that are like three-dimensional models of abstract thought. All the boxes have the same footprint, but no two are alike: there are nested cubes both open and closed, double-walled and recessed sides, false bottoms high and low, flat and tilted. Nearby is the Slant Piece from the same year, in which a plywood wall unexpectedly fronts for a steeply inclined wedge. (It was recently shown in its larger original dimensions at Paula Cooper in New York; Cooper presented the piece for the first time in 1976.) There is also a modest group of wall-hung sculptures, including six plywood boxes that are among Judd's last works. If this chamber contributes to the sense of the whole Dia:Beacon undertaking as somehow posthumous--the great pyramid of Minimalism's kings--these late wall boxes might be its Rosetta Stone. The surprise is that they incorporate a cruciform element, with crossed wooden boards of two different widths, with horizontals alternately in front of or behind the verticals; the boxes are lined with red or dark blue Plexiglas. Perhaps Judd intended what seems to be a clear reference to Ad Reinhardt, and perhaps even to Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross as well--a late homage to an earlier generation.