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

Richard Serra's work plays a predictably key role in activating the Beacon space. His Torqued Ellipses (1995-96), plus a torqued spiral titled 2000, are lined up in a row in a side gallery that was the factory's train depot, and they look terrific there, steaming majestically downriver in a tall narrow space unencumbered by the complicated ceilings of the Manhattan Dia gallery where the Ellipses were first shown. Even more dramatic is Serra's Union of the Torus and the Sphere (2001), which is wedged, like a ship in a bottle, into a space barely big enough for it. Listing, swelling, looming, leaning, it is alarmingly dynamic and reassuringly muscular. Along with other recent work--a space-deforming wall drawing called Consequence (2003) and the flat-topped, floor-hugging Elevation Wedge (2001), for which a subtly inclined floor was poured--there is also a historical surprise: Serra's ebulliently funky rubber scatter piece (from Judd's collection) that was made in 1967 and has not been seen since 1968, when it appeared as part of the celebrated "9 at Castelli" exhibition organized by Robert Morris.

Time has been less kind to Joseph Beuys's work, here represented, in an exceedingly dim gallery, by performance and sculpture residue that includes heavily framed photos leaning against the wall and a selection of felt and copper Fonds. Divorced for decades from his galvanizing presence, these objects grow increasingly hermetic and inert--or, perhaps, revealing of Beuys's essential thanatotropism. Indeed, his 1979 tableau at Beacon, based on the remains of I Like America and America Likes Me, a 1974 performance-cum-residence at the Rene Block Gallery in New York, seems creepily necrophiliac. Its components include a blanket, a cane, gloves, a flashlight, hay, rubble and yellowed stacks of the Wall Street Journal. While the language of Imi Knoebel's work is altogether different, it suffers from the same kind of post-dramatic stasis, the more so as his installation, of masonite and wood boards and crates stacked at random, is meant to seem provisional; the spirit of spontaneity doesn't easily fly in these precincts.

Painting and freestanding sculpture are at a different kind of disadvantage at Beacon. Sculptures by John Chamberlain are present in great number and variety. But however robust the works are individually, they seem oddly lost in too big a space. The painting galleries are scaled to prevent this problem, and largely succeed, though focusing on easel-scale work at Beacon is not easy. A selection from four decades of paintings by Agnes Martin, all ethereal color, liquid shadow and whispery delineation, well rewards the effort. The eight "Innocent Love" paintings of 1999, made for Dia and burdened with individual titles like Perfect Happiness and Where Babies Come From, are skeptic-chastening miracles of palest sunrise yellows, blues and pinks. Equally heartening are the two rooms of paintings by Blinky Palermo, which include work that is the artist's last: the 39 paintings, arranged in 15 groupings, of To the People of New York (1976-77), a rousing chorus of red, yellow and black. Notable among the splendid selection of Robert Ryman's white paintings, which span 40 years and more, is a new series called "Third Prototype 2003." It was painted on site on thin rubber panels that Ryman taped to the wall and then varnished, after which the tape was removed. The varnish holds the rubber to the wall, and the tape marks are the paintings' only articulation, framing questions of surface, material and process with rare wit and elegance.