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

The perceptual downshifting required in moving from work like Serra's and Heizer's to Martin's and Ryman's is paralleled by the emotional leap entailed in moving from the main floor to a small gallery above. In a commendable but awkward effort to diversify the museum's sensibility--and, more to the point, to remedy its egregious gender disparity--an abundance of work by Louise Bourgeois has been introduced in a relatively dark, brick-walled second-story space where, Cooke concedes, it is impossible not to think of a madwoman in the attic. Admittedly, Bourgeois's work, all of it at Beacon on long-term loan, only gains in power in such surroundings. There are "Lairs" and "Soft Landscapes" in two versions each, a tabletop full of smallish sculptures in a variety of mediums, and the wonderful marble Sleep (1967), its big, round head tipped drowsily forward. Four double-sexed "Januses," two of them "jacketed," are suspended just above eye level in a fiendish circle dance; the "sweeter version" of the hermaphroditic Fillette (1968) dangles alone. In its own room is the eye-catching, giant Spider (1997), the creature straddling a large cylindrical mesh cage. This piece is the only such hybrid of Bourgeois's two dominant late motifs, the spider and the "cell," as she refers to them. The cage/cell is adorned with tattered tapestries and various mementos--lockets, perfume flasks, a tear-shaped black rubber form, glass cupping jars from antiquated medical practice. Wedged into it at a child's eye level and looking like a spyglass are two vertebrae of an oxtail skeleton. But for sheer drama nothing beats the luridly red-lit installation The Destruction of the Father. Though it comes from a 1974 performance with an autobiographical animus, this almost comically witchy tableau, with its seething, bubbling walls, sacrificial centerpiece and sinister glow, seems deliberately positioned to challenge the Beuys installation below. Which father, you might wonder, is being destroyed?

Just as Bourgeois is banished to the attic, the incorrigible Bruce Nauman is sent to the basement, a raw space that enhances the latent seaminess of his nocturnal 24-hour video Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), 2001, and lends a dash of noirish drama to the classic video-surveillance teaser Corridor Installation of 1970 (watch your back!). Though some of this typecasting seems inadvertent (or, unavoidable), it is not entirely beneath Dia's dignity to risk a few jokes. Before entering the galleries, viewers must purchase tickets in a bookstore/admission desk/cafe area presided over by an admonition by Lawrence Weiner that reads, in part, "The Work Need Not Be Built." (Just as tellingly, this 1969 piece, one of the artist's "freeholds," is in the public domain.) Elsewhere, language-based work by Weiner is squeezed between the two Heizer installations, a mom dubious joke, if such it is. And in several cases, art that lives more in the mind than in the flesh--On Kawara's date paintings, or even Robert Smithson's mirror installations--suffers from the relative paltriness of the examples on view. Though Cooke writes in the museum catalogue that Gerhard Richter's big, impassive Six Gray Mirrors (2003) "serve as a pivot at the core of the whole facility ... foregrounding issues of spectatorship," (2) what's best at Dia:Beacon is not work that reflects viewers and their condition, but work that absorbs attention, massively and for a long, long time.