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

In a 1996 essay titled "Site-Specific Art: The Strong and the Weak," Thomas Crow faulted the Minimalists for adopting a timeless phenomenology. For "strong" site work, Crow wrote, "brief duration is a condition of meaning." (3) Site-specific work, in other words, must be temporary to be good. Crow represents a considerable faction. Indeed Robert Irwin, offering a kind of gentle manifesto for site work in 1985, also called for a "conditional art," subject to and expressive of change. (4) Clearly, Dia's choices reflect other convictions. Cooke writes that however disparate the Dia:Beacon artists, "what constitutes mutual ground is a concern with the relation of the work to its site." (5) But the idea of permanence is also at the new facility's core--is, arguably, its most fundamental and controversial aspect. Of course it only fans the flames that Michael Kimmelman, writing in the New York Times Magazine, described the Dia cohort as "the greatest generation of American artists," (6) with a triumphalism of the kind that got apologists for the Abstract Expressionists (for whom the claim is usually made) into trouble, too. But Kimmelman's remark is in sympathy with the spirit of Dia's undertaking. Dia:Beacon is undeniably dedicated to demonstrating the gravity, breadth and sheer staying power of what these artists have done. If the Abstract Expressionists were memorably dubbed "the irascibles," Dia:Beacon proposes its artists as the imperturbables, and points their work toward eternity.

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(1.) Calvin Tomkins, "Onward and Upward with the Arts: The Mission," The New Yorker, May 19, 2003, p. 53.

(2.) Lynne Cooke, "Never No More No Literature?" in Cooke and Michael Govan, Dia:Beacon, New York, Dia Art Foundation, 2003, pp. 63-64.

(3.) Thomas Crow, "Site-Specific Art: The Strong and the Weak," in Modern Art in the Common Culture, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1996, p. 135.

(4.) Robert Irwin, Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Conditional Art, New York, the Lapis Press in conjunction with Pace Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1985.

(5.) Cooke, p. 61.

(6.) Michael Kimmelman, "The Dia Generation," New York Times Magazine, Apr. 6, 2003, p. 32.

Dia: Beacon is located at 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, N.Y. Summer hours [May 18-Oct. 14] are 11 A.M.-6 P.M., Thursday through Monday. Next fall and winter [Oct. 15, 2003-Apr. 14, 2004], the galleries will be open 11 A.M.-4 P.M., Friday through Monday.

Nancy Princenthal is a critic based in New York.