Shining beacon: thinking big. thinking out of the box. thinking art. interview talks to the director of a brave new museum

Interview, July, 2003 by Ingrid Sischy

INGRID SISCEY: Congratulations on the new Dia museum in Beacon, New York. The amount of media attention on it has been phenomenal--which is terrific for the art, much of which is still very unknown, no matter how great it is. I found myself smiling when I read all those articles about defining it as the biggest museum for contemporary art in the world in terms of exhibition space. A museum such as this presenting Dia's collection couldn't have been small, because much of the art is so big--which really leads to my first question: If someone from another planet were to ask, "What is Dia?" how would you answer?

MICHAEL GOVAN: Dia is kind of an un-museum. It was founded in the 1970s with the idea of supporting individual artists to do projects that they would not otherwise be able to do, and to show work--all of it created since the 1 1960s--in a way that no one else would be able to.

The norm has always been for museums to function as a container into which artists could deposit things like painting or sculpture--objects which the institution would collect. The physical structure would often have stairs and columns and banners and be kind of a civic center where you would see these objects of material culture. You have to look much earlier in art history to find precedence for what Dia does--you might think of ancient times when there was little difference between art, architecture, and landscape.

IS: Yes, certain Dia projects have always reminded me of certain ancient works that don't really fit into categories, and that are also destinations, such as Stonehenge. Before wego to Beacon, talk about some ongoing Dia projects that are more like that.

MG: Walter De Maria's Lightning Field fits into this tradition. It is composed of 400 stainless steel poles set in a flat, high desert in a remote area of New Mexico, all of which harness the light of the sky. Whether it's sunlight, sunset, or the lightning flashes that occur there in summer, you see it as a work which is totally bound up in the landscape. In fact, as you know, you have to go there, stay there and see it over a 24-hour period, and the landscape is literally part of the work.

IS: Another thing that I always think about with Dia projects is their relationship to time. For instance, with De Maria's Lightning Field--ideally, it will be there for as long as the world is around, as long as the support for it is there. This is very different from a traditional museum approach, where maybe the Picassos get to stay in their spot and maybe they don't.

MG: By measuring art differently over a long period of time, several things happen. One is that you accumulate visitors over a longer stretch of time-[for instance, only a small number of people may ultimately be able to make the journey to the Lightning Field each year, but because] it's there for hundreds and hundreds of years, it still qualifies as a blockbuster.

IS: In that context I think of another Dia project, lames Turrell's Roden Crater. To my mind this one could have more fans than Star Wars [19721. Tell us about it.

MG: The Roden Crater's creator, James Turrell, was interested in a kind of experiment in which a bowl-shaped form was lifted above the horizon, and which shapes the sky when the viewer is in its center and looks up in a certain way. So when you are in this volcanic crater in the middle of the Painted Desert in Arizona, standing in the shaped bowl, you actually see the sky as a monumental dome. The other amazing thing about the work is that you can go underground, into a chamber beneath the crater's center, where the ceiling has a circular disk cut into it such that, when you look at the sky, different things happen. From inside this chamber you see the sky as a deep blue flat disc that's close enough to touch and you begin to realize that the shape and color of the sky are things you make in your eyes and your mind, and not necessarily inherent to the sky itself. It's a shift in perception.

IS: So how did you land at Dia?

MG: When I was a student at Williams College I was actually studying to be an artist because for me art somehow brought together every other discipline. It linked to philosophy, to history, to mathematics--it seemed a kind of general way of thinking. Doing that, I got involved in the museum at Williams, which Thomas Krens was then the director of, and I began designing posters and catalogues. Studying art history and fine arts together I realized that this making of a museum is a very physical process and, at least in its intensity, something that's not sofar from the making of artwork. I later went to the University of California, San Diego where artists like Allan Kaprow, David Antin, and the Harrisons, and art historian Sheldon Nodelman [who taught there] were attracted to both museums and the making of art. Of course, you ultimately have to make a choice because the labor involved in the museum process is also huge; you can't do both well. So I ended up leaving art school to work with Thomas Krens at the Guggenheim Museum. It was through that experience, as well as my experience at Mass MoCA while I was working at Williams at the museum, that I began to work with artists like Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Robert Ryman, all of whom are actually part of Dia:Beacon. By visiting Judd at Marfa [in Texas] and seeing specifically how he imagined an alternative museum I was already unwittingly involved in that strange territory between Dia and the artists and projects that were outside the mainstream.