Beacon
About Located on the banks of the Hudson River in a former Nabisco box-printing factory. Dia:Beacon presents Dia Art Foundation’s collection of art form the 1960s to the present as well as special exhibitions, performances and public programs. Dia invited arts Robert Irwin to conceive the master plan for a twenty-frist-centruy museum building that retained the original character ofthe interior spaces. Irwin also designed seasonally changing gardens throughout the grounds. Following the renovation, Dia:Beacon was added the National Register of Historic Places.
Dia Art Foundation Founded in 1974, Dia Art Foundation is dedicated to commissioning, supporting, presenting, and preserving contemporary art and performance, and to fostering critical dialogue. In addition to Dia:Beacon, Dia maintains a constellation of iconic, permanent artworks and intallations in New York City, the American West, and Germany.
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contents
Joseph Beuye
63.
Gerhard Richter
11.
7.
Louise Bourgeois
69.
Robert Ryman
15.
John Chamberlain
73.
Fred Sandback
19.
Dan Flavin
77.
Richard Serra
23.
Michael Heizer
83.
Robert Smithson
29.
Robert Irwin
87.
Lawrence Weiner
35.
Donald Judd
39.
On Kawara
43.
Louise Lawler
47.
Sol LeWitt
51.
Agnes Martin
55.
Bruce Nauman
59.
Max Neuhaus
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Joseph Beuys
Artist Biography
Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 in Krefeld, Germany. He trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1947 to 1951, then taught there as a professor of sculpture from 1961 until 1972. Beuys’s first one-person exhibition of his sculpture and drawings was in 1953, at the house of the collectors Franz Joseph van der Grinten and Hans van der Grinten. In the early 1960s he became involved with the Fluxus group, taking part in concerts and performances and devising his own “actions,” which for a time became his principal aesthetic mode. In 1970 the Beuys Block—a broad group of works belonging to the Karl Ströher collection— was installed in the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt; it remains his most important public collection. Dia held exhibitions of Beuys’s work in 1987, 1992, and 1998, and has planted trees and basalt columns in New York City as part of his 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks), a project he began in 1982 for Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, with initial funding from Dia Art Foundation. Beuys died in Düsseldorf in 1986.
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Arena—Dove sarei arrivato se fossi stato intelligente! (Arena—where would I have got if I had been intelligent!, 1970–72) includes one hundred panels of distressed and altered photographs that document the actions, drawings, and sculptures of German artist Joseph Beuys, which range in date from the 1940s to 1972. Like much of Beuys’s work, Arena was developed and modified over several years. A modest iteration was first shown in Edinburgh in 1970; three monochromatic panels and the heavy aluminum frames were added to the reworked installation for a second exhibition in Milan in 1972. Remnants of Vitex agnus castus, an action performed at the opening of that exhibition, complete the work. Beuys was interested in questions of posterity throughout his career. He frequently organized retrospective groups of his work into “blocks” for exhibition and also developed an alternative curriculum vitae, his Lebenslauf/Werklauf (Life Artist Statement
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Course/Work Course, 1964–70), which inter-
weaves fictional events with personal
including hung on the wall, propped
history. Arena partially functions as
against the wall, or stacked into piles.
a visual analogue to his Life Course/ Work Course and is the artist’s only
Beuys believed in making Social
major photographic project. A single
Sculpture that could “mould and
found photograph of the Roman
shape the world we live in.” Brasilien-
amphitheater in Verona alludes to
fond (Brazilian Fond), Fond III/3, and
the work’s title and suggests Beuys
Fond IV/4 (all 1979) embody this idea.
viewed the writing of history as a
Each sculpture consists of stacked
theater for debate.
piles of heavy felt that are covered or supported by copper or iron plates.
Despite being an archive of work to
Beuys saw his Fonds as batteries—
date, Arena is deliberately illegible as
devices for receiving, storing, and
a historical record. Some photographs
sending energy. The felt symbolized
are torn, crumpled, and obscured
protective insulation, while the con-
with paint, wax, fat, or Braunkreuz (an
ductive qualities of the metals implied
oil-based medium that he frequently
transmissions. The charged nature of
used) to emphasize their status as
these works is palpable when standing
evocations rather than documentation.
next to the tall U-shaped rounds of
No particular chronology guides the
Brasilienfond. The felt absorbs the sur-
organization of images in each panel.
round- ing sound waves, resulting in a
Further, the panels themselves can
dull pulsating silence, which gives the
be arranged in a number of ways,
impression that the sculpture is literally
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teeming with energy. In a different edition of Fond IV/4, Beuys made this sonic relationship explicit, mounting a felt “loudspeaker” above the sculpture to capture and store acoustic vibrations. A working drawing for Fond IV/4 is included Dia’s collection of works on paper for the multiple Joseph Beuys: Zeichnungen zu den beiden 1965 wiederentdeckten Skizzenbücher “Codices Madrid” von Leonardo da Vinci (Joseph Beuys: Drawings After the Two “Codices Madrid” Sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci That Were Rediscovered in 1965, published in 1975).
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Louise Bourgeois
Artist Biography
Louise Bourgeois was born in 1911 in Paris. She entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics in 1932 but turned to art the next year. She enrolled at several art schools, including the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in addition to apprenticing in artists’ studios in Montparnasse and Montmartre. She then immigrated to New York in 1938, and continued her studies at the Art Students League. Her first one-person exhibition was held at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, in 1945, and her sculpture was first shown in 1949 at the Peridot Gallery, New York. In 1982 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized a retrospective, which traveled to various American venues. Her work has since been shown internationally, including in Documenta 9, Kassel, Germany (1992), and the São Paulo Bienal of 1996. Bourgeois’s first European retrospective was organized in 1989, traveling from the Frankfurter Kunstverein to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, among other venues. Bourgeois represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1993. Tate Modern, London, organized a major traveling retrospective of her work in 2007. Bourgeois died in May 2010 in New York City.
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Artist Statement Mnemonic, symbolic, evocative, and
around, and usually they repulse you.
restrained—these strong, if contradictory,
Finally, you get one that will work for you.
qualities are typical of Louise Bourgeois’s
And it is usually the softer ones—lead,
sculpture. “Every day,” she declared,
plaster, malleable things. That is to say
“you have to abandon your past or
that you start with the harder thing and
accept it, and then, if you cannot accept
life teaches you that you had better
it, you become a sculptor.” For her, the
buckle down, be contented with softer
art-making process was a search for the
things, softer ways.”
forms that translate experiences—an op-
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eration that she compared with exorcism.
As illustrated in this presentation in
The sculptor is her own healer, the work
Dia:Beacon’s attic—a place akin to the
a sort of proxy that reveals the forms of
intimate mood of Bourgeois’s art—the
trauma: elusive, almost abstract, but
artist’s repertoire of materials was as
also descriptive. In Bourgeois’s figures,
connected to traditional media such as
one can recognize limbs, organs, and
bronze or marble as it was open to new
organic formations that fuse with the
textures, such as those of latex and
inorganic materiality of the medium, be
synthetic resin. Latex, in its similarity to
it marble, resin, wood, or bronze. In fact,
human skin, conveys a feeling intrinsic
the choice of a specific material was
to Bourgeois’s aesthetic, where repre-
something completely intuitive for the
sentation often entails the creation of a
artist: “The medium is always a matter
surrogate for the body and its suffering
of makeshift solutions. That is, you
organs. Yet her images of the body
try everything, you use every material
point not at its appearance, but the
way it is perceived from within.
stood as the (haunted) house of
Bourgeois’s body is a psycho-
the self. “Space does not exist,”
logical, internalized one—the
Bourgeois claimed. “It is just a
body as it is experienced by the
metaphor for the structure of our
sufferer—and the accumulations
existence.” This idea is already
of members and membranes are
present in her first mature works,
symbolically powerful because
made in the 1940s, when she
they are imaginary.
began to explore a concept she called the femme-maison, or
Interconnections among dif-
“woman-house.” In the 1960s,
ferent moments in time infuse
this concept bifurcated into
Bourgeois’s approach to art
various related series—Soft
making as well as the objects
Landscapes, Lairs—expressive
she generates: over a career of
of both haven and prison, refuge
more than seventy years, she
and trap.
repeatedly returned to particular motifs, constantly probing, ex-
Some sculptures evoke human
panding, and reformulating their
shelters and those made by
forms. Certain works suggest an
other creatures— cocoons, cara-
intricate relationship between
paces, shell-like vessels—at the
architecture—the living space
same time that they are rife with
where feelings are transferred—
allusions to the body. In later
and the human body—under-
series, notably exemplified here
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by Crouching Spider (2003), the organic aspect is emphasized, and the predominant feeling is exacerbated: cold, threatening, and unforgiving. A frequent subject in her later work, the spider is a weaver. Tellingly, as a child, Bourgeois worked with woven fabrics, helping her parents in the family business of tapestry repair. This dichotomy between protection and threat expresses Bourgeois’s ambivalent idea of maternity. But, though all her works are resolutely autobiographical, the artist refused to assign rigid meanings to her pieces. They are expressions of desire and trauma, simultaneously physical and invisible, bodily and amorphous.
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John Chamberlain
Artist Biography
John Chamberlain was born in 1927 in Rochester, Indiana. He grew up in Chicago and, after serving in the United States Navy from 1943 to 1946, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1950s. In 1955 and 1956, Chamberlain studied and taught sculpture at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. He moved to New York in 1956 and the following year made Shortstop, his first sculpture incorporating scrap metal from cars. Chamberlain’s first major solo show was presented at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, in 1960. His work was included in the Art of Assemblage exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1961, and he began showing at Leo Castelli’s New York gallery in 1962. Chamberlain had his first retrospective in 1971 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, held a second retrospective in 1986. In 2012, the Guggenheim Museum presented another retrospective that included seventeen works from Dia’s collection. Chamberlain has received numerous honors, including the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture and the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture from the International Sculpture Center, Washington, DC (both 1993); the Gold Medal from the National Arts Club, New York (1997); and the Distinction in Sculpture award from the Sculpture Center, New York (1999). John Chamberlain died in December 2011 in New York City.
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Artist Statement
While at Black Mountain College in 1955–56, John Chamberlain encountered poets Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, who confirmed the artist’s belief that everyday elements—be they words or painted metals —could be mobilized in novel conjunctions to make unexpected sense: fresh, immedi- ate, direct, and divested of narrative and commentary. As his art matured in the early 1960s, his large-scale painterly shapes, vigorous and voluptuous in form, seemed to many the quintessential Abstract Expressionist sculpture, the progeny of the gestural abstraction of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. To others who focused on its material—crushed automobile parts in sweet, hard colors, redolent of the Detroit cars of the 1950s—his work was more appropriately aligned with Pop art.
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The artist Donald Judd (also represented in Dia’s collection), was a longtime supporter of Chamberlain’s work and noted the balance between his capacious, open forms and common, neutral materials. Judd concluded that he was “the first to use automobile metal and to use color successfully in sculpture,” challenging “the prevailing idea of sculpture as a solid mass.” Concealing the quality of the metal and the shape of the inner structure, individual components interlock organically, articulating into single expressive bodies that bear unexpected, even puzzling names such as Flufft (1977), Coup d’Soup (1980), and Pigmeat’s E♭Bluesong (1981). These titles are usually found words and expressions, and they are never referential or descriptive. Rather, they account for Chamberlain’s poetic sensibility and his taste for unlikely associations. Some of them were even composed by randomly shuffling index cards. In the late 1960s, Chamberlain took a three-
deployed with increasing inventiveness. While
year sabbatical from steel to use other
encouraging assistants to improvise on his ele-
materials, such as urethane foam, synthetic
ments with further cutting, crushing, torqueing,
polymers, and aluminum foil. In the mid-1970s,
and crimping, he also elaborated his enameled
Chamberlain returned to automotive parts and
surfaces with sprayed, stenciled, dribbled,
other recovered steel components, which he
graffitied, and airbrushed coats of color—jazzy,
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tropical, even raucously patterned. Occasionally restricted palettes only enhance the ebullience of his usual spectrum. In 1980, as his work became more monumental, Chamberlain relocated from New York to Sarasota, Florida, in search of an affordable studio with high ceilings and abundant space. Paradoxically, the first body of work he produced in Sarasota was a series of low-slung, meandering works made from small planar elements threaded into, draped over, and perched on horizontal linear armatures forged from dismembered truck chassis. Each of these works, the Gondolas (1981–82), is dedicated to a poet, as evidenced in Gondola T. S. Eliot and Gondola W. H. Auden (both 1981), for example. In the late 1980s, Chamberlain reinvigorated his signature mode, reverting to volumetric compactness, as illustrated in Daddy in the Dark (1988), where little remains of the material’s past life as an automobile. Working improvisationally and intuitively, long slivers of white metal weave and twist organically like surreal vegetation, manifesting once again Chamberlain’s humorous fusion of material concretion and chance-generated fancy.
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Dan Flavin
Artist Biography
Dan Flavin was born in 1933 in New York City. In the mid-1950s, he served in the US Air Force, after which he returned to New York, where he studied art history at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University. In 1961, he had his first solo exhibition at the Judson Gallery, New York. Later that year he began experimenting with electric light in a series of works called “icons,” which led him to his first work made solely of fluorescent light, the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi) (1963). Major exhibitions of Flavin’s work include those at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1967); the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (1969); and the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (1989). In 2004, Dia organized a traveling retrospective in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. In 1983, Dia opened the Dan Flavin Art Institute, a permanent exhibition designed by the artist in a former firehouse and Baptist church in Bridgehampton, New York. Flavin’s last completed work, untitled (1996), occupies the stairwell at 548 West 22nd Street in New York City in a building formerly used by Dia as an exhibition space. In 2014, the installation of untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection) (1973) was designated as an official Dia site and reinstalled on the premises of the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. Flavin died in November 1996 in Long Island, New York.
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Artist Statement Few artists are more identified with a particular medium than Dan Flavin. After 1963 Flavin’s work was composed almost entirely of light, in the form of commercially available fluorescent tubes in ten colors (blue, green, pink, red, yellow, ultraviolet, and four whites) and five shapes (one circular and four straight fixtures of different lengths). He arranged fixtures in varying autonomous configurations, as in the series of “monuments” for V. Tatlin (1964–90), and then increasingly in color and in relation to architecture, exemplified by the monumental work untitled (1970). Flavin once summed up his practice as “decisions to combine traditions of painting and sculpture in architecture with acts of electric light defining space.” Continue on page 21
York). Flavin had invented the “barrier” in
allows for individual consideration of
1966 as a freestanding series of fixtures
each work and the full series at the same
that physically block a passageway or a
time. The invocation of Tatlin illuminates
segment of a space with light.
both formal inventions in Flavin’s work and its context within the history of
Flavin often proclaimed respect for the
art. Tatlin’s art epitomized the utopian
work of pioneering abstract artists, from
revolutionary spirit of the avant-garde.
Constantin Brancusi to the innovators
Flavin’s monuments reference Tatlin’s
of the Russian avant-garde, particularly
Monument to the Third International
Vladimir Tatlin, to whom he dedicated
(1920), the planned but unrealized spiral
his most sustained series of works,
tower. Yet as Flavin noted, he always
“monuments” for V. Tatlin, a myriad
used “monuments” in quotes to empha-
of variations of two-, four-, six-, and
size the irony of temporary monuments
eight- foot fixtures. The zigzag wall
such as his fluorescent light sculptures,
arrangement, which the artist designed,
whose parts have a limited life span and Continue on page 21
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Despite dedicating many of his untitled works to a person or a personal reflection, and his deep awareness of the historical symbolism of light in art, Flavin always refused to attach any symbolic or transcendent significance to his works. His simplified formal vocabulary can be related to the work of contemporaries such as Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, and Donald Judd, in its reduction of formal devices, emphasis on serial and rational rather than gestural forms, and focus on the phenomenological presence of the works rather than their narrative implications. The systematic repetition of form culminates in untitled, a large-scale barrier in red and blue light (the first version of which was made for Judd’s loft on Spring Street, New Continue on page 20
need to be replaced regularly. He used his humorous historical reference to Tatlin precisely to separate his work from the kind of sym- bolic significance to which Tatlin aspired. At the same time, though, he clearly revered Tatlin as a tragic human individual, and his “frustrated, insistent attitude to attempt to combine artistry and engineering.” Flavin’s use of commercial light fixtures, far from a celebration of an industrial revolutionary culture as Tatlin’s work was intended to be, is simply phenomenological fact, tangible and temporal.
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Michael Heizer
Artist Biography
Michael Heizer was born in Berkeley, California, in 1944, the son of the anthropologist Robert Heizer. After briefly attending the San Francisco Art Institute in 1963–64, he moved to New York in 1966. In 1967 Heizer began creating large Earthworks, primarily in California and Nevada. For his first one-person show, at the Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich, in 1969, he removed 1,000 tons of earth in a conical shape to create Munich Depression. He followed this with Double Negative, a displacement of over 240,000 tons of earth to make two vast incisions opposite one another on the edge of Virgin River mesa, Nevada. Heizer’s next one-person show was at the Dwan Gallery, New York, in 1970, and that same year he exhibited in the International Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Major exhibitions of his work have been staged at institutions such as the Museum Folkwang, Essen (1979), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1984). Heizer lives in Nevada, where he continues to work on City, a sculptural complex begun in 1970 currently supported by Dia and Lannan Foundation.
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Artist Statement In the mid-1960s, during the same
Lightning Field (1977), in New Mexico.
period that Michael Heizer was making
Facing each other in the cliffs on either
large-scale, shaped, "negative" paintings
side of a wide cleft in the mesa, the cuts
in his New York City studio, he began
define rectilinear spaces from which
a series of trips to his home states of
bulldozers have removed the sandstone
Nevada and California to experiment
strata and rock. These spaces, which
on the expansive raw canvas of the
would roughly absorb the Empire State
American desert landscape, where
Building lying on its side, might as
he created "negative" sculpture. The
aptly be compared to the large-scale
genre that he and his colleague Walter
feats of modern engineering, or to the
De Maria invented there—later dubbed
monumental earthen architecture of
"Earth art" or "Land art"—changed the
ancient times, as to sculpture. Thus,
course of modern art history. Working
Heizer's work constitutes a challenge
largely outside the confines of the gal-
to sculpture's long history.
lery and the museum, Heizer went on to redefine sculpture in terms of scale,
Although the "sculptural volume" of
mass, gesture, and process, creating a
Double Negative was created by a
virtual lexicon of three-dimensional form.
massive movement of earth, performed with the help of heavy machinery, it isn't
Heizer's Double Negative (1969) com-
physical at all. Instead it is made literally
prises two giant rectangular cuts (and the
of nothing, of negative space: the volume
space in between them) in the irregular
that traditionally defines a sculpture is
cliff edges of a tall desert mesa near
described in these works by a void, by
Overton, Nevada. This monumental
absence rather than presence. The first
piece is iconic of the period and of
such "negative" form in Heizer's work
works made in and of the landscape,
was North, East, South, West, which the
as are Robert Smithson's later Spiral
artist produced in wood and sheet metal
Jetty (1970), in Utah, and De Maria's The
in 1967, putting two of the four elements,
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North and South, in the ground in the
an experience that is a function less of
Sierra Nevada in California. The work has
movement to allow multiple viewpoints
now been constructed in its entirety as
than of the extended journey in time
a permanent feature of Dia's museum in
and space required to comprehend it.
Beacon, in the size and material (weath-
And the fact that the sculpture literally
ering steel) that Heizer originally specified
displaces the floor on which the visitor
for it. These four diverse sculptural
walks creates a sense of potential
elements— two stacked cubic forms, one
physical danger that further challenges
larger and one smaller (North); a cone
the viewing experience.
(South); a triangular trough (West); and an inverted truncated cone (East)—together
The architectural scale and construction
measure more than 125 feet in length,
of Heizer's work, particularly Double
and sink from the floor of the gallery to
Negative and City, begun in 1970 and still
a depth of 20 feet. When the work was
under construction in Nevada, often call
first developed, such dimensions had
forth comparisons to the megalithic mon-
no precedent in the art of recent times.
uments of ancient cultures. The son of an anthropologist, Heizer acknowledges
Heizer prefers the term size to scale
numerous ancient sources for some of
in descriptions of his work, in part to
his forms but sees the comparison as
emphasize the factual and visual impli-
more apt in the realm of effect than of
cations of the actual distance traversed
specific reference:
by the eye or on foot in viewing it. The sheer physical dimensions of North,
It is interesting to build a sculpture that
East, South, West, and its physical
attempts to create an atmosphere of
integration into, or displacement of,
awe. Small works are said to do this
the fabric of the Dia building, force an
but it is not my experience. Immense,
entirely different viewing experience from
architecturally sized sculpture creates
that of traditional sculpture in the round,
both the object and the atmosphere.
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Awe is a state of mind equivalent to
of his ongoing City project; he also
religious experience, I think if people
created a slightly smaller version (made
feel commitment they feel something
of industrial corrugated cardboard) of
has been transcended. . . . I think that
it for an exhibition at the Museum of
large sculptures produced in the '60s
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1984.
and '70s by a number of artists were
The work comprises eighteen diverse
reminiscent of the time when societies
geometric forms, but its title refers to its
were committed to the construction of
feature elements, three rectangular blocks
massive, significant works of art.1
respectively placed at a forty-five-degree angle, vertically, and horizontally. Set on a
The simplified, monumental geometric
rectangular plaza, the forms are separate
forms of North, East, South, West
volumes cut from a single triangular
also share affinities with futuristic
monolith that was itself a by-product
Constructivist sculpture and modernist
of a drilling plan that Heizer originally
architecture. In sum, the piece suggests
developed for the removal of masses
the underlying Euclidean lexicon of basic
of stone block from a cliff for a vertical
three-dimensional forms—box, cone,
sculpture. As in Dragged Mass (1971),
and wedge—essential for all sculpture,
which is the result of earth displaced by
ancient and modern. Going more deeply
literally dragging a massive thirty-ton
still, the forms suggest the molecular
block of stone over the ground, Heizer's
crystalline morphology from which all
"forms" are sometimes less designs than
physical shapes in matter are derived.2
the results of a practical physical process.
The emphasis on elemental vocabularies
Another outdoor work, Adjacent,
of form and gesture is key to Heizer's
Against, Upon (1976), comprises three
work. His most massive single (posi-
poured-concrete geometric shapes, each
tive) sculptural shape, 45°, 90°, 180°/
so paired with a comparably huge natural
Geometric Extraction, is a focal point
rock as to enumerate the possible relation
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ships between a movable object and a
are infused with the unique perspective
fixed one: as the title describes, one rock
and biases of the artist and of the culture
is adjacent to, one is against, and one
within which the work is made. The
stands upon its concrete counterpart.3
"minimal" shapes in Heizer's sculpture
The title 45°, 90°, 180° describes another
abound with references to the objects
essential axiom of three-dimensional
and architectures of ancient cultures, to
potential: any object can stand, lean,
the language of sculpture, and even to
or lie in relationship to a horizontal
the underlying crystalline morphology
and a vertical plane. Similarly, the title
defining all shapes. But what lies at the
North, East, South, West— defining the
core of Heizer's art is his extreme re-
cardinal points of the compass as well
duction of such myriad specific sources.
as describing in total the 360° plane of the floor or ground—suggests a primary
Ancient sculpture may have specific
set of conditions that rest at the core of
commemorative or religious meaning
more complex variations.
to convey, but for Heizer it generates its sense of awe through its intense
Described like this by the artist himself
"commitment" to making an "architec-
in his titles, Heizer's work can seem less
turally sized" work that becomes "both
art than a collection of data or a list of
the object and the atmosphere." Those
fundamental laws of sculpture. Yet, to
issues of commitment and scale can
the contrary, these matter-of-fact titles
equally be embodied in the contemporary
only partially account for the experiential
artist's intense and self-reflexive process
effects of each sculpture, because the
of abstraction—even negation— with the
translation of any abstract principle into
same overall results.
actual form in time and space involves countless formal decisions. Even the most minimal artistic intentions, then,
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Robert Irwin
Artist Biography
Robert Irwin consulted on the master plan for Dia:Beacon, creating, in particular, the design and landscaping of the outdoor spaces, and the entrance building and the window design. He was born in Long Beach, California, in 1928, and studied in Los Angeles at the Otis Art Institute (1948–50), the Jepson Art Institute (1951), and the Chinouard School of Art (1952–54). Since his first solo exhibition, at the Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1957, he has exhibited widely in galleries and museums in North America and abroad. Irwin received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984. In 1993, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, initiated a major retrospective of his work, which subsequently traveled to Paris, Madrid, and Cologne. Among his numerous public projects, the most recent is the monumental garden he designed for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, which opened in 1997. Dia held a two-part exhibition of Irwin’s work in 1998–99, showing two site-specific installations, Prologue: x183 and Excursus: Homage to the Square³. Irwin currently lives and works in San Diego.
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a café and bookshop or the newly constructed entrance to the galleries, and from there down any of a number of possible paths through the museum's interior and into the artists' spaces, each specifically designed by the artist in question and/or by Dia to accommodate the work on view. Irwin's work in Beacon lay across the borders of a number of different Artist Statement
roles—landscape designer, architect, aesthetic philosopher—in a manner completely consistent with his practice as an artist, in which,
Robert Irwin's work at Dia:Beacon may elude
among other things, he has questioned exactly
the casual visitor. It consists of a master plan
where the boundaries lie around the role of the
for the museum and its outdoor spaces, as well
artist today.
as design work on numerous aspects of the project, most notably the extensive landscape
At the beginning of the twentieth century, artists
environment, where Irwin was involved in every
such as Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian
aspect of the plantings, paving and fencing,
proposed that the basis of painting could
and windows and doors.
change, from representational relationships with an external world to a play of formal
Most important, Irwin helped Dia consider the
relationships within a work itself—Mondrian's
design of the Beacon project in experiential
culture of determined relations, as Irwin often
and environmental terms as a totality—from
calls it. As if in search of the reduced essence
the visitor's entrance, by car or by foot, down
of painting, Mondrian's career moved dra-
a driveway marked at its top by a gate and a
matically from landscape painting, through a
new copper beech tree, through an orchard
Cubist-inspired dissolution of pictorial space,
that serves as a parking lot, into a plaza that
to the rarefied and entirely abstract paintings
signals one's arrival at the museum, into either
for which he is best known. Irwin's early
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development moves along a similarly reductive
inches in front of one of the long walls, creating
trajectory, from Abstract Expressionist painting
the effect of an empty room in which one wall
in the late 1950s, to more rigorously optical
seemed permanently out of focus. Because of
hand-painted line and dot paintings, to metal
its quality as a substance that defines space
and plastic circular discs and prismatic col-
by slowing or heightening vision rather than
umns that nearly dissolve visually at the same
creating an impenetrable barrier, scrim is a
time that they channel and shape the light and
prevalent material in many of Irwin's projects,
space around them. Finally, in the early 1970s,
in various manifestations as fabric, translucent
Irwin eschewed the discrete object entirely
film, fencing, or even the branches, raw and
in favor of totally environmental works that
dense in winter, of the European hornbeam
involved modifying and augmenting indoor
trees that frame the Dia:Beacon entrance plaza.
and outdoor spaces themselves. He sees this development as foreshadowed by Mondrian,
In 1975–76, at the Museum of Contemporary
who predicted "the end of art as a thing sepa-
Art, Chicago, Irwin similarly cleared out a gal-
rated from our surrounding environment." But
lery but this time placed one long strip of black
that would not mean the end of art, Mondrian
tape on the floor to create, in conjunction with
continued: "By the unification of architecture,
the reveal below three bounding walls, a contin-
sculpture and painting, a new plastic reality will
uous dark line forming a square around an
be created. Painting and sculpture will not man-
existing standard square structural column. By
ifest themselves as separate objects . . . but
this simple gesture the column became eerily
being purely constructive will aid the creation of
isolated and newly discovered as a prominent
a surrounding not merely utilitarian or rational
object in an austere room. Commissioned to
but also pure and complete in its beauty."1
make an installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, in a gallery overlooking
For Soft Wall, a 1974 installation at Pace
the Pacific Ocean, Irwin removed a square of
Gallery in New York City, Irwin simply cleaned
glass from each of two corner windows and
and painted a rectangular gallery and hung a
one central large window. The deletions from
thin, translucent white theater scrim eighteen
the gray-tinted glass created a strange and
31
Most important, Irwin helped Dia consider the design of the Beacon project in experiential and environmental terms as a totality—from the visitor's entrance, by car or by foot, down
environment, where Irwin was involved in every aspect of the plantings, paving and fencing, and windows and doors. Most important, Irwin helped Dia consider the design of the Beacon project in experiential and environmental terms as a totality—from the visitor's entrance, by car or by foot, down
entirely new relationship between the museum
An artist, for example, can create an overriding
and its spectacular outdoor context: Framed by
order, while also taking visual and experiential
a suddenly blurry and dense-seeming barrier of
complexities as opportunities for discoveries
glass, the cutouts put the outdoors into sharp
in perception. The politics of the airport's huge
focus while also objectifying it, like small cubes
construction project eventually defeated Irwin's
of nature. Similarly, the decision to replace just
proposals—but not before he had worked in-
a few panes of Dia:Beacon's long east and
tensely to develop a master plan that included
west rows of opaque factory-glass windows
a process for identifying and then working with
with clear glass completely changes the rela-
other artists on the project, as well as his own
tionship between the galleries and the exterior.
proposal to plant a large new grove of cypress
And the decision to create two windows in
trees in place of an old parking garage. He had
the south boundary of the building, directly
also gotten a worthwhile taste of the possi-
opposite the double doors at the museum's
bilities of working on a complex, large-scale
new north entrance, has the effect from outside
public project. More recently, Irwin completed
the front doors of momentarily collapsing the
a more discrete project for the Getty Center in
490-foot view through the entire building into
Los Angeles, a large-scale public garden. Both
two punctures of light.
of those projects were important precedents for his work at Dia's museum in Beacon.
In the early 1980s, Irwin was invited to participate as a collaborating artist in designs for the
The primary medium of Irwin's art is neither
rejuvenation and improvement of the Miami
steel nor glass, neither trees nor pavement, but
International Airport. The daunting task of
our perception, our curiosity, and our desire to
creating some overall structure for the chaotic
make sense of the world around us. By subtly
and unruly environment of an airport was an
manipulating our environment in unexpected
ideal challenge for Irwin, whose ambition it is
ways, his gestures provoke us to see differently,
to show that an artist can use his or her trained
to question our assumptions, and to pay an
sense of vision to reshape any experience
attention to phenomena that in turn cause us to
simply through a creative reorganization of
redraw our mental picture of the world. The role
elements such as directional paths and seating.
of the artist, in Irwin's terms, is to learn to see
32
as design work on numerous aspects of the project, most notably the extensive landscape environment, where Irwin was involved in every aspect of the plantings, paving and fencing, and windows and doors. Most important, Irwin helped Dia consider the design of the Beacon project in experiential and environmental terms as a totality—from the visitor's entrance, by car or by foot, down
aspect of the plantings, paving and fencing, and windows and doors. Most important, Irwin helped Dia consider the design of the Beacon project in experiential and environmental terms as a totality—from the visitor's entrance, by car or by foot, down
not only a physical, quantitative reality but the
or may not result in a thing called artwork.
qualitative aspects of a situation, and to em-
"If you asked me the sum total—what is your
power the viewer to gain access to that vision
ambition?" Irwin told his friend and biographer
as well—to engage in a process of discovery.
Lawrence Weschler. "Basically it's just to make
The real subject of Irwin's art is not the object,
you a little more aware than you were the
then, but the viewer:
day before of how beautiful the world is. It's not saying that I know what the world should
As artists, the one true inquiry of art as a pure
look like. It's not that I'm rebuilding the world.
subject is an inquiry of our potential to know
Basically what artists do is to teach you how to
the world around us and our actively being in
exercise your own potential—they always have,
it, with a particular emphasis on the aesthetic.
that's the one thread that goes all the way
This world is not just somehow given to us
through."3 By Irwin's measure, a work of art
whole. We perceive, we shape the world, and
succeeds when it challenges our perceptions
as artists we discover and give value to our
to such a degree as to cause us to reconsider
human potential to "see" the infinite richness
our environment and invest it, and ourselves,
(beauty?) in everything, creating an extended
with greater potential. In the case of his work
aesthetic reality.2
at Dia:Beacon, it was only after he had sensed and assessed the degree to which he had
Through a self-directed study of philosophy,
carried out his responsibilities to solve practical
psycho-logy, and art history, Irwin has come to
problems, as well as the total aesthetic effect
understand art not within its traditional social,
of his myriad of individual and dispersed ges-
cultural, and commercial practice of object
tures, details, and proposals—some of which
making but as a process of "pure inquiry," as
are described in his drawings in the following
he says, and "pure subject." Art for him need
pages—that he was satisfied that his efforts
not result in a discrete object or even a discrete
operated within those terms and
experience. The work of the artist might then
could be considered a work in his oeuvre and
be defined as a process of investigation subject
in Dia's collection.
to a particular set of circumstances (a place, an invitation to work, a problem to solve) that may
33
34
Donald Judd
Artist Biography
Donald Judd was born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, in 1928. He attended Columbia University, studying philosophy from 1949 to 1953 and art history with Meyer Schapiro from 1957 to 1962. At the same time that he launched an impressive career as an art critic and polemicist, he began to produce his earliest paintings. He had forged his mature aesthetic by 1965. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a retrospective in 1968, and a one-person exhibition was shown at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, in 1975. During his lifetime, Judd received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968 and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 1987. In 1986 a permanent installation of his work opened at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Judd died in New York City in 1994.
35
Artist Statement In the 1960s Donald Judd began placing simple geometric boxes directly on the floor or spaced evenly along the wall. In forgoing the pedestal, he engaged viewers in a bodily experience that happened in real time and space. Within a decade he began exploring the contingencies of space and the parameters of perception on broader terms, as in Untitled (slant piece) (1976). This work slowly reveals itself as it is approached. The plywood wall gives way to a sloping plane that divides the gallery into two inaccessible volumes. Originally fabricated for the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City, the work is adapted to the dimensions of each new site. The secant angle shifts according to the width of the wooden barrier. While resolutely abstract, Untitled (slant piece) is emblematic of Judd’s belief that “actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.” Judd’s complicated relationship to painting is evident in his many wall-mounted structures and his persistent and varied use of color. Rejecting the proscriptions of both painting and sculpture,
36
he focused instead on three-dimensional objects which, he argued, “can have any relation to the wall, floor, ceiling, room, rooms, or exterior or none at all.” Untitled (1975) and Untitled (1991) both consist of a series of wall-mounted boxes that project into space. To avoid any external references, Judd arranged these structures in non-hierarchical order, respectively using a simple line and grid. In a further attempt to reject the illusionism of painting, Judd incorporated color into these series through the use of Plexiglas—a material that assimilates color as an inherent rather than superficial quality. Early in his career Judd determined a basic vocabulary of materials and forms that he would use throughout his practice. Judd was interested in developing an aesthetic free from any historical or metaphorical associations. He identified and deployed new industrial materials—such as anodized aluminum, Plexiglas, and plywood—that had no precedent in the visual arts. These were used in the construction of square planes, cubes, and rectangular pipes. Rejecting traditional notions of craftsmanship in favor of an industrial production more true to the nature of his materials, Judd delegated the fabrication of his objects to specialized technicians who followed instructions and sketches provided by the artist.
37
38
On Kawara
Artist Biography
On Kawara: 29,622 days on January 15, 2014. Kawara’s earliest exhibitions include the first Nippon Exhibition, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, in 1953, and at the Takemiya and Hibiya galleries the following year. He began traveling throughout the world in 1959, then settled in 1965 in New York City, where he has been an intermittent resident ever since. His work was exhibited at New York’s Dwan Gallery in 1967, and his one-person exhibition One Million Years was shown in Düsseldorf, Paris, and Milan in 1971. Kawara’s work was included in Documentas 5 (1972), 7 (1982), and 11 (2002), in Kassel, Germany; the Tokyo Biennale (1970); the Kyoto Biennale (1976); and the Venice Biennale (1976). He won the Carnegie Prize in 1991 and the Kunstpreis Aachen the following year. In 1993, Dia held the yearlong exhibition One Thousand Days One Million Years, for which Kawara installed paintings from the Today series that had been executed in New York City. The exhibition also included his book work One Million Years (Past) and a sound work, One Million Years (Future). Twenty years later, and in celebration of Dia:Beacon’s tenth anniversary, Dia organized a live reading of Kawara’s One Million Years and produced a new recording.
39
Artist Statement
On Kawara is interested in time—its
evenly applied to the canvas, creating a
measurement in days, years, centuries,
dense matte surface. Letters, numbers,
and eons. Each Date Painting in his
and punctuation marks are then built
Today series, the magnum opus that he
up by hand, rather than with the aid of
began in 1966, is a monochrome field on
stencils. Initially he used an elongated
which is written the date the painting was
Gill Sans typeface, later a quintessentially
executed, in the language and according
modernist Futura. Variations in the letters
to the calendar of the country where
or hues are of no symbolic significance,
Kawara was at the time. If he does not
nor is the choice of a work’s color more
complete a painting by midnight, he
connotative than its measurements.
destroys it. Some days he makes two paintings; very occasionally, he makes
Each painting is stored in a handmade
three; but most days he makes none.
cardboard box with a clipping from a newspaper published in the same city
40
Every painting in the series conforms
and on the same day that the painting
to one of eight sizes, all horizontal in
was made. (Kawara has exhibited the
orientation, ranging from eight by ten
works both with and without their boxes.)
inches to sixty-one by eighty-nine inches.
History as recorded in daily events,
For every painting the artist mixes the
whether global or local, is bound together
paint afresh, so that the color of each is
with a residue of individual activity. The
unique. Tonalities in the brown-gray and
subtle traces of manual execution are
blue-black range have dominated the last
a counterpoint to the dialectic between
decades. Four or five coats of acrylic are
order and chance—that is, between the
regularity of calendrical and linguistic
imperceptible component: its air is
conventions and the arbitrary strictures
constantly purified by Japanese white
of size and color. A constant traveler,
charcoal. Installed at the artist’s request
Kawara has created Date Paintings in
under the room’s wood floor, this char-
over 112 cities worldwide, in a project
coal is known for absorbing chemicals,
that will end only with his death.
freshening air, removing humidity, and releasing it back into the air when the
At Dia:Beacon, Kawara exhibits thirty-six
conditions are drier. While this material
Date Paintings, one for each year from
is traditionally used to ionize the air
the beginning of the series, in 1966, until
in Japanese houses, Kawara’s subtle
the millennium (including the exceptional
gesture may or may not affect viewers
Friday, November 3, 1989, when he
in ways they consciously register.
completed a pair of works). Executed in the same small format and in similar dark tonalities, they were made in locations from Tokyo to Stockholm, from New York to Nova Scotia. Their starting point is contemporary with some of the earliest works in Dia’s collection, and their span corresponds to the period that the collection currently covers. This installation contains an additional,
41
42
Louise Lawler
Artist Biography Louise Lawler was born in 1947 in Bronxville, New York. Lawler received her BFA in art from Cornell University, New York, in 1969, and moved to New York City in 1970. Lawler held her first gallery show at Metro Pictures, New York, in 1982. Soon after, Lawler gained international recognition for her photographic and installation-based projects. Her work has been featured in numerous interna- tional exhibitions, including Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany (2007); the Whitney Biennial, New York (1991, 2000, and 2008); and the Triennale di Milano (1999). Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Portikus, Frankfurt (2003); the Museum f端r Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland (2004); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio (2006); and Museum Ludwig, Germany (2013). In 2005, the solo exhibition In and Out of Place: Louise Lawler and Andy Warhol was presented at Dia:Beacon, which comprised a selection of photographs taken by Lawler, all of which include works by Warhol. She lives and works in New York City.
43
Artist Statement Since the early 1970s, Louise Lawler has created works that expose the economic and social conditions that affect the reception of art. Lawler’s work directs attention to positions of artistic authority and upends the presentation strategies that shape one’s encounter of an artwork. Her early projects, which appropriated other artists’ works and investigated the boundaries between private and public, established strategies she has continued to use throughout her career. In the winter of 1970, Lawler was recruited to assist several artists for Willoughby Sharp’s Projects: Pier 18, a group exhibition that occupied an abandoned pier along the Hudson River on the west side of Lower Manhattan. The absence of female artists among the twenty-seven commissioned to create ephemeral interventions and actions in situ did not escape Lawler. By her own account, “the women involved were doing tons of work, but the work being shown was only by male artists.” While walking down the street after leaving the piers one evening, Lawler and her artist friend Martha Kite began to sing loudly off-key to ward off any unwanted interactions, which led to their mimicking bird-like sounds to chant “Willoughby Willoughby.” This parody led Lawler to compose a list of famous male artists, all of whom came to prominence in the 1960s. Not surpris- ingly, many of them are represented in Dia’s collection, including Joseph Beuys, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, and Lawrence Weiner. For each artist, Lawler created a distinct
44
birdcall sound of their first or last names, and
displayed in the space where the work is
occasionally used both. This list of canonical
presented.
names was developed as both an antagonistic
For the presentation at Dia:Beacon, Lawler
and instinctual response to the privileging
installed the audio recording outdoors in the
of male artists at the time, who she felt were
west garden along the Hudson River and the
being granted positions of authority based on
text panel of names at
name recognition. Speaking on what she views
the exit leading to the garden. Birdcalls
as art history’s adoration of biography, Lawler
encourages the viewer to consider the
explained, “This question of name recognition
boundaries between artwork and context, to
relates to my feelings about interviews, to the
consider the fixed conditions that influence an
credibility that is given to a statement because
artwork’s meaning and value.
of who is speaking.” In 1981, Lawler decided to make an audiotape recording of her reading the scripted list of artists. Recorded and mixed by composer Terry Wilson, the work was titled Birdcalls and dated 1972/1981 to mark the two occasions of the work’s development. Birdcalls was first installed as part of the group exhibition A Pierre et Marie: Une exposition en travaux (To Peter and Mary: An Exhibition in Progress) that took place from 1982 to 1984 in an abandoned old church in Paris. From this first iteration, where Lawler installed the work herself, Birdcalls was conceived as consisting of the audio piece and the accompanying list of artists’ names
45
46
Sol LeWitt
Artist Biography
Sol LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1928, and attended Syracuse University. After serving in the Korean War as a graphic artist, he moved, in 1953, to New York, where he worked as a draftsman for the architect I. M. Pei. LeWitt had his first solo exhibition at the Daniels Gallery, New York, in 1965, and the following year Dwan Gallery, New York, mounted the first in a series of solo exhibitions. He participated, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, in several significant group exhibitions of Minimalist and Conceptual art, including “Primary Structures,” at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1966, and “When Attitudes Become Form,” at the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, in 1969. His renowned text “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” was published in 1967. LeWitt’s work was included in Documentas 6 (1977) and 7 (1982) in Kassel, as well as the 1987 Skulptur Projekte in Münster and the 1989 Istanbul Biennial. Major retrospectives of his works were organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1978, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 2000. “Drawing Series...” a presentation of LeWitt’s early wall drawings was installed at Dia:Beacon in 2006. Sol LeWitt died on April 8, 2007 in New York City.
47
Artist Statement "Serial components are multipartite pieces with regulated changes," Sol LeWitt argued in 1966. "The differences between the parts are the subject of the composition." Such works, which have constituted the mainstay of his practice since the mid-1960s, "are to be read by the viewer in a linear or narrative manner . . . even though," he conceded, "in its final form many of these sets would be operating simultaneously, making comprehension difficult." LeWitt first articulated his long-standing commitment to seriality as a mode of composition and a thematic as his practice was evolving from its roots in Minimalism to a pioneering Conceptualism. In response to seminal works by peers such as Donald Judd and, more particularly, Dan Flavin, LeWitt, too, pared his vocabulary to simple geometric forms. Focusing on the cube and square, he fabricated neutral three-dimensional structures, in a pristine white, which he then parsed in permutational progressions or finite preset series. For example, (1967–2003) manifests all possible variations on three different kinds of cubes. Eliminating the play of the arbitrary, the expressive, and the subjective, eschewing all trace of his hand and taste, LeWitt accorded priority to underlying ideas over their physical counterparts: "In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work," he stated in his landmark 1967 credo, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art." At first highly rational and logical, LeWitt's foundational precepts veered in unforeseen ways once they entered a two-dimensional arena. Inspired by Flavin's the nominal three (to William of Ockham) (1963), he increasingly explored the inherent potential of wall-based works to engage with their surrounds, that is, not only with the space but with the contours of the site in which they are realized. But whereas Flavin focused on the ways in which light shaped and inflected the work's environment, LeWitt began to limn his graphite lines directly onto
48
the architecture, which he thereby made physically integral to the work. By dispensing with the conventional support—whether paper or, as in the case of Agnes Martin, canvas—he fused his grids of closely drawn, evenly toned pencil lines with the planar field in which the work had its being. In his earlier graphite works, among which Drawing Series—Composite, Part I–IV, #1–24, A+B (1969) is a key example, the dimensions of the individual drawing were fixed and hence independent of the scale and size of any venue. Gradually, however, LeWitt began to adjust the overall frame of the works as they were given material existence to the proportions and measurements of the site, so that they now engaged the whole wall. Yet each work exists initially as an idea, in the guise of textual instructions accompanied by a diagrammatic representation: it need not assume concrete form as a monumental physical entity. Its existence, then, is always contingent: not only its dimensions but its duration is provisional. Drawing Series. . . exemplifies LeWitt's singular yet highly influential practice on manifold counts. Formulated from an initial idea outlined in a diagrammatic sketch accompanied by a set of instructions, it has been installed here by a team of trained assistants supplemented by volunteers, who rigorously followed the artist's directives, including his determination of its placement in relation to the particular configuration of Dia's galleries.5 In the work of Judd and other Minimalists, the specifics of the modular system underpinning any individual work are not necessarily overtly legible, although they may be intuited. In LeWitt's art, by contrast, the conceptual program that determines the composition is always self-evident. Irrespective of the resulting degree of complexity, the point of departure—the preset schema—is literally stated, in the title, the accompanying diagrammatic instructions, or both. The straightforward formulation of the preset idea of Drawing Series. . . has here been exhaustively realized: all 192 permutations of the black pencil version are present. The work's basic unit, a square measuring one meter per side and divided into quarters, is grouped to make a larger square of four equal units, then stacked into four rows centered on
49
each of the four walls of the gallery. A recurrent form in LeWitt's early drawings, the square, like the cube, from which most of his early sculptures were composed, is for him among the "least emotive" of any possible forms. "A more complex form would be too interesting in itself and obstruct the meaning of the whole. There is no need to invent new forms," he contends. "The square and cube are efficient and symmetrical." This elementary syntax constitutes "the best form to use as a base unit for any more elaborate function, the grammatical device from which the work may proceed." The four directions assumed by the lines in Drawing Series. . . represent the basic directions in which lines may be drawn: vertical, horizontal, diagonal from top left to bottom right, and diagonal from top right to bottom left. In accordance with the artist's preset plan, these lines have been overlaid in every possible combination so that the resulting sequence methodically exhausts every variation that may be derived from the given logic and within the formal limits established by the location. Light-toned and applied evenly with a near-uniform thickness and spacing, the lines create grids of varying tonality that nonetheless preserve the integrity of the surface plane even as they appear at one with it. The measured logic and reasoning evidenced here betray neither a dogmatic commitment to mathematical calibration nor a belief in the transcendence of thought, of mind.10 On the contrary, obsession pushed to the limit of paradox and absurdity is as fundamental to LeWitt's practice as any axiomatic intellectualizing—witness a key statement in his 1967 credo "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art": "Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically." It was precisely this fascination with the contradictory that Robert Smithson so presciently identified when he acclaimed LeWitt's concepts as "prisons devoid of reason." In their monumental physical guise his works reveal a compelling, luminous beauty that speaks as much to the senses as to the intellect. For even though the preset programs can be readily grasped, what is unexpected is their exhilarating presence. Experienced as a kind of aesthetic excess, this is the sensory equivalent of their conceptual address to "the purposelessness of purpose."
50
Agnes Martin
Artist Biography
Agnes Martin was born in Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1912. She grew up in Vancouver, then moved to Bellingham, Washington, in 1932. Martin gained a BA degree in 1942 and an MA in 1952 from Teachers College at Columbia University, while living intermittently in New Mexico. In 1957 she relocated to Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan. She had her first one-person exhibition in 1958 at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York. Surveys of her work have been presented at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1973); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1991); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1992). She was awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1997, and in 1998 she received a National Medal of Arts award from the National Endowment for the Arts. From the late sixties until her death in December 2004, Martin lived and worked in rural New Mexico.
51
Artist Statement In the late 1950s, after a long period of inves-
rience of landscape underlies her allover grid
tigation and self-education, Agnes Martin es-
paintings that, as she once said, are never
tablished the formal parameters of what came
mechanical and never rigid. A close examina-
to be her mature oeuvre. Insisting on the use
tion of Untitled (c. 1959), for example, shows
of grids and repetitive geometric patterns while
that the grid-like drawing—a field of adjacent
preserving the sensual richness of the brush-
rectangles, in fact—has been carefully marked
stroke, Martin is regarded as a bridge between
by hand into a thick irregular layer of white
two generations of American artists—the Ab-
paint. However evocative the titles of some
stract Expressionists, whom she admired and
paintings may appear (such as Window [1957],
recognized as her peers, and the Minimalists,
The Spring [1958], and Earth [1959], all on view
who saw her as an inspiring precursor.
in this gallery), Martin described her work as “anti-nature.” Through simple, persistent, yet
Martin, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest,
apparently fragile geometry based on grids and
was drawn to the arid, open landscape of
planes, she found she could pursue an ideal of
New Mexico as a student in the 1940s and
classical perfection whose forms are held only
established her permanent home and studio
in the mind.
there in 1968. The vast southwestern desert became a defining experience and a subject
Between 1967 and 1974, Martin gave up
of constant meditation for her. “I used to paint
painting and pursued isolation and a simple
mountains here in New Mexico and I thought/
lifestyle as a means of sustaining spiritual
my mountains looked like ant hills/I saw the
awareness, which she understood as the
plains driving out of New Mexico and I thought/
only source of genuine inspiration. Leaving
the plain had it/just the plane,” she recalled in
New York City—where she had lived since
a poem that explains the inti- mate connec-
the 1950s, and which she found increasingly
tion between the radical abstraction of her
distracting—Martin moved permanently to
paintings and idealized landscapes, especially
an adobe house that she built herself on a
the desert and the ocean. The spiritual expe-
deserted mesa near the small town of Cuba,
52
New Mexico. Martin’s temporary interruption of her practice, a drastic hiatus often mythologized by art historians and critics, did not hinder the calm evolution of her formal language over the next three decades. In fact, the works produced at the end of her career often include elements reminiscent of her earlier periods. Those parallels are sometimes unexpected, such as the ominous black that conceals more than it reveals in Untitled #17 (2002) and Untitled (c. 1957). Often employing delicate pastels and light gray washes, Martin’s late paintings emphasize lightness over structure and seem to emanate light rather than reflect it. In her Innocent Love series (1999), gently insistent horizontal lines, bounding the color washes, suggest an infinite space beyond the frames of the five-foot-square canvases. The theme of innocent love may be related to the artist’s descriptions of the “untroubled state of mind” (often referred to in her journals) that allows for “moments of inspiration,” which “added together make what we call sensibility.” Innocent young children, in Martin’s view, have many more inspirations than adults: such notions may have informed the ethereal tone of these elusive yet luminous works.
53
54
Bruce Nauman Artist Biography
Bruce Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1941. He acquired an M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis, in 1966. His debut show was at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1966, and since then he has exhibited widely in North America and Europe, including contributions to Documentas 4 (1968), 5 (1972), and 7 (1982), in Kassel, Germany, and to the Whitney Biennials of 1984, 1991, and 1997. Several major exhibitions of his work toured, principally in Europe, in the 1980s, and in 1994–95 the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., organized a retrospective. Recent exhibitions include “Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light,” organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee and “A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s,” organized by the University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In 2009, Nauman will represent the United States at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Since 1979, Nauman has lived on a ranch near Galisteo, New Mexico, where, in addition to continuing his studio practice, he breeds horses. 55
Artist Statement
In the late 1960s when a recent art-school graduate, Bruce Nauman began to explore issues relating to the practice of artmaking and to the role of the artist. Performances that put his own body under duress paralleled those that demanded as much of paid performers or of spectators: compare the physically exhausting Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) (1968) with Body Pressure (1974), exacting mental exercises in which, respectively, an actor and viewers are required through intense concentration to try to suffuse themselves into the architecture of the room. Sometimes these works were orchestrated for the camera in the studio, to become later single-monitor video pieces; sometimes they were choreographed for a gallery or museum situation. More recently, in the multiscreen projection Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001), Nauman has returned to these themes. Over the course of the summer of 2000 he set up an infrared camera in multiple positions in his studio to track the nocturnal activities of mice, moths, and other sundry creatures. Edited down to some six 56
hours per projector, the footage in the resulting installation offers a wryly elliptical take on the mundanities of daily studio activity, as replete with languor as with moments of visionary insight. First constructed as a prop for an early video piece, Performance Corridor (1969) eventually became an autonomous work, which soon spawned numerous progeny. Some related pieces, such as the Nick Wilder corridor (1970), incorporate surveillance cameras and closed-circuit video systems that function like electronic mirrors. Both these virtual mirrors and the real mirrors Nauman used elsewhere allow spectators to see places that they might not imagine they would be able to see. A strange, frustrating sense of dislocation is engendered by denying physical access to what can be seen. Although Nauman posited in his early work a notion of the artist as visionary or seer-the revealer of “mystic truths�-his conception subsequently darkened into a more authoritarian and implacable paradigm, as evidenced in a series of neon works he made in the 1980s. The terse texts and violent images found in such works as White Anger, Red Danger, Yellow Peril, Black Death (both from 1985) relentlessly assault the viewer. Occasionally, as evidenced in South America Circle (1981), his abiding preoccupation with issues of power as they pertain to the realm of the aesthetic-to the relation between artist, artwork, and 57
beholder- expands to take on wider political reference. The compass of Nauman’s humor is as broad as his imagination is protean. Idiomatic expressions in the form of both verbal and visual signs have long interested him. Among his key early works is a sculpture titled From Hand to Mouth (1967), which depicts just that: a cast of the relevant parts of a person’s body. In the 1980s, the expression “better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick” seems to have prompted several works in neon. Whereas Double Poke in the Eye II (1985) verges on the slapstick, White Anger, Red Danger, Yellow Peril, Black Death assumes the guise of signage for a still-timely message whose humor is characteristically mordant. 58
Max Neuhaus
Artist Biography Max Neuhaus was born in 1939 in Texas, and spent his childhood in Fishkill, New York. He began his studies in music at the Manhattan School of Music under Paul Prince’s mentorship. In 1958, he met John Cage, and this encounter determined his decision to become a professional percussionist. After a solo tour in Europe in 1965, Neuhaus started developing projects that went beyond the strictly musical realm; among them were site-specific pieces that he was the first to call “sound installations.” In 1968, as he started a research residency at the Bell Laboratories, Neuhaus ceased performing as a musician and fully devoted himself to sound art. Since then, his work has been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1978); Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (1983); and the Kunsthalle Bern (1989). He was also included in Documentas 6 (1977) and 9 (1992), Kassel, Germany; the Whitney Biennial, New York (1983); and the Venice Biennale (1999). In 2008, an exhibition of Neuhaus’s drawings was organized by the Menil Collection, Houston, which coincided with the inauguration of a new installation, Sound Line. Neuhaus passed away in February 2009 in Italy.
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Artist Statement Commissioned specifically for Dia:Beacon, Max Neuhaus’s Time Piece Beacon (2005) creates a zone of sound around the perimeter and in the galleries of the museum. As each hour approaches, a low tone gradually emerges, almost imper- ceptibly increasing in volume; the hour is signaled when the sound abruptly ends, creating what seems a silence in the ambient sonic environment. This is what the artist called a “sound signal in reverse,” a subtle sound that is noticed when it disappears rather than when it begins. This work belongs to a series inspired by a singular early project—a silent alarm clock, designed by Neuhaus in 1979. The device produced a drone that, growing from inaudible to a distinctly haunting volume, would induce the sleeping listener to wake up as the sound shut off. Similarly, in Time Piece Beacon, Neuhaus devised a continuous, gradual sound tapestry pitched at the upper limit of the natural ambient sounds of the area: “Initially inaudible, the sound will gradually emerge from the ambient noise and then will suddenly stop.” The signal thus becomes the silence that ensues after the cessation of the sound. As another reference that informed the series, Neuhaus recalled the unifying role of bells in early modern societies, gathering the listeners audibly, but also delimiting the spatial perimeter of a community by means of vibrating, tactile sound resonance. A pioneer in the fields of contemporary art and music, Neuhaus is credited with being the first to explore the role of sound as a primary medium for installations and site-specific pieces. Unlike music, his works are never a succession of changing audio events in time, but continuous markers of “a site as a whole and the different places within it.” For Neuhaus, sound was the material he used to “transform the space into a place.” Neuhaus explained that “trying to capture this work with a recording is as
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silly as chipping the paint off the canvas, putting it in a box and thinking you still have the painting.” One of a number of works from the Moment series, Time Piece Beacon is premised on perception as a whole, involving sight and hearing and touch— in other words, the visitor’s entire physical presence. For each project, Neuhaus made a drawing-text diptych (the one corresponding to Time Piece Beacon is on view in Dia:Beacon’s galleries). This is what he called a “statement in another medium,” although this statement is mixed since it involves a visual description and a verbal one. Whereas in his drawings Neuhaus experimented with possible graphic and chromatic solutions to visualize sound, his written notes have surprisingly poetic qualities. In addition to the presentation of his work in numerous exhibitions over the past forty years, today there are a dozen works by Neuhaus permanently installed in public and private venues. Along with his last installation at the Menil Collection, Houston, in 2008, the two works in Dia’s collection—Time Piece Beacon and Times Square (1977/2002) in New York City—are the only permanent installations by Neuhaus located in North America.
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Gerhard Richter
Artist Biography
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. He studied at the art academy in Dresden between 1951 and 1956 and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1961 to 1963, becoming a professor there in 1971. Since his first solo show at Galerie René Block in Berlin in 1964, Richter has exhibited in many international venues, including Documentas 5 (1972), 7 (1982), 8 (1987), 9 (1992), and 10 (1997). In 1998, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, co-organized Richter’s first North American retrospective. During its 1995–96 season, Dia exhibited Atlas, Richter’s ongoing encyclopedic work composed of photographs, reproductions, and illustrations; during Dia’s 2002–03 season, Richter presented, with Jorge Pardo, “Refraction,” an exhibition in Project, Pardo’s redesign of Dia’s bookshop, lobby, and first-floor exhibition gallery in Chelsea. In 2002, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented a major retrospective of Richter’s paintings, which traveled throughout the United States.
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Artist Statement Gerhard Richter exhibited his first signature works in a furniture store in Dßsseldorf in 1963. A relatively recent immigrant to the West from the East German city of Dresden, where he had been born, raised, then trained as a painter, Richter demonstrated in this group of works, in a style he called "Capitalist Realism," a preoccupation with both the context in which painting was received and how that framing operated—physically, socially, historically, and conceptually. Photographs gleaned from newspapers and other popular sources, and snapshots from family albums, provided the point of departure for these early works, which explored ways in which photography, as the dominant visual language of the modern era, challenges and impacts upon the production and the reception of painting. Through questioning the role of painting, Richter also addressed an ocular-centrism now inextricably enmeshed with the spectacle, an issue that has become increasingly foregrounded in his art in recent years. In the later 1960s, when many of his colleagues abandoned painting for other art forms ranging from performance to installation-based and still more experimental modes, Richter focused self-critically on his practice. Under pressure to justify, if not restore, painting's vanguard position as a viable expressive language, he embarked on an exigent scrutiny of its history and ontology. The results included a number of strategies devised to explore its origins in mimesis. The key mythemes grounding Western painting derive from the notion of a painting as either a window offering a view on to a world beyond or a mirror reflecting whatever is held before it. These two tropes, thewindow and the mirror, which metaphorically
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figure painting's relation to visuality, now became his subjects. A group of some twelve pencil studies from 1965–67 for glass constructions are all based in his ongoing critique of painting as a form of illusionistic picturing. However, only one of these, the landmark Glasscheiben (4 Glass Panes), 1967, was executed at this time. Poised between architecture and painting, this seminal work invokes mythemes of glass, including the German Romantics' reverence for it as a mystical substance, the German Expressionists' fascination with it as the inculcation of a visionary new world, and salient modernist preoccupations with it, such as the embrace of transparency by Walter Gropius and his peers as integral to a utopian functionalist architecture. Concurrently, in a series of paintings titled Fenster (Window), begun in 1967, Richter directly addressed abstraction, modernism's primary pictorial language. Wittily and subtly reformulating the axiom that any representation is necessarily an abstraction, he simultaneously postulated the converse: abstraction is inherently referential. All languages of representation, the mimetic as well as the nonfigurative, are constructs whose formulations depend on the establishment of governing pictorial codes and conventions. More forthrightly, the monochrome, the paradigm of modernist abstraction, became the focus of Richter's attention in the Gray Paintings series, initiated in 1975. While invoking influential precedents by Kasimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and other pioneering early twentieth-century abstractionists, Richter's dour works ambiguously mourn what are irretrievably lost registers of pictorial experience: mimetic representation, individuated subjective expressiveness, psychic inscription, virtuoso craftsmanship, sensual gratification, etc. Subtle but telling differences among these reductive, manifestly impersonal works serve eloquently as
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"a memory of the past of painting, " rendering the ongoing series mute testimony to "the elegiac cond itions of painting."2 In one of the bleakest of his many commen taries accompanying his work, the artist himself described this serie s as "the welcome and only possible correlative for indiffere nce, apathy, refusal to make a statement, formlessness." Literally and metaphorically, Richter's works increasingly incorporated the walls on which they were hung and the spaces in which they confronted each othe r. For example, in 1981, for a two-person show with Georg Bas elitz in Dßsseldorf, he produced the first of the monumental tran sparent mirrors that appear intermittently thereafter in his oeuv re. Purged of all evidence of the maker's presence, they absorb as their content the ambient world before them in all its transitory sere ndipity. Subsuming spectators into that fluctuating matrix, depriving them of any clear, fixed, stable relationship to space and place, his mirrors seductively undermine the viewers' authorial indepen-denc e and autonomy by dissembling traditional hieratic perspectival systems of perception. Sieben stehende Scheiben (Seven Stan ding Panes), 2002, the first in a recent series of three-dimensional glass works stemming from those seminal sketches of 1965–67, conf ounds what is seen with what is represented. Filtering, refracting , and inflecting its environment, it affectlessly incorporates its surro undings, venturing yet another compelling if double-edged varia nt on the problematics of the in situ or environmental artwork. The strongly synesthetic basis of
Richter's practice, evident early in his career in a virtuoso interplay of disparate traditions and techniques, has turned increasin gly in recent years to a fusion of the normally discrete registers of architecture, painting, decor, and sculpture, as witnessed in the ense mble of paintings and colored mirrors he presented in a special pavi lion designed in collaboration
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with architect Paul Robbrecht at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1992. Interweaving abstract paintings, a floral still life, and two colored mirrors, this installation foregrounded protocols of exhibition and display. In this unprecedented spatialized ensemble Richter realized what, only several years before, he had described as a "dream of mine—that the pictures will become an environment or become architecture—that would be even more effective." "I do perceive an unchangeable basic attitude, a constant concern that runs through all my works," the artist averred in 1991.7 Now spanning some forty years, Richter's oeuvre confirms his continued engagement with fundamental pictorial problems in the broadest sense, for from his first exhibition in the Düsseldorf department store he has been highly attentive to issues of presentation and reception.8 At the same time, his unwavering commitment to the media and materials conventionally associated with the practice of painting—oil pigment, acrylic, watercolor—allows him to probe the viability of this art form by situating his work in dialogue with its most hallowed traditions. Richter's proposal for Dia:Beacon is an installation comprising a suite of six large reflecting glass surfaces, a fusion of the monochrome gray paintings that he has executed for almost thirty years and the earlier glass and mirror works originating in those prophetic sketches of 1965–67. He describes his hybrid colored mirrors as a "Neither/Nor," noting, "which is what I like about it."9 At his request the space where his work is installed has been redesigned so that the building's articulated structure of column and beam has been masked, transforming it into a more conventional white-cube gallery lit by a clerestory. The gray enameled panels of glass cantilevered from the walls on steel supports will be tilted at various angles.
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Their crepuscular depths not only reflect approaching visitors but respond to shifting weather condition s, as light is refracted through the high windows, conflating the regis ters of architecture, sculpture, painting, and photography into a synthetic environmental whole. The culmination of a pursuit that began with Glasscheiben, the Dia:Beacon project Six Gray Mirr ors (Sechs graue Spiegel), 2003, is more a sequel to than a reprise of Acht Grau (Eight Gray), 2002; commissioned for the Deutsch e Guggenheim, Berlin, in 2002 that grand, austere installation was as profoundly destabilizing in its relation to site and place as it was solemnly elegiac." Glas Symbol (alles sehen nichts beg reifen)" (Glass symbol [to see everything to understand nothing]) , Richter wrote in 1966 on the edge of one of the sketches limn ing Glasscheiben. This brief note succinctly formulates his abid ing doubt that perception will vouchsafe understanding, and, by extension, that light, with glass as its preeminent transmitter, can still serve as the embodiment of transcendental experience—i n short, that the Enlightenment project has any viability today. Drai ned of memory, repulsing history, these penumbral surfaces obscure as they reflect. At once somber veils and surfaces of pure unblemi shed radiance, they offer no reconciliation between the contrari es of opacity and reflection, painterly paradigms for the monochr ome and the window. Refuting the Enlightenment's belief in the power of illumination, and, with it, the promise of seeing as a tran scendental experience, Richter proffers a stance that is, however , less unrelievedly pessimistic than that which underpinned his Gray Paintings in the mid-1970s. A qualified skepticism informs his Neither/Nor.
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Robert Ryman
Artist Biography
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1930, Robert Ryman attended Tennessee Polytechnic Institute and the George Peabody College for Teachers. After serving in the United States Army Reserve Corps from 1950 to 1952, he moved to New York City, intending to pursue a career in jazz. In 1953, however, Ryman began working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, and that same year he was inspired to make his first painting. His first one-person exhibition was held at the Paul Bianchini Gallery, New York, in 1967. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ryman’s works were represented in Documenta, Kassel, Germany; the Venice Biennale; the Whitney Biennial, New York; as well as the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh. His first retrospective was organized by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1974; Dia mounted a show of his works in 1988. In 1993, a retrospective of his work was organized by the Tate Gallery, London. Ryman was elected vice president of art for the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, in 2003. In 2005, Ryman was named the Japan Art Association Praemium Imperiale Laureate and received the Roswitha Haftmann Prize. Ryman lives and works in New York City.
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Artist Statement The principal concern of Robert Ryman’s painting can be illuminated by an observation the artist made in the late 1960s, that “there is never a question of what to paint, but only how to paint.” For Ryman, this “how” of painting has always been about what he has described as “getting the paint across”—meaning, literally, getting the paint across the surface, but also, more idiomatically, getting the idea of the painting across to the viewer. “What is done with paint is the essence of all painting,” he once declared. “What painting is, is exactly what people see.” Occupied from the outset of his career in the late 1950s with ways of letting paint engage with surface, Ryman has continuously sought to approach a painting’s underlying support as a stage for the performative display of brush marks, strokes, and the exploration of texture. Thus each work is a surface rather than a “picture.” Its material qualities are determined by both the type of paint and the nature of its support, which not only provides a background but also filters and modifies the hue. Though Ryman considers white paint his medium, his paintings are only deceptively monochromatic: “The gray of the steel comes through; the
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brown of the corrugated paper comes through; the linen comes through, the cotton—all of those things are considered.” Ryman’s choice of white over other, less neutral colors may be paral- leled with his choice of square supports over rectangular, round, or irregular formats. By minimizing the presence of any distracting factors, the viewer’s focus on the painting’s internal field is intensified. Over the past fifty years, Ryman’s modes of paint application have been astonishingly various given his self-imposed, carefully considered constraints. His paintings range broadly, from gestural to self-effacing, from pristine to vigorously layered, from broadly brushed to delicately applied. Ryman’s repertoire of materials is just as assorted, including various types of industrial paints and rare pigments, supports, adhesives, and fixtures, such as fiberglass, steel, aluminum, and wood. In these galleries, which include works dating from 1958 through 2003, the artist chose to utilize site-specific elements, such as natural lighting and the shape and orientation of walls, to enhance the experience of every piece or
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set. In some cases, the room’s natural lighting has been modified by means of the installation of filters—a maneuver that favors the merging of the paintings’ edges into the wall. For a work like Vector (1975/1997), an almost dark environment invites the viewer to get closer to the work and even look at it sideways, so the qualities of surface—rather than the differences of color—may be observed. Varese Wall (1975) also exhibits the fine line between a painting and its backdrop. The work receives a fresh coat of paint each time it is exhibited, as do the gallery’s walls. Installed on seemingly provisional small foam blocks and composed of wooden door panels, it is nonetheless a wall, and thus engenders an amusing dialogue with the gallery wall on which it is braced. With his overriding interest in imbuing paint with the power to act on its own behalf, Ryman often introduces his own signature in his compositions, so that this inscription (“an accepted element of all painting” for Ryman) becomes an integral component of the work.
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Fred Sandback
Artist Biography
Fred Sandback was born in Bronxville, New York, in 1943. After receiving a BA in philosophy at Yale, he studied sculpture at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture. Sandback’s first one-person exhibitions were at the Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, and the Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich, both in 1968. Since then he has exhibited widely both in the United States and abroad. His work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual exhibition of 1968, the Biennale of Sydney in 1976, and the Biennial Exhibition of American Artists at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979. In 1981 Dia initiated and began maintaining a museum of his work, the Fred Sandback Museum in Winchendon, Massachusetts, which remained open until 1996. Dia presented exhibitions of his works in 1988 and in 1996–97. Sandback died in 2003 in New York City.
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Artist Statement
“The first sculpture I made with a piece of string
this site: “I don’t feel that once a piece is made,
and a little wire was the outline of a rectangular
then it’s done with,” he explained. “I continue
solid . . . lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but
to work with older schemata and formats, and
it seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for me,”
often begin to get what I want out of them only
Fred Sandback recalled of a seminal sculpture he
after many reworkings. Though the same sub-
executed in 1966. In wanting to create sculpture
structure may be used many times, it appears
that did not have an inside, he found the means
each time in a new light. It is the measure of the
to “assert a certain place or volume in its full
relative success of a piece, not necessarily that
materiality without occupying and obscuring
a new structure emerges, but that a familiar one
it.” For more than three decades, Sandback
attains, in its present manifestation, a particular
pursued these formative insights with remarkable
vibrancy or actuality.” Thus, not only the specific
consistency and inventiveness, creating a body
measurements and proportions but also the tone
of work that is informed by a signature style and
or hue of the yarn may have been adapted or
yet, as a result of the close interdependence of
altered as the artist intuitively adjusted a work to
each piece with the architectural site in which
both its neighbors and its new location.
it is realized, ever different in its manifestations. In these sculptures, space is both defined and For his presentation at Dia:Beacon, Sandback
imbued with an incorporeal palpability, so that
seamlessly integrated older pieces with newer
often the spectator concentrates less on the
ones to orient and ground the viewer in a par-
edges, on the yarn demarcating the forms, than
ticular place, a specific situation. Rigorously
on the planar or volumetric components con-
selected from his deliberately circumscribed
tained within. Whether transparent geometries,
lexicon, each sculpture was newly parsed for
as in Untitled (1977)— a two-part vertical con-
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struction—and Untitled (1996)—two triangles—or
line than that produced by metal, and its matte
simple linear trajectories, as in Untitled (1996)—a
surface absorbs rather than reflects light. When
six-part vertical construction— Sandback’s sculp-
required, a more strongly accentuated edge can
tures unequivocally occupy the same physical site
easily be made by doubling or trebling the strings.
as the viewer. Inhabiting what the artist dubbed “pedestrian space”—the ordinary matter-of-fact
In his exploration of physical relationships via
space coextensive with that of the spectator and
the immaterial rather than the concrete—via the
of the site— they reveal themselves over time,
interplay of vacancy and volume—Sandback
from different vantages, and according to different
recognized that the illusory and the factual are
perspectives. Yet his work is never environmental,
inextricably intertwined. “Fact and illusion are
if such a term implies transforming the context.
equivalents,” he asserted. “Trying to weed one out
On the contrary, as he stated, “It incorporates
in favor of the other is dealing with an incomplete
specific parts of the environment, but it’s always
situation.” Nevertheless, he stressed that “in no
coexistent with that environment, as opposed to
way is my work illusionistic. Illusionistic art refers
overwhelming or destroying that environment in
you away from its factual existence towards
favor of a different one.”
something else. My work is full of illusions, but they don’t refer to anything.”
All the works on view are made from acrylic yarn, a material that carried no significant connotations for Sandback. He preferred it over other similar materials, such as wire, because its soft, slightly fuzzy contours conjure a less crisp, less rigid
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Richard Serra
Artist Biography
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939. After graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1961, with a degree in English, he studied art at Yale University until 1964, taking classes with Josef Albers and others. Serra spent two years traveling in Europe before settling in 1966 in New York City, where he continues to live and work. He began to show his work in museums and galleries in New York in 1967, and since then he has exhibited extensively throughout the world, including representation in Documentas 5 (1972), 6 (1977), 7 (1982), and 8 (1987), in Kassel, Germany; the Venice Biennales of 1980, 1984, 2001, and 2013; and multiple editions of the Whitney Biennial, New York. Retrospectives of Serra’s work have been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1986 and 2007). He has also created numerous site-specific sculptures in public and private venues in both North America and Europe. In 1997, Serra’s first Torqued Ellipses were presented at Dia Center for the Arts, New York. 77
Artist Statement "What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are." —Richard Serra
Concerns quintessentially sculptural have engaged Richard Serra for more than thirty years, although as a young artist in New York in the late 1960s he was strongly affected by the work of a number of contemporary dancers, above all Yvonne Rainer. Such work prompted him to consider “ways of relating movement to material and space,” he has explained, in that it allowed him “to think about sculpture in an open and extended field in a way that is precluded when dealing with sculpture as an autonomous object. . . . I found very important the idea of the body passing through space, and the body’s movement not being predicated totally on image or sight or optical awareness, but on physical awareness in relation to space, place, time, movement.” A visit to a number of Zen gardens in Kyoto while on a trip to Japan in 1970 reinforced Serra’s growing preoccupation with work that was defined through the processes of its reception. There he discovered that “your vision is peripatetic and not reduced to framing an image. It includes and is dependent upon memory and anticipation. . . . The relationship of time, space, walking, and looking—particularly in arcs and circles—constitutes the only 78
way you can see certain Japanese gardens.” Redefining this requirement of extended temporality and nomadic vision, Serra’s recent series of Torqued Ellipses elaborates concerns with orientation and movement into tightly contained sculptures that radically challenge modernist notions of sculptural space. For in these works space shifts and moves in wholly unpredictable and unprecedented ways: so destabilizing yet so beguiling is this sensation of movement that the spectator quickly gets caught up in an exploration of extended duration. Rolled-steel plates, each two inches thick and weighing twenty tons, stand abutted. This forthright, direct presentation, characteristic of Serra’s aesthetic, gives little hint of the fundamental newness and potency of the experience offered in these monumental works—and also fails to betray the prolonged and difficult process of their
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realization. By Serra’s account, the initial idea for this body of work was breathtakingly simple: take an elliptical volume of space and torque it. After an inspirational visit to Francesco Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane church in Rome in the early 1990s, he began to try to devise such a space. Experimenting with two small wood ellipses held parallel but angled to each other by a dowel, he created a “wheel” from which he cut and rolled a template in lead. By varying the angles at which the ellipses were set to each other, or by modifying the overall proportions, or by introducing a second component within the first, he gradually assembled some thirty models for large-scale sculptures. With the aid of a computer program, he then calculated the positions and angles at which sheets of steel would need to be bent in order to realize such works at full scale. The problem next confronting Serra was to find a steel mill capable of this
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exacting task, a difficulty compounded by the fact that the job required a special type of roller and by his need to work with the maximum-size plate available, that is, with sixteen-foot sheets. After considerable research, it became apparent that there were perhaps only two rollers in existence that could carry out the project. Beth Ship, a shipyard and rolling mill outside Baltimore, agreed to undertake the work without fully comprehending the complexities entailed. Several trials were required before the first sculpture was completed, in late 1996. The results are informed by his signature clarity, stringency, and rigor. In tracking the exteriors of the sculptures (in the particular configuration installed in the former train depot at Beacon), one is always in close proximity to the steel skins, and this sets up a dramatic tension between one’s bodily awareness and one’s vision. Inside, the converse of what is occurring at one’s feet seems to be happening over
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one’s head; the works consequently generate bodily based movements and responses that are neither necessarily nor exclusively initiated by looking or seeing. Though it is arguably even more difficult to follow visually the motion of the curving walls leading to the interior of these works than to track the exterior modulations, only there do the footprint of the sculpture and the shape of its upper profile become evident. Each is a perfect ellipse, and each has the same radius; these ellipses never align, however, instead angling one to the other. Therein lie both the structural and the compositional sources of such unprecedented spatial experiences. Union of the Torus and the Sphere (2001), one of the latest works to extend this vocabulary, presents a closed form, an exception in Serra’s oeuvre: extravagantly tilting, obviously hollow, it encourages a kind of vertigo as the viewer edges around the deliberately constricted space, a site selected by the artist for its snug fit and for the dramatic immediacy of the encounter. In contrast, Elevational Wedge (2001) evolves directly from earlier bodies of work, as it subtly alters the proportions of the room in which it is located, testing perceptual and conceptual apprehension of the relation between the assumed horizontal plane and the ground, and tempering routine assumptions regarding the built environment and the spectator’s relationship to it.
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Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson
Artist Biography
Robert Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1938. In 1953, as a high-school student, he won a scholarship to the Art Students League of New York, where he studied in the evenings for the next two years, also taking classes at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1956. Smithson’s first solo exhibition was in 1959, at the Artists Gallery, New York. In 1964, he began to produce what he considered his first mature works of writing and sculpture. In 1973, Smithson died in a plane crash in Amarillo, Texas, while working on the earthwork Amarillo Ramp. Major retrospectives of his work have been orga- nized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (1980); the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (1999); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2004). Recent solo exhibitions on his work were held at the Dallas Museum of Art (2013–14) and the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey (2014). In 1999, through the generosity of the artist Nancy Holt, Smithson’s widow, and the Estate of Robert Smithson, the artist’s work Spiral Jetty (1970), located at Rozel Point peninsula on Great Salt Lake, Utah, was donated to Dia Art Foundation.
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Artist Statement Robert Smithson focused his short but
example is Untitled (1966), a modular,
influential career on a reconsideration
composite volume that incorporates
of the nature of sculpture—or, rather,
opaque and reflective surfaces. The
of sculpture in relation to nature.
cross-shaped whole, which consists
Created during a brief period from the
of organically merged cubes, conjures
mid-1960s to the early 1970s, Smith-
a deliberately static, yet paradoxical,
son’s provocative works spanned a
volume: as the structure seems to
variety of sites beyond the museum
expand, its consistency is undermined
and gallery, from magazine pages
by the mirroring surfaces on its sides.
to abandoned industrial and natural
As part of a series of stepped pieces,
wastelands. Deeply informed by sci-
each module results from the applica-
ence in its popularized forms (such as
tion of a simple mathematical principle
science fiction literature and cinema,
to create a contrapuntal system, literal
encyclopedic collections, even natural
and symbolic, dynamic and still. A
history museums), his art focuses on
similar principle operates Four-Sided
processes of accumulation, displace-
Vortex (1965–67), where a tetragonal
ment, and entropy in order to reveal
container encloses an abyssal space,
the contradictions in our visible world.
reformulating optical systems and protocols in a structure that opens into
In his first mature works, Smithson
endless vanishing points. The viewer’s
used crystalline formations and
gaze is multiplied and engulfed as she
structures as symbolic models for the
comes closer to scrutinize the object,
composition of his sculptures. One
which thereby dodges examination.
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As the structure remains painstakingly still,
As
its experience involves decomposition—an
its e
entropy in perception.
entr
“A crystal,” observed Smithson, “can be
“A c
mapped out.” In fact, the study of crystallog-
map
raphy led him to the formulation of the concept
rap
of Nonsite as a physical synthesis of the map
of N
and the mapped, or, as he put it, “a container
and
within another container—the room.” Techni-
with
cally, he defined the Nonsite as
call
“an indoor Earthwork,” an elusive “three-di-
“an
mensional map of a site.” “Instead
men
of putting a work of art on some land, some
of p
land is put into the work of art. Between the
land
site and the Nonsite one may lapse into places
site
of little organization and no direction.” Some
of li
remarkable examples related to Smithson’s
rem
Nonsites may be found in this gallery. Gravel
Non
Mirrors with Cracks and Dust (1968), for
Mir
instance, contains gravel collected at Bergen
inst
Hill, New Jersey. The piece incorporates
Hill,
85
the
six pairs of mirrors that occupy the
form Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis)
es of
junction of floor and wall, with piles
(1969) are layered both literally and
ntion
of gravel dropped on them with the
figuratively. As the title implies, the
ions
intention of cracking the glass. The
sculpture is to be seen not simply as
ts in
reflections create the illusion that
a pile of sharp, transparent fragments
ace.
the work exists in and encompasses
but also as a map of a legendary lost
rors,
an expansive space. Symmetrically
continent. “It is a shimmering collapse
with
duplicated by the mirrors, the fissures
of decreated sharpness . . . arrested
stine
of cracked glass together with the
by the friction of stability.” Similar to
ating
dust from the gravel mar the pristine
other fictive territories, Map of Broken
ality
reflective surfaces, further compli-
Glass foreshadows Smithson’s most
Two
cating the multifaceted interplay of
ambitious realization: a spiral-shaped
ater,
materiality and illusion, presence and
artificial peninsula made out of mud,
sely
absence. Two related sculptures, made
salt crystals, and basalt rocks named
irror
one year later, also incorporate mirrors
Spiral Jetty, which he built in the Great
969)
and loosely assembled raw mate-
Salt Lake, Utah, in 1970.
pre-
rial—Closed Mirror Square (Cayuga Salt Mine Project) (1969) and Leaning Mirror (1969).
less “I like landscapes that suggest prehistory,” said Smithson. The countless fragments of shattered glass that
86
Lawrence Weiner
Artist
Biography
Lawrence Weiner was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1942. After graduating from high school, he traveled across the country to California, where, in 1960, he used dynamite to create his Cratering Pieces in Mill Valley. His first solo show was held at the Seth Siegelaub Gallery, New York, in 1964. In 1968 he presented Statements, a book of works composed solely of language, and since then he has continued to explore the capacities and presentation of language as a sculptural medium. Weiner has had solo exhibitions at venues including the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2000); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1991 and 1994); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (1990); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007). In 1991 Dia presented his work Displacement and published an accompanying book of the same title. Weiner currently lives in New York City and Amsterdam.
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Artist Statement
Lawrence Weiner formulates his work through language. For him, language provides a medium for representing material relationships in the external world as objectively as possible. His statements are produced with minimal traces of authorial subjectivity—of the artist’s hand, skill, or taste. “Art is not a metaphor upon the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to objects in relation to human beings but a representation of an empirical existing fact,” Weiner argues. “It does not tell the potential and capabilities of an object (material) but presents a reality concerning that relationship.” Weiner contends that an individual artwork need never be actually realized, since “each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.” The artist’s Statement of Intent from 1969 begins: 1. THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE WORK 2. THE WORK MAY BE FABRICATED 3. THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT Because Weiner’s works are conceived as nonspecific representations of states or processes rather than material realities, they are capable of countless manifestations. Although their content is general and abstract, it is inextricable from their presentation and context. Seldom site-specific, these works can be site-related—that is, conceived in relation to the venue and circumstance. Whether the letters are stenciled, painted, or mounted in relief, as well as the choice of typeface, size, placement, and color, varies with the site. The context—whether a poster, artist’s book, gallery, or public arena—also inflects the work’s meaning. The works index not only sculpture’s materials but its relationships of space, structure, and mass. For 5 Figures of Structure (1987), five descriptive statements are matched by corresponding diagrams that give geometric shape to these words. When first realized in Chicago, the words were outlined, in charcoal, on textured gallery walls. Reinstalled in New York in 1999, in the same Franklin Gothic Condensed typeface (Weiner’s customary sans-serif script), the work appeared as solid black letters
88
compacted into dense blocks stacked vertically on a single wall, the relevant diagrams adjacent. At Dia:Beacon, the visual and textual “figures” are cadenced to mime the spatial and linguistic conditions and conventions they embody, a coming together of text, inscription, context, and site. Weiner has said, “I really believe that the subject matter of my art is—art.” While sculpture has become his primary focus, earlier pieces addressed painting, the artist’s medium of choice in his early days. Presenting a single formula that equals the work, ONE QUART EXTERIOR GREEN INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL (1968) alludes particularly to the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock. Weiner actually fabricated this work, as he did with a few others. In hurling paint against the facade of his home, he effectively extended Pollock’s gesture into the real world. Various and versatile, Weiner’s works at Dia:Beacon appear at physically dispersed sites—among the sculpture galleries, in a stairwell, and in the café/bookshop. Suspended high over the admissions desk, the Statement of Intent attests to his belief that “art always institutionalizes itself,” irrespective of placement. It also reminds visitors that the work of art is completed in its reception, understanding, and potential enactment.
89
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3 Beekman Street Beacon New York 12508 845 400 0100 www.diaart.org