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Beacon, Barney and Baker

If New York didn't know about Dia:Beacon before, surely it does now. A massive Richard Serra piece dwarfs a black-clad gallery-goer on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, which inside runs a 6,500-word opus by Michael Kimmelman all about the Dia Foundation and the new home for its permanent collection.

The piece is nothing if not gushing: at parts it reads more like a press release than a critically-reported magazine feature. "The Greatest Generation," it's called on the cover:

The most influential American artists weren't Pollock or De Kooning. They were the ones who came next – Minimalists, Conceptualists, Earth artists – who redefined what art was and who are now, finally, celebrated in a spectacular new museum.

Granted, probably Kimmelman didn't write the cover blurb. But he does contrive to put Dia (and Barnes & Noble) chairman Leonard Riggio in a very favourable light, despite being confronted with a man whose quotes would be considered self-parody if he weren't so serious:

"When Jay Chiat asked me to join the board, I asked the question everybody asks: 'What is Dia?' He told me it had great parties. My epiphany came when I saw Serra's 'Torqued Ellipses.' I immediately got the idea of the single artist space, seeing art in its own environment. I just got the concept of Judd, Flavin and all the others without even seeing their work yet."

One fears to think what Donald Judd would have said about a man who "just got" his work before seeing any of it, but Kimmelman doesn't even pause to catch his breath before Riggio continues, po-facedly glossing some of the most élitist artists in the history of the world as champions of the people.

"I went to Marfa and Roden Crater and visited Heizer in Nevada, and I thought these artists recognized the genius of the average American. Judd built his museum in a little Texas town. Turrell was hiring Native Americans from the area. Heizer was working with local people."

Sure, Leonard. Ask the "local people" of Marfa what they think of Donald Judd. (Be prepared for invective of a vehemence you probably never normally encounter.) Ask yourself, for one minute, who else Turrell and Heizer could have been working with, given where they were constructing their projects. These are great artists, but recognising the genius of the average American was never what they were about.

Similarly, Kimmelman seems to have written his article not for the general public, but for a very small number of art-world grandees. The piece concludes with our intrepid reporter standing in the middle of the new museum, its walls still bare, the museum director by his side. Here's what we learn:

To get acclimated to Beacon is to become attuned to an aesthetic of plainspoken industrial spaces, simple forms and a kind of meditative silence.

Sure, Michael. "Meditative silence" – that's bound to be what most of us find when we squeeze through the "tight vestibule like a small compression chamber" which Robert Irwin has designed as the entrance to the museum.It's "akin to the entrance at the Guggenheim in Manhattan," we're told, an entrance which is usually so bottlenecked that a line ends up running down Fifth Avenue, often stretching around the corner onto 88th Street.

I saw such a line myself on Saturday: I went up to the Guggenheim to check out the Matthew Barney show which they have on there at the moment. It opened back in February, and it's on until June, but even so, the crowds were huge and the lines for people to pay their $15 entrance charge long and chaotic. If this is the kind of response that Matthew Barney gets, imagine what Serra, Judd, Warhol, Heizer et al will elicit up in Beacon. "Meditative silence"? I think not.

I saw the Barney show just after finishing A Box of Matches, the new book by Nicholson Baker, and it's interesting to see how one can consider both Barney and Baker to be direct descendants of the Dia's artists.

Few, if any, artists were ever self-declared minimalists: no one liked the term much, and it only really caught on by default because the alternatives (like "literalism") were even worse. One of the biggest problems with the name is that it conceals what Kimmelman refers to as the work's "crazy scale and wild ambition". These are artists who blast tons of rock, who change the shape of ancient volcanic craters, who drill holes a kilometer deep into the Kassel earth, who buy up entire Texan towns: both ego and hubris are outsized in most of them, from Judd all the way to Serra. Michael Heizer's 20-foot-deep holes, lined in Cor-Ten steel, stand in relation to your average Pollock much as the Pollock would to a Van Gogh. And those holes are as nothing compared to Heizer's City.

Matthew Barney is one of the few artists of the next generation to make work of similar ambition and magnitude. The Cremaster cycle, a series of five films and associated artworks which rival Wagner's Ring cycle in length and complexity, fills essentially all of the Guggenheim. The show isn't a retrospective, it's one work. Ain't many other artists, of any generation, who need an entire museum just to show one piece.

Whatever you think of the Cremaster cycle, there's no denying the way in which the sheer scale of the work awes the spectator. The production values, as they say in Hollywood, are about as high as these things get: no starving-artist cost-cutting here. Walk in to the Guggenheim, and it's almost as though the long circular drain running down the museum's famous spiral was built to collect not liquid vaseline, but rather the money which is pouring off every surface in the exhibition.

Meanwhile, Nicholson Baker has taken the simplicity of minimalism, its focus on the kind of things we normally don't even bother to see, and transferred it into print. This is minimalist minimalism, in all senses: the book is very short, is broken up into tiny little parts, only a few pages each, and is concerned with the minutiae of life, the kind of things we never stop to think about in any detail: how we take our pajama bottoms off, or the sequence of actions we go through when we take a used coffee filter out of the machine in the morning.

Baker also has a nice line in wry punchlines: at the end of one of his finely-observed and meandering paragraphs, he'll suddenly come out with a phrase like "no animal likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck". Here's an example:

Once I told a doctor from France that I was able to wake myself up at a preset time with the help of nightmares, and he said that his father had been a soldier who had taught him that if you want to wake up at, say, five in the morning, you simply bang your head five times on the pillow before you close your eyes, and you will wake up at five. "But how do you manage five-thirty?" I asked the doctor with a crafty look. He said that in order to wake at five-thirty you just had to do something else with your head, like jut your chin a little, to signify the added fraction, and your sleeping self would do the math for you. I've tried it and it works except that it's much harder to go to sleep because your head has just been hit repeatedly against the pillow.

Most of the time, however, Baker is doing much the same thing that people like Robert Irwin and John Cage did in the 70s. Irwin would try to focus attention on elements of a space which are normally ignored; Cage brought to notice the kind of sounds which were never previously considered eligible to be classed as music. More generally, all three are concerned with the processes of perception, and with foregrounding the normally overlooked.

At Dia, Irwin has designed the car park: a characteristically oblique act in that most people will rush through it on their way to the Serras, barely giving it a moment's thought. But it's good to see that the legacy of minimalism continues to run both ways, or even more. You could set up a kind of matrix, with a simple/complex distinction on one axis ranged against an effacement/hubris distinction on the other. Irwin would be simple effacement; Serra would be simple hubris; Baker would be complex effacement; and Barney would be complex hubris. At Dia, they like to keep things simple. Looking at contemporary work, however, it looks like complexity is more the order of the day.

Posted by Felix at 12:35 EST

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