Dia:Beacon

At the weekend I made a trip to upstate New York and visited the Dia contemporary art museum in Beacon. It’s an easy 90 minute train ride from Grand Central, with some pretty stunning views of the Hudson along the way. The gallery is a 300,000-square-foot converted printing factory and houses works of art too big to be shown in conventional gallery spaces. It’s a truly mind-blowing place. The scale of the building and the art within is just enormous. Top tip – don’t wear heels. There’s room upon room of works by Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Dan Flavin and Louise Bourgeois to name but a few.

Many of the pieces have been created specifically for the space: with Michael Heizer’s North, East, South, West and Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses being particularly memorable (if not a little distubing, claustrophobics beware). The graphic designer geek inside me also loved the Sol Lewitt wall drawings which occupy several rooms in the gallery.

I was also struck by the specially comissioned work by Zoe Leonard, who was asked to respond the the museum’s collection and location. I thought it was a good example of work that would pass the ‘would you understand the idea if it was described over the phone test’, something we strive to achieve in our work at TP. The piece, You see I am here after all, is made up of several thousand vintage postcards of Niagara Falls. The postcards, which were mostly bought online from sites like eBay, are arranged in a grid and positioned horizontally in accordance to their geographical location and vertically in accordance to the camera angle. The resulting visual impact of the piece is fascinating: a sea of sameness, but also every part a little different.

And then after all that walking, and all that thinking, there was a nice shop and a café at the end. Lovely.