Storm King Arts Center & Dia Beacon
Storm King Arts Center and Dia Beacon are two ridiculously good spots for modern art and sculpture that make a great trip to the country for art lovers, nature lovers and foodies alike.
Located in the Hudson Valley, NY, an hour north of NYC and 2 1/2 hours from Philly, Storm King showcases monumental sculpture laid out over a 500 acre site. Dia Beacon is an old Nabisco box factory with some site-specific art and minimalist masterpieces from the biggest names of the 1960s onwards. While you could visit them both in one day trip, it's better to stay over at the Roundhouse hotel, in the uber-charming hamlet of Beacon, NY and have dinner at Cafe Americord. Modern art lovers and nature lovers will all be happy with this weekend itinerary.
Storm King Art Center
E=MC2 (forground) Figolu (background), Mark di Suvero
Storm King is a massive, 500-acre outdoor museum that situates monumental sculpture, land art and intimate installations among the rolling hills of the Hudson Valley. Sculptures by Mark di Suvero - E=MC2 and Figolu - form a central axis for the site and play with the notion of size and scale in really successful ways. Borrowing from the Japanese idea of Shakkei, or 'borrowed scenery,' these sculptures maximize the natural setting to 'borrow' the landscape in the distance that frames the works beautifully. The work in the foreground is approximately 100' tall, and the one in the background is about 50' tall, but their size and scale appear to change as you engage with them from afar then individually up close.
Storm King Wall
Storm King Wall, Andy Goldsworthy
My favorite work at Storm King is Andy Goldsworthy's Storm King Wall, a 2,300' long dry stone wall, a technique of fitting field stone without mortar used in British agriculture. Instead of running straight as a land border, this wall snakes around existing tree trunks, runs down a hill to the edge of a pond, only to pop up the other side of the water to continue up the other hill to the highway. Rather than man controlling the environment, nature dictates the path of this wall. I find it playful - cleverly constructed with historical references - and the best of 'site specific' art.
My bike along Goldsworthy's Storm King Wall
The best way to get around Storm King is to bike. While I cringe every time at the rental rates, I tell myself I'm just maximizing my time and allowing me to retrace my steps in case I missed something great - something you might not do on foot. That being said, most people walk and either way, it's good exercise and fresh air.
Maya Lin's Wave Field is a piece of land art that creates seven, 400 foot long 'waves' in the earth, each between 10 and 15 feet tall - echoing the height and spacing as waves in the mid-ocean. Sailors will immediately recognize the swells and cadence of the waves. This environmentally-minded work is the old gravel pit for the highway construction alongside Storm King and uses natural grasses and water drainage to make the work sustainable. Lin also created the controversial, but ultimately very successful, Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC when she was still a college student.
Calder's art is recognizable from literally a mile away...the blazing red color, the abstract forms and the visual punch of Calder's sculptural vocabulary. The work has pride of place next to the museum building, at the start of the great south field, and forms part of the site's central axis and sits like a red buoy against the bright green grass of the meadow.
Dia Beacon
If your first reaction is "when is someone gonna sweep up all that broken glass" - then let's discuss modern art, conceptual art or anything called contemporary art that does not have an overt text, context or subtext. Simply put, most of the art at Dia Beacon is about the environment and your engagement with the piece. This means that you almost have to see it for yourself to really 'get' the work - even if you don't get it at all. Most all of us search for (or impose) biographical or societal meaning to art - for not doing so is disconcerting and leaves us feeling unresolved. Here, Smithson gives us a reference in the title of the work to the lost city of Atlantis and Plato. While mapmaking is all about borders and geography, what does it mean for Smithson to lay out a map of a fictional place, with a Classical allusion, in broken glass no less? Hold that thought as we look at more art at Dia Beacon...
John Chamberlain's smashed-up car sculptures are as instantly recognizable as Calder's mobiles. Part abstract impressionist, part pop art, Chamberlain plays with familiar objects - here automobiles - and smashes, twists and crushes them into art. If you're looking for meaning in the title, here 'castle in the air,' you're going to be disappointed again as most of his works are names pulled at random. The trick for me is that Chamberlain takes a horrific idea - a twisted car crash - and turns it into a human-sized, candy-colored object that is both familiar and really strange at the same time.
Dia Beacon is a former industrial site, spanning 300,000 square feet, with tons of natural daylight thanks to 34,000 square feet of skylights. This abundant light allows works to be lit naturally, without pin spot or atmospheric illumination. As a result, works like Richter's Six Gray Mirrors work so well in this environment. The rectangular, white space is framed on all sides by these huge mirrors whose smooth, grey surface from one angle becomes a series of tones from white to black as images reflect on the viewer. Somewhere between painting and photography, this series of panels subvert our expectations for minimalist art while providing insight and meaning through surface alone.
One of Dia Beacon's permanent installations is Michael Heizer's North, South, East, West - a series of geometric pits in the floor of the building. Heizer uses the negative space, the area of air formed by the shape, as the focus rather than the mass or volume of a more traditional sculpture. Each pit is 20 feet deep and the125 foot wall of windows helps to illuminate the work and give shape to the voids.
Dan Flavin is one of my favorite minimalist artists who uses fluorescent bulbs to create what can best be described as light sculptures. Using commercially available white and colored tube lights, Flavin sets up formal grids, or sometimes even a single bar of light, to illuminate a space's architecture and create intimate, spiritual spaces where light, color and shadow are the subjects of his work. Deceptively simple at first, I find Flavin's work endlessly fascinating.
Torqued Ellipse, Richard Serra
Apologies for my squeaky shoes, but Dia Beacon is home to several of Serra's large-scale, cor-ten steel sculptures that are a joy to explore. Part maze, part sculpture, Serra's work is said to engage "ways of relating movement to material and space." I find these sculptures to be a healthy mix of claustrophobic and coddling - each creating a space and confinement at the same time. While suitable for outdoor exhibition, these works are a great example of what makes Dia Beacon special; a venue that houses work whose experience is only heightened by the surroundings, not detract from it. A rarity in the art world, which makes this place such a gem.