A visit to Dia:Beacon

On October 25 I paid my first visit to the Dia:Beacon art museum, prompted by an article called “Art and Calm Just Up the Hudson.” I’d heard about the museum but never took the trouble to go there. (The trip takes about 80 minutes on the Hudson line of Metro North. For about $27 you can get a ticket that covers the round trip plus museum admission.)

Leaving the train in Beacon, I felt as if I was a long way from the city. Canada geese stalked along the riverside, and the steady rain brought out the smells of grass and herbs. Lichen only grows where the air is very clean, and here you can see it on rocks and fence rails.

It’s a short walk to the brick building that once housed a Nabisco factory and is now the home of Dia:Beacon. You don’t realize how enormous the building is until you get inside. The sheer scale of it makes an impression, and the museum is able to accommodate sculptures and installations that would be close to impossible in the city.

Dia:Beacon’s attitude to visitors is an odd combination of overprotectiveness and laissez-faire. Backpacks must be checked, cameras and even pens are not allowed in the galleries, and numerous signs warn you not to touch the artwork. Yet guards are scarce, there are no electric eyes and alarms, and protective plexiglass is almost nonexistent, except to keep visitors from falling into the enormous geometric pits that artist Michael Heizer has built into the ground floor. (This picture gives little sense of how gloomy and impressive these are.) There are many children with their parents, and some of the sculpture almost begs to be touched.

The biggest works of art were the ones that most impressed me, although you do get a strong sense of something — maybe futility — from walking down a gallery as long as a football field that is filled with nothing but square white paintings. On the top floor is a titanic bronze spider by Louise Bourgeois that recalled the malevolent Shelob in The Lord of the Rings. There is also Michael Heizer’s “Negative Megalith No. 5,” a huge upended boulder that is neatly fitted into a white wall. Walk up close and you get the pleasingly scary sensation that it might topple over and crush you.

It was a treat to walk inside each of the rings of steel that Richard Serra calls “Torqued Ellipses.” One of them is a ring within a ring, so that you make your way carefully between two curling, sloping, rust-streaked walls. The sensation was strangely familiar, and I realized that it reminded me of how it felt in 1990 to walk between the two high sloping stone walls that surround the main enclosure at the ruins of Great Zimbabwe.