(For better or worse Robert Irwin–think Getty Garden–landscaped the museum)
I always mistakenly assumed that the Dia Foundation was founded in order to house the work of the Minimalist artists of the 1960s, and perhaps subsequently related movements. Somehow I pictured a figure such as Donald Judd arranging it. While this is not actually true, viewing the collection of the Dia Beacon, located an hour or so upstate in the run-down town of Beacon itself, rendered the mistake an understandable one. The Dia collection seemed to foreshadow the recent trend I have noticed amongst wealthy collectors showing in public spaces (Eli Broad for example), of collecting numerous works by the same artist. Never have I seen so many Judd’s, Flavin’s, Nauman’s, or Smithson’s shown together. The space itself reminds me of PS1, an “alternative” building turned into a clean, well-lit venue with huge rooms and long hallways, as opposed to the traditional museum or gallery cube. While PS1 used to be an elementary school and now haunts contemporary artwork with its institutional architecture, the Dia used to be a Nabisco printing plant built in the 1920s that now cozily embraces the geometric artwork it houses—the industrial nature of the building, all brick and cement, suits the industrial material choices of the artists inside. Dia is also a convincingly coordinated collection. While the artists are not necessarily like each other, they share the same intellectual concerns. Wandering through it feels like looking at the problems of an era dissected visually by various minds, and though the concerns were similar the individual answers appear to have been different.