We ended up with a welcome day to ourselves on Friday, since we had both taken the day off, thinking we’d head to Iowa for a wedding. Between the incredible flooding and damage being dealt with in Cedar Rapids and the ungodly expensive plane tickets, we nixed those plans. Instead, we headed up to the Dia:Beacon first thing Friday morning.

The museum itself is beautiful, and right along the Hudson. One of the perks of doing anything with Matt is that you have your own personal photographer for the day.

The museum is gorgeous. It used to be a box printing factory and the building is a pretty staggering 240,000 square feet. Their permanent collection includes work by Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol; many of the key large scale features of any good American-art-since-1945 class.

There is also an outstanding exhibit of Louise Bourgeois work upstairs in a sort of attic-like space with the original exposed brick walls. Her cast bronze pieces that resemble hornets’ nests are suspended from the beams, and one of her now somewhat classic spiders is carefully nested into a back room, leaving us wondering how exactly they managed to fit it in there. (The image I linked to here is a different spider than what’s there right now, but the same space.)

It takes the right approach to installation art to make a statement I actually appreciate. Oftentimes the conceptual element far outweighs the execution, leaving you with a nasty I’m-not-quite-sure-that’s-art feeling. The Tacita Dean exhibit in the basement of the Dia:Beacon is not one of those installation pieces. It is breathtaking. The Dia has given her almost the entire floor: as you come to the bottom of the steps, you enter a huge, cavernous room with ceilings on the order of 20 feet high and concrete columns throughout…and there are absolutely no lights on. As you wander through the space (and you have to wander because your eyes can barely adjust), there are 6 projectors showing video of Merce Cunningham doing a piece called Stillness projected onto 6 small panels (about 6′ x 6′ each). The video is just Cunningham shifting into different simple seated positions every 45 seconds or so, raising his hand to his chin or crossing his legs. Otherwise, he’s completely still. It’s a powerful piece, I think because it has such an instant physical effect on anyone in the room. You have to slow down. You have to move carefully.

After we made our way through the basement, to the outdoor side garden with a bizarre sound installation (imagine the most annoying birds you can think of from some sort of tropical jungle, yet you’re in Beacon, NY and the Hudson is just on the other side of those trees), we stopped into the bookshop to wait out a brief shower. While the shop hosted the usual selection of art books and a great selection of texts on modern sculpture, there was also an impressive assortment of small fine press chapbooks. I saw a lot of books that were definitely on the order of what I want to be doing over the course of the next several years: small, handmade, limited edition (anywhere from 100 to 350 in an edition, in this case) and beautifully designed collections of poetry, imagery, and essays.

We spent the afternoon walking through downtown Beacon and had a wonderful lunch, some amazing sorbet, and enjoyed being able to walk down the street and actually have room to let our arms swing at our sides. We needed a break.

We popped back into Grand Central after half-napping on the Metro North train all the way back, and decided to stop at Franklin Park when we got back to the neighborhood…a little too nice!

And, while I’m still terrible at calming down and just enjoying the moment, it’s been a fantastic weekend. I’m getting myself ramped up for the newfound time I’ll have to devote to books & printing, come August, and still kind of amazed, terrified, invigorated, and exhilarated that all of this is actually happening!

From Blossoms
By Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
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