Lee, from 1969, comprises some 20,000 reedy steel poles planted in a foot-tall beach of golden sand, and resonates with Smithson’s “non-sites” of dirt and gravel, made the very same year and on display nearby. Yet Asian art was well out of Dia’s initial purview, and his introduction here should prompt a serious rethinking of the aims of elemental sculpture in the years around 1970. Lee is among Asia’s most renowned living artists, with a permanent museum devoted to his work in Japan and a major retrospective up now at the Centre Pompidou’s satellite in Metz, France. While Posenenske has been a specialist’s name up to now, Mr. Smaller than the Posenenske retrospective, but more radical in its implications for the museum, is a stellar presentation of five sculptures by the Paris-based Korean artist Lee Ufan.
At Dia, some lightly patinated prototypes of the Square Tubes stand in the same gallery as freshly fabricated sculptures - each as much a “Posenenske” as any other. Where Judd, Flavin and others made small editions that now sell for elevated sums, Posenenske’s were unlimited and sold at cost. To see them here in Beacon, in the postindustrial minimal architecture beloved by cultural mandarins and plutocrats worldwide, also highlights certain economic tensions that eventually led Posenenske to abandon art for sociology. First made of sheet steel, later made of cardboard, these standardized parts can be combined in any shape you like - several trapezoids can be joined into an X that sits on the floor, or a dozen pieces can climb and curve in on themselves, like in the classic Snake arcade game.
DIA BEACON SERIES
Her most important series was the “Vierkantrohre,” or “Square Tubes”: free-standing pipes, articulated out of any number of cuboid or trapezoidal chutes, that look almost exactly like commercial air ducts.
DIA BEACON SERIAL
She showed these serial sculptures alongside works by American colleagues like Judd and Sol LeWitt - but Posenenske abruptly quit making art in 1968, and devoted the rest of her short life to sociology.ĭia has filled two of its largest galleries with all her major sculptural series, including simple reliefs made of two steel sheets joined at an angle, or human-scale aluminum boxes that support large panels on hinges, which viewers can open like doors. After early, improvised “art informel” paintings made with a palette knife or spray gun, Posenenske in 19 turned to industrially inspired sculptures of aluminum, steel or cardboard, whose modular components could be combined and reproduced at will.
DIA BEACON FULL
The larger is the first full American retrospective of Charlotte Posenenske (1930-1985), a German artist whose factory-made sculptures and wall reliefs are a natural fit here. Martin, who is leaving this summer to direct the Yale Center for British Art - Dia has been introducing new artists into its permanent collection, and telling a fuller story of postwar art without turning its back on its essence.Ĭome to Beacon now and you can see this larger Dia Generation coming into focus in two assured presentations. Over the last four years - under its British director, Jessica Morgan, who took the reins in 2015, and its chief curator, Courtney J. This year the foundation turns 45, and - discreetly, deliberately - it has been rethinking just what that Dia Generation looks like. By 2003, when the foundation moved its permanent collection to a renovated box factory in this Hudson River town, my colleague Michael Kimmelman bestowed these artists with a new sobriquet: “ The Dia Generation.” Most of Dia’s chosen artists were Americans and Germans, working in minimal and conceptual idioms that privilege processes, materials, phenomenology and environment. It also undertook permanent installations in New York and in the American west, where Dia commissioned Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field” and now maintains Robert Smithson’s monumental earthwork “Spiral Jetty.” It committed early on to supporting a small number of artists, such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, and presented their work in uncommonly long exhibitions of up to a year. Of all New York’s museums, none has a stronger house style than the Dia Art Foundation.
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