Monday 1/12/08

We were up early to meet at 9am at Grand Central station. This was my first real look at Grand Central and it was huge, a sight in itself. We all jumped on a train heading to Beacon to visit DIA: Beacon museum. The train ride took around about an hour and a quarter, but I hardly noticed, sleeping most of the trip. Once there, we went into the museum, and the space was amazing. DIA: Beacon holds a collection of contemporary art, housed in an old biscuit factory; a lot of the works were large scale pieces. A few favourites were the LeWitt, Heizer and Serra. Sol LeWitt’s Drawing Series was one of the best collections I have seen yet. It is a series of large scale wall drawings of lines, grids, patterns and diagrams using simple colours of red, blue, yellow and black, the drawings take your breath away. You can actually see and understand the amount of time, calculation and precision that has gone into these pieces, they were unbelievable. Michael Heizer’s North East South West was a large scale installation of four shaped holes in the floor, of which the bottom was unable to be seen. The installation was barricaded off so you couldn’t get too close, however you could gather the depth of the holes which were amazing to look at and take in.

My other favourite was Richard Serra’s monumental installation of five large iron pieces nearly as tall as the roof, bent in circular shapes. Two had a gap so people could enter into the centre of the pieces and the other three also allowed you to enter but you had to follow it round, like a kind of maze to the centre. Each presented a different bodily experience and physical impact. They were so big it made you feel small and insignificant. When entering, they created a sense of journey and exploration as you couldn’t see what was ahead and to find out, you had to keep walking into the unknown creating a sense of anticipation. They created a sense of never ending, bringing the sense of risk to the table when entering, as you were not sure when you would reach the middle. The work is monumental in both the artist’s capacity and in an engineering sense with the creation of such work. After we jumped back on the train for the long trip home, I was pretty tired so slept for a short while again.