Let's Supersize It!

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At Dia Art Foundation, folks think big. Over the past three decades, the foundation has spent millions of dollars commissioning and maintaining art, some of it having dimensions you associate with the Army Corps of Engineers. In the late 1970s, it was Dia that bought artist Donald Judd a derelict, 340-acre Army post in Marfa, Texas. Judd filled it mostly with his rows of concrete, wood or aluminum boxes, the alpha and omega of Minimalist sculpture. It's Dia that in 1977 paid for and still superintends The Lightning Field by Walter De Maria--400 stainless-steel poles arrayed in a rectangular grid in the desert of New Mexico: width, 1 km; length, 1 mile. If Dia had been around 4,500 years ago, the pyramids at Giza could have been financed with foundation grants.

So it was no surprise that when the institution's new outpost, Dia: Beacon, opened on Sunday, it was considered the world's largest museum of contemporary art. Five years ago, Dia director Michael Govan went searching for a building to hold some of the foundation's nearly 700 works. In Beacon, N.Y., a struggling Hudson River town, he found an abandoned factory, built in 1929 and used for decades to print boxes for Nabisco crackers. Fifty million dollars later, the structure is nearly 250,000 sq. ft. of sunlit display space. And much of it will be given over to some of the iciest, most refractory art ever produced — Judd's boxes, Joseph Beuys' piles of felt, Robert Ryman's all-white paintings, Dan Flavin's deliberately plain arrays of fluorescent light tubes.

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Is this the kind of work that will bring in 100,000 visitors a year? That's the number Dia hopes for. So does the State of New York and Beacon and its surrounding towns, which have chipped in $2.7 million toward the project so far and have visions of Guggenheim Bilbao dancing in their heads. Dia: Beacon offers some of the most potent art experiences to be found anywhere, in some of the most well-considered settings. But it was conceived largely to present difficult work for long durations in one space. And for much of what it offers, difficult is the word.

Dia was founded in 1974 by Philippa de Menil, of the Schlumberger oil fortune, and her husband Heiner Friedrich, a German art dealer. When oil prices slumped in the early 1980s, the foundation faltered for a while, but it re-emerged in chastened form several years later and, more recently, has got about $30 million from Leonard Riggio, chairman of Barnes & Noble. The foundation goes in for converted industrial buildings with good bones but no high-design drama. (The Nabisco factory was art-readied by little-known OpenOffice architects.) And while most museums collect a few works by each of a long roster of artists, Dia prefers to support a small list of favored names.

Most of them are well known: Andy Warhol, Robert Ryman. Others are less so: Blinky Palermo, On Kawara. History has by no means decided that all of them are keepers. Minimalism, earthworks, conceptualism, performance art — all have entered our history without always entering our affections. For the artists who came of age in the 1960s and '70s, Dia: Beacon may become the place that secures their reputations once and for all. It could also become the Lourdes of Postmodernism, a place where we converge to share in an illusion about the power and consequence of their work.

Dia has what you can only describe as faith in De Maria. For his Equal Area Series, 1976-77, the museum is devoting two galleries the length of football fields. At intervals along the floor is a polished steel circle next to a polished steel square, different shapes but each encompassing an equal area: 25 pairs in all. Judd is represented by some of his dryest, most unyielding output: not his colored aluminum boxes, which can have their share of sunlit surface incidents, but the eat-your-spinach plywood of Untitled, 1976.

If Dia: Beacon consisted of nothing but that sort of thing, a long visit would feel like being swatted all day with the complete works of Hegel. But Dia also collects much juicier artists. John Chamberlain's hunks of automobile metal, cut and welded, crushed and painted, build multicolored bridges between Abstract Expressionism and Pop. Not far from his galleries, there's a mini-show of Agnes Martin's delectable paintings, broad washes of color over a rectangular gridwork of lines drawn with a slightly trembling pencil. Something sings across those shivering wires. Dia also has the space to present some of the weightiest and most forceful postwar American art. The sheer tonnage of Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses, 1996-97, or Michael Heizer's North, East, South, West, 1967-2002--four massive holes, each a slightly vertiginous 20 ft. deep — operates by pressing down into your nerve paths the heft, the lethal power, of the physical world.