Let's Supersize It!

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Upstairs at Dia is what could only be called the lair of Louise Bourgeois, who inhabits the space like a crazy old aunt in the attic. Born in 1911, Bourgeois is one of the founding figures of feminist art, and what she does has very little to do with the sanitary composure of Minimalism. Nothing could be further removed from Judd's mute boxes than the psychodrama of Bourgeois's sculptural pieces, with their sources in the clammiest corners of the psyche and in the meat and moisture of the human body. In recent years she has been showing variations on an enormous metal spider. The one at Dia: Beacon, wedged into a brick-lined confinement, is the best, and best displayed, of any of them, holding in its grip a cage in which you see tattered tapestries that recall the ones Bourgeois's family repaired as a business.

The Hudson Valley, where Dia: Beacon is located, is the place where 19th century American painters discovered the sublime in the natural world, the tradition that some of the Dia artists extend. As the museum settles in further, it can use its 31-acre site to display work outdoors. That is the setting in which Minimalist sculpture makes its most beckoning stand, flaunting its otherness against that worthy opponent, nature. Over the long, slow run, Dia: Beacon may be precisely the place to resolve the question of how to value some of our most imponderable artists. An important part of the later 20th century is in Dia's keeping. How important? What Dia plans to do is give us a while to decide.