A TRIP TO NEW YORK
Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York
Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York

By Laurie Meunier Graves

I. Leaving Home

There are hinterlands and there are hinterlands. Maine, with its far northern location and its preponderance of pine trees, quite properly qualifies as a hinterland. In Maine, life is slower but harsher, the weather is temperamental, and the tourists often outnumber the natives. However, Maine, especially the central and southern sections, is also in a unique geographic position. While it may feel remote and removed from the hustle and bustle of cities, in fact it is only a few hours north of Boston and seven or eight hours north of New York City. (Northern Maine is another matter. I suppose this section could quite rightly be referred to as the hinterland of the hinterlands.)

Therefore, I can live on a quiet country road in a house on the edge of a big forest and yet still be within a day’s drive of New York City. I believe this is called having your cake and eating it, too. Because as much as I enjoy living in Maine, from time to time, it is nice to visit other more populous parts of the country.

Not long ago, my husband and I decided to drive south to New York to visit two places we have long wanted to see—Storm King Art Center and Dia:Beacon. Both are museums, of sorts, and both feature what has come to be known as modern art (more on this later). In addition, we have a daughter who lives in New York City, about an hour south of Storm King and Dia. This meant we could combine a weekend of art with a weekend with our daughter, who is just as keen on such things as we are and was more than willing to join us. What could be better? Not much, we decided, as we loaded a cooler of food into the Toyota, filled the tank with gas, and headed south.

The defining moment for most Mainers who head south is crossing the huge bridge that spans the Piscataqua River and connects Maine with New Hampshire. When we cross that bridge, we know we are not in Maine anymore. Suddenly, the roads become clogged with cars and people from away, regardless of the time of year. Except now we were the ones who were from away, and on we drove, away from the bridge and away from Maine. Although we were excited to be going to New York, we knew we wouldn’t be truly comfortable until we crossed that bridge again and headed north rather than south.

Storm King Art Center and Dia:Beacon are conveniently located within an easy drive of each other in the Hudson River Valley near the town of Newburgh, where we had decided to stay. Our daughter had graduated from Bard College, an hour or so north of Newburgh, and we have many wonderful memories of that part of the Hudson River Valley. To someone from Maine, the Hudson River Valley is incredibly lush, green, and fertile. In the Valley, I saw peach orchards for the first time and was actually able to buy peaches at a roadside stand. To this northern woman, getting fresh peaches from a stand still seems like a minor miracle.

However, what a difference an hour south down the Hudson can make. Newburgh and its sister city Beacon, just across the river on the east side of the Hudson, are a combination of rampant strip development and abandoned factories. (Indeed, Dia:Beacon has made its home in one of the area’s many empty mills.) As a Mainer, I am very familiar with both strip development, which alas has hit even northern Maine, and with abandoned factories, a specialty of central Maine. But Newburgh and Beacon, at least the sections we saw, have been blighted with a vengeance by these two modern afflictions. We stayed at a Ramada Inn in Newburgh, and although the Inn was clean and quiet, the strip development it was a part of was so busy and so intense we didn’t even dare walk across the road to get to the diner. It seemed ridiculous, but we drove there. As we ate, I watched the rush of traffic and couldn’t help think how nerve wracking it was to be in a place where there were so many cars that we didn’t want to walk across the street. I suppose if you live there, you get used to it, but it’s not something to which I would wish to adapt.

Across the river, the city of Beacon was no improvement on this. The long main street was dotted with empty storefronts, and crowds of young adults wandered aimlessly up and down the sidewalks. Beacon looked sketchy to me, but I know I can be overly sensitive about such things. However, when our daughter from New York City joined us, she agreed with me and wondered if we should park our car on the street. Toward the end of the main street, the shops looked better, and there was a good restaurant where we ate one night. We even parked the car in front of the restaurant, and the car was still in one piece after we finished our meal. In all fairness, the city does look as though it is trying to make a comeback from hard economic times, and I suspect that Dia is, in part, fueling the regrowth.

A telling commentary on the state of Beacon came when we went to a secondhand bookstore, started talking with the owner, and learned about the upcoming “Spirit of Beacon” celebration. In my experience, it is never a good thing when a city must come up with a slogan. It usually means the city has fallen on hard times and is trying to boost its image. The bookstore owner confirmed that this was indeed the case, that after the many factories closed there was really nothing to take their place. We bought several books and wished the owner and the city good luck in dealing with a difficult situation that has no easy solutions.

We never did visit the main street of Newburgh. We did, however, go to a movie at a cineplex in Newburgh, and it is the only cineplex I have ever been to that has had a policeman patrolling the area. The place was full of unattended adolescents, and they seemed just on the verge of being out of control. To make matters even worse, many of these young people had babies and small children, and I suspect Newburgh is as much on the edge as Beacon is.

II. Storm King Art Center

However, just outside Newburgh, in Mountainville, is Storm King Art Center, which more than made up for the strip development and the edgy cities. In fact, Storm King was such an amazing experience that we all agreed we wanted to visit it again. I realize the word “magical” can be overused to the point of triteness, but there’s no way around it: Storm King is a magical place, and I have never seen anything that remotely comes close to it.

How to describe Storm King? Picture, if you will, five hundred acres of rolling hills, trees, mountains as a backdrop, and huge sculptures rising like monuments throughout the place. Storm King manages to feel both futuristic and ancient at the same time, and while I was there, I couldn’t help but imagine I had been dropped in the middle of another time and another planet.

As if to emphasize this blend of the past and the future, near the visitor’s center stands a dark statue of a slim but curvy woman in front of five tall columns. She has her thumb up (thumbs-up for art and for Storm King?). The columns are classical, but the girl has a modern look, and it’s an arresting combination that perfectly captures the mood of Storm King.

The columns are on top of a big hill that looks down on a grand allée lined with maple trees. Three giant skeletal yet industrial sculptures by Mark di Suvero guard the allée. These sculptures loom high in an open field, hot under the noonday sun and filled with leaping grasshoppers. A path then takes you away from the field and loops into a wooded area.

Here you enter another realm, cool, shaded, and mysterious, presided over by a sinuous, twisting stone wall called, appropriately enough, Storm King Wall, which seems to have a life of its own. It begins with just a few rocks but eventually rises to a height of five feet. It twists around trees—indeed, at one point, a tree grows in the middle of it—and descends to a pond. The wall then becomes a water serpent, submerging in one side of the pond and coming out the other side, where it goes up a hill and appears to go on forever.

Andy Goldsworthy created this enchanted wall, which makes a sort of courtyard for the trees in the woods. In an article in the New Yorker, Simon Schama describes Andy Goldsworthy’s genre as “land art” and how “Goldsworthy…believes…that the social and the natural are not mutually exclusive.” This is certainly the case with Storm King Wall, which is both natural and unnatural, of nature and not of nature, ordered but not formal or stiff. It seems part of the land, yet rock walls are completely manmade.

We left the woods and spent the rest of the day wandering around Storm King. Over and over, I could see Storm King and the various sculptures as settings for different performances. Mr. Goldsworthy’s wall would, of course, be perfect for a fantastical tale. Alexander Calder’s The Arch, black and massive, rises out of a field and belongs in a science fiction story. Adonai, by Alexander Liberman, is a configuration of giant, rust-colored tubes, and it would make a funky set for one of Shakespeare’s plays.

We marveled at how distance and height changed perspective. From afar, a piece, Untitled, by Robert Grosvenor, looked thick, black, and substantial. From above, at a different angle, it appeared to be a thin sliver of silver. In an enclosed museum, this change of perspective seldom happens to the extent it does at Storm King.

We also went on a tour led by Ruth Manyin, one of the docents at Storm King. She explained how Storm King, once an estate, had been carefully planned and how the landscape and art interact. She described the sculpture park as a “mix of art, physics, and math.”

Being math phobic, I certainly hadn’t thought of Storm King in that way. Instead, my mind turned, as it frequently does, to narrative and story. However, once Ms. Manyin made this point, I could certainly see the connection, and I began to think about how art, math, and story are, in a strange way, interrelated in the physical world as well as in the world of the imagination.

III. Dia:Beacon

In a play called Art, three friends squabble over a painting one of them has bought. The painting appears to be white with maybe a slight shading of some other color, gray perhaps. However, from where the audience sits, the painting looks pretty darned white. The man who bought the painting is enthralled by his new piece of art, but one of his friends thinks it’s the worst piece he has ever seen. He finds it pretentious to the point of insulting and cannot understand why anyone would buy such a painting. The third friend, a conciliatory sort, understands both points of view and, of course, winds up irritating the other two.

At Dia, there’s pretty much a whole room filled with white paintings, and while there may be other colors in them, they look pretty darned white. Robert Ryman, the artist, has a point of view about art, and his philosophy seems to be shared by many of the artists at Dia.

We have been trained to see painting as “pictures,” with storytelling connotations, abstract or literal, in a space usually limited and enclosed by a frame which isolates the image. It has been shown that there are possibilities other than this manner of “seeing” painting. An image could be said to be “real” if it is not an optical reproduction, if it does not symbolize or describe so as to call up a mental picture. This “real” or “absolute” image is only confined by our limited perception.

Ah, the “limited perception” of viewers. So many of them want “storytelling connotations” and “mental images.” I’m afraid I must admit I fall into this category of viewer. However, at Dia, “storytelling connotations” and “mental images” are in short supply. Instead, Donald Judd’s plain plywood boxes filled one whole area. In another room, Robert Smithson piled shattered green glass in a heap. In still another, Gerhard Richter gave us six huge monochrome gray paintings fused with glass and mirrors. No stories came to mind as I looked at these exhibits. In fact, I felt nothing much as I stared at the boxes, the glass, and the paintings.

This, however, seems to be exactly what the artists intended. Each exhibit had a box filled with copies of the artists’ statements. Gerard Richter describes Six Grey Mirrors as a “neither/nor…which is what I like about it.” Donald Judd comments on his boxes and the “repetition to order…The implications are as much social and ethical and aesthetic, eschewing both hierarchical placement and the suppression of the individual to the whole.” Finally, Robert Smithson’s statement goes back to Robert Ryman’s and the desire to dispense with storytelling. Mr. Smithson’s pieces are “unshaped by handcrafting. They are divested of any content pertaining either to the persona or skill of their maker or to any traditional narrative or emotive subject matter.”

With only a few exceptions, the art at Dia is difficult, demanding, and, in the end, cold. To understand it, the artists’ statements are essential. Plywood boxes, piles of glass, and white paintings on white walls do not lend themselves to immediate interpretation. There’s a part of me that rebels against this kind of art, which to be blunt, is the art of my parents’ generation. Mr. Judd, Mr. Richter, Mr. Ryman, and Mr. Smithson were all born in the same era as my parents, and this is true for many of the other artists shown at Dia. The type of art they produce has been labeled as modern, but to me, it doesn’t seem modern at all. Instead, it looks dated and old-fashioned. In the 1950s and 1960s, this style might have been fresh; it might have even been modern. But that was forty or fifty years ago. Times change and art changes with it. This is how it should be, and to label a particular style of art as modern is problematic. Modern is what is happening now, not what happened forty or fifty years ago. In two hundred years, will this style of art still be considered modern? I doubt it, and I expect people will come up with another name for it. Unfortunately, for the short run, we seem to be stuck with this label.

My generation (the baby boomers) has become famous for rebelling against our parents’ generation. We rejected their clothes, music, philosophies, and even their food. This no doubt explains some of my antipathy to the art at Dia, but part of it is also the tendency my mind has to turn to story and narrative.

On the other hand, to reject a whole generation’s take on the world seems foolhardy and willful. While what they produced may not be to my taste, it is at least worthy of consideration. That generation was born during the Great Depression and came of age during World War II and the Cold War. They saw the development of atomic bombs and the devastation let loose by those bombs. They had to deal with the fact scientists had made weapons capable of destroying the world. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that many artists of that generation would create art that is without narrative and could even be considered nihilistic, “neither/nor” as Gerhard Richter put it.

Mr. Judd, Mr. Richter, Mr. Ryman, and Mr. Smithson all had a particular philosophy and intent. Judging from what they wrote in their statements, I would have to concede they succeeded in doing exactly what they set out to do. Their work may not speak to me, but as I wandered through the huge factory turned museum, with its white walls and wonderful light, I heard people (mostly older, it’s true) saying positive things about the art. It obviously spoke to them in a meaningful way.

There was, however, a striking exception to the art without narrative. Upstairs, tucked in a corner, a gigantic spider rests on top of a cage. Its long legs may be slender, but they look lethal, ending in sharp points. Inside the cage is a chair covered with tapestry, and bits of worn tapestry adorn the cage, a parlor for the victim. There is also a bone, clean and white, stuck in the side of the cage. This is the spider of stories, dreams, and nightmares, and its huge size symbolizes the way such images loom in the unconscious, just waiting to be released. It’s interesting to note that the artist, Louise Bourgeois, was born in 1911, a full generation before most of the other artists featured at Dia. Somehow, her work seemed the freshest and a true example of contemporary art.

IV. Back to Maine

When the weekend was over, our daughter took the train to New York City, and my husband and I headed home to Maine. As we traveled, we discussed what we had seen, the powerful art at Storm King and the art without narration at Dia. All in all, it had been a wonderful weekend, full of images, thoughts, and ideas. However, we were eager to return to Maine and the hinterlands. We drove over the Taconic State Parkway, with the Catskill Mountains dark in the distance; through the Berkshires and lovely rolling country; through Lowell and Lawrence, with its huge hulking abandoned factory; through tiny New Hampshire. And there it was. The bridge to Maine. Did we hear singing? “You’re out of the dark, You’re out of the night. Step into the sun, Step into the light. Keep straight ahead for the most glorious place on the face of the earth or the sky.”

Beyond the bridge, Maine glowed a glorious green, and as we crossed the bridge, we smiled. We were home.

 

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