If there is one acceptable way for me to see myself celebrating a religious holiday or, indeed, celebrating in general, it is most certainly spending a day at peace with the world in a quiet and nearly empty art museum. To take this idea of the holiest of holy to the absolute next level is to spend said religious holiday in the dia:beacon in the middle of nowhere, new york.
Encased in an old cookie factory with massive concrete walls and an impossible number of skylights, the Dia's minimalist collection is decidedly the most pure of any I have seen in some time. Standing at one end of a rectangular red and blue Flavin work my Dad and I came to the conclusion that if there were a heaven of some kind, then dia would most certainly be in the running. Not only do most of the artists in the dia:beacon's collection respond to the unusual yet impressive space itself, but they all seem to find a simple fascination in the materials that they are working with as well; Donald Judd's perfect wooden boxes are seamless and smooth and explicate his own thrill with the process of their fabrication. Painters like Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin fill canvases with neutral, white paint just so they can see the surface of a metal plate growing thick or the gesture of a brush breaking up a canvas. Even a pop artist like Andy Warhol's work exemplifies his joy in the physical process of screenprinting and, though the redundant figure in his Shadows series is eerie, the colors that he uses look sweet and edible.
This is not to say that other art museum's collections are inferior simply because many of their artists pick up inspiration from means other than the materials they are using for construction. This is not to say that you have to go out to Beacon on a chilly Sunday when, surely, no one else will be there (aside from some Germans - so many Germans!). But where else in the world can you look down a cathedral of white cement and through a checkerboard of frosted and non-frosted windows to see the tips of a long row of apple blossoms swaying? Where else can you descend an almost unnoticed stairwell and find yourself confronted with four Corten steel Torqued Ellipses?
