Get Off The Internet For Under $50: Bruce Nauman at dia:beacon

by Seth Colter Walls

Did the Internet eat a pallet-full of Grade F stank beef earlier this week? Because I smelled combat gas all the way over here, in the part of the Internet where people don’t even use Tumblr. (For, as Paul would have it in First Corinthians, the body does not consist of only one part, but of many.) Even though I hadn’t actually stepped to anyone all week long, I went ahead and took some good advice and took a day off from the city and the Internet. A pal wanted to go to Beacon, NY, to check the contemporary art museum dia:beacon. I realized I had never been. Also, trees are nice to look at, and Beacon, NY has those, too.

It costs $13, during Metro-North off-peak hours, to head from Grand Central to the Beacon stop on the Hudson line. dia:beacon charges a non-negotiable $10 entry fee, so if you limit yourself to a modest lunch, you can round-trip a whole day of culture and walking through a small town for under $50.

My companion was all about Richard Serra’s massive Torqued Ellipses. The structures’ tall, 2-inch-thick steel plates stand freely in the middle of a sun-dappled industrial garage. The narrow openings in each outer shell invite you inside what turn out to be Serra’s sculptures of negative space. Or, per the brochure: “For in these works space shifts and moves in wholly unpredictable and unprecedented ways: so destabilizing yet so beguiling is this sensation of movement that the spectator quickly gets caught up in an exploration of extended duration.”

I liked it pretty well, but then again, I live in a NYC-sized studio, and thus know all about staying in destablizing areas for extended durations.

The real winner for me was dia’s Bruce Nauman basement, which offered a nice mix of the artist’s early neon-based work (like Double Poke in the Eye II, above), as well as a recent video installation entitled Mapping the Studio. Nauman’s mind is an unmistakably dark one — and its outputs have appealed to me ever since I encountered his work during my teenage years. That first point of contact was Nauman’s multi-channel installation Clown Torture, of which there turns out to be a fairly decent (if non-pro) YouTube representation:

Nauman stretches this gauze — stitched of humor, paranoia and sadness — across lots of his works. Since the subtext is often about the fraught quality of social interaction — hey, like a party I went to earlier in the week! — it’s sometimes best to experience his work on a solo basis. Get a roomful of people staring at a Nauman piece like Mean Clown Welcome, and everyone starts to feel pretty weird about the phalluses going soft when the characters shake hands.

Understandably, there’s not a lot of Nauman’s video or neon work excerpted on the dia:beacon site, either, as it’s rather difficult to summarize in 2D form. But Mapping the Studio is actually set up for a group experience, with a series of chairs placed in the middle of the room. According to Nauman/the museum:

This new installation with multiple projections records nocturnal activity by the artist’s cat and various mice in his studio over the summer of 2000. “I used this traffic as a way of mapping the leftover parts and work areas of the last several years of other completed, unfinished, or discarded projects,” Nauman has stated.

That inclusiveness — both in terms of user-experience as well in its incorporation of fragments from multiple pieces — made me wonder if Nauman has been feeling a more social vibe, of late. His work for the last Venice Biennale seemed to suggest as much, at least in terms of the only way I was able to experience it (again, via YouTube).

After an afternoon stewing in the Nauman psyche, though, I was ready to head back to New York, and the internet. Like Emily Haines, I figure no one else wants to fight me like you do.

When he’s not taking the day off, Seth Colter Walls has a day job.

Top photo of dia by Madabandon from Flickr. Richard Serra photo by Robzand from Flickr.