Hudson River Treasure Hunt Report
from a recent visit to a new art mecca
Dia:Beacon, part of a new network of land art
destinations on the Hudson River.
CLUI photo
The art and land projects sprouting up this spring
centered around the Hudson River town of Beacon make for an interesting
treasure hunt through this newly culturally engorged industrial-pastoral
landscape.
The obvious place to start is at Dia:Beacon, which
opened in May, and may be the largest contemporary art museum
in the nation. The huge old factory is now full of big art, some
of it the brand of minimalism that moved outdoors in the 1960’s
and 1970’s in the form of Land Art. Inside the museum are
some often depicted but rarely seen things like Smithson’s
dirt piles, Beuys’ wolf piece props, and some new Heizer
holes. The landscaping is by the post-minimalist gardener, Robert
Irwin.
Just beyond the museum, the road dead-ends at the
town sewage treatment plant, a handsome brick building with a
stack, and a trail heads off into an intriguing peninsula that
extends into the river beyond the shoreline railroad tracks. This
is Denning’s Point, an undeveloped 65 acre wooded site where
the artist Lothar Baumgarten is creating a number of sculptural
installations and sound pieces that will be complete next year.
Baumgarten’s project, funded by Lannan Foundation,
is part of the Watershed Art Project, which begins exhibiting
this year as a program to create artwork and educational programs
that “raise awareness of the imaginative and physical landscapes
of the Hudson River Valley.” The project is managed by a
Manhattan-based organization called Minetta Brook, which distributes
a field guide to the projects from its storefront exhibit space
in downtown Beacon.
Follow the field guide’s directions to sound-equipped
park benches at a few locations in the region, which provide an
audio track of interviews and sounds when you sit down on them;
or head out to scenic overlooks with customized mounted viewing
binoculars, one on either side of the river; or to a site at Beacon
Point, where the landscape artist George Trakas is building a
sculpted shorefront peninsula.
The unceremonious entrance to the Watershed
exhibit site, in the mostly empty Dick’s Castle, New York.
CLUI photo
During the opening weekend of Watershed, May
24th, visitors had an added, temporary site along the Watershed
Project trail, that involved a visit to Dick’s Castle, the
looming, monolithic, hundred year old, locally legendary unfinished
residence on a hillside at Garrison. On arrival, a sign indicated
a side door through which to enter the seemingly unoccupied castle,
near an unfinished fountain and a gravel parking area. Inside,
was a small unpainted drywall room, with only an elevator door
and a sign that said: Please Take the Elevator to the 3rd Floor.
On the third floor was a grand room, partially furnished with
a banquet table, sofas, and paintings. An attendant, working for
Minetta Brook, oriented visitors to the featured Watershed piece,
a large map on a table, marking spots along the river where field
recordings were made by Annea Lockwood in the 1980’s, following
the river from the Ocean to its source. The recordings played
on speakers in the room. Archived interviews with longtime Hudson
River characters could be accessed via a digital playback machine
and headphones.
Additional and more far flung Watershed sites include an exhibit
of new and locally shot photographs by James Welling, in New Paltz,
and an agricultural sculpture on the grounds of Bard College.
Back in Beacon, the previously “unremarkable” and
generally poor upstate town is beginning to reflect the new art
culture that Dia has precipitated, which will take form over the
coming years with a planned conference center, shoreline housing
developments, and a multimillion dollar Rivers and Estuaries Center.
For now, a walk down Main Street shows a mix of old convenience
stores and new art galleries. Two adjacent nondescript storefront
spaces serve as additional exhibit spaces for Hudson River films
commissioned for Watershed. Nearby, across the street is Beacon
Project Space, a new gallery whose curator, David Ross, is the
former director of the Whitney Museum and the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art.
Part of the collapsing Tioronda Hat Works mill
complex, on Fishkill Creek. CLUI photo
Beacon Project Space’s current exhibition
program focuses on artists and architects working in the Hudson
River Valley. The inaugural exhibition included work by artist
Carrie Mae Weems, who launched a new long-term residency project
in Beacon. The gallery and the residency are programs of the Beacon
Cultural Project, started last year by the New York developer
and art patron William S. Ehrlich, who has purchased "half
of Beacon" according to some published reports, and who has
teamed up with the Mayor, David Ross, and others to spearhead
the revitalization of the city.
Ehrlich’s sites include what is possibly the most interesting
and pleasantly sited abandoned and crumbling mill complex on the
Hudson, the old Tioronda Hat Works. It is a network of several
connected buildings from different industrial periods, spanning
the early 1800’s to the 1960’s, located at the intersection
of the Hudson River and Fishkill Creek, Beacon’s 19th Century
industrial corridor. Uses for the buildings that have been seriously
considered include a performing art space for Twyla Tharp and
an exhibit space for some of the Sonnabend art collection. In
the meantime, the grounds are untamed and sort of open to the
public. A path leads along the edge of the broken and collapsing
complex, to a viewing area at a scenic marsh on the edge of the
Hudson River, where scattered fragments of police-line tape allude
to some unknown incident or rehearsal.
