At AAP NYC, there’s a lot more local spillover in terms of instruction than there is in Ithaca. While in the latter, Cornell students get taught by lots of internationally acclaimed instructors, whereas the New York program makes good use of its immediate surroundings. My theory class, CRITICAL NYC : PROJECTIVE DISCOURSES IN, ON, AND OF THE METROPOLIS, taught by James Lowder, aims to conquer the origins and implications of discourse ‘in, on, and of the metropolis,’ and we have done a lot of talking about how to talk about architecture thus far. Our exploration stems mainly from our investigation into the annals that are modern art – more specifically modern painting and sculpture – and the critique upon modern art that has been fostered by the Kantian dialectic: “this is one idea, this is another conflicting idea, the two ideas butt heads, and produce a synthesis.”
We are a well-read group; anyone from Krauss, to Greenberg, to Judd and Rowe have been speculated about, frowned upon, torn asunder and/or lauded. After scrutinizing case study after case study, we were finally put to practice this weekend when we forked over the forty bucks it took to ship off to Dia: Beacon.
A sanctuary to ‘specific objects’ (what’s good Donald Judd?), Dia: Beacon is sited in the old printing factory for the National Biscuit Company, commonly appropriated as Nabisco. Each exhibit is dedicated to the lone artist, and each installation is (site) specific to the space in which it is exhibited. It’s a huge blank canvas in which specific art objects perform specific moves upon the site, and the site responds specifically upon those objects. It’s a pretty ambitious and large undertaking, and the sheer scale of the work and the museum itself are fascinating.
Like explorers in an abandoned sugarcoated wasteland, we dredged through the concrete halls, peering upon Sol Lewitts and Dan Flavins. We found a place among Carl Andre sculptures, enjoyed the silence created by Beuys’ stacks of felt, and got tangled among Fred Sandback’s prescriptive yarn installations. Each piece has its own unique rhythm and medium carving out space in the factory at Beacon.
Each artist was pertinent to our previous readings of them in class and on our own time. It was lucky that after all of the hours upon hours of dimly lit text stare-downs we finally got to put a face to the words. Only in such a centralized, rich, cultural locale could these kinds of trips be possible. It’s all in a day’s work here in NYC.
