Gehry still has unfulfilled ambitions: “I’d love to do an airport, but I’m not going to chase after one”. Despite the fish stuff, there’s no personal myth, no manifesto that’s driving him. “I trust my visual intuition,” he says. “If I can explain it in advance, I don’t do it.” And at last his face cracks into a smile as he comes out with the best explanation of how a remote campus arts building, with all its technical givens in terms of stages, flytower, auditorium, and so forth, can become a species of mythical beast in Arcadia. “It’s a magic trick,” he says quietly. And he’s right. There’s nothing else to add.
Hot on the heels of Bard: Dia Beacon.
From a British perspective, we can imagine Gehry’s Bard complex as something in the tradition of the summer opera festival at Glyndebourne. But imagine Tate Modern in Gloucester, or the Saatchi Collection in Kettering. That is roughly what is happening in the post-industrial town of Beacon in the Hudson Valley, half an hour south of the Bard campus. There, the New York city-based Dia Art Foundation has spent $50m converting a 1929 Nabisco cereal-box factory into a shrine to 1960s minimalist art. It opens on May 18.
Few previously gave a glance to the old factory. It is scarcely a landmark: you have to keep your eyes peeled as you rattle past the functionalist red-brick building in your mournfully-hooting Amtrak train. But as an art gallery, this old factory is ideal: acres of single-storey, skylit space, high ceilings, maple floors.
Beacon was a town in severe economic decline when Dia’s director Michael Govan persuaded the factory owners to donate the abandoned building to the foundation in 1998. The opening of the Dia:Beacon art museum, with its full complement of 700 works by artists including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Richard Serra, Andy Warhols and Joseph Beuys, is going to make a big impact on this serendipitously-named town. Developers are already rushing in. What with this, plus Bard, plus established summer rural music festivals at Tanglewood and Saratoga Springs, Manhattan is going to have to find a cultural response. That will not come until the reopening of the hugely-expanded Museum of Modern Art in 2005.
