Plasma is the fourth state of matter, my dad tells me—solid, liquid, gas, plasma. 99 percent of the universe is believed composed of plasma, he says, the sun for example. When a gas is superheated, it reaches this state, what he calls a kind of purgatory. In a plasma cutter, an inert gas at higher volume than a welder can produce is surrounded by an electric arc, which prevents oxidation. Intense heat breaks off positive electrons from atoms and they scurry about so rapidly that an immense amount of energy can be concentrated in a small area. The result: being able to cleanly and accurately cut steel that is many inches thick. This technology has really developed in the last 20 years, and has been around since WWII. According to my dad, I mean. You can have your own cutter for under 2,000 dollars, he lets me know.
The works of Richard Serra might not be possible without plasma cutters. Walking around Serra’s huge Torqued Ellipses makes us all feel dizzy and sick, and I already had a headache. I’ll lie down in the center of the final ellipse’s spiral but stretching out on the cement floor won’t help me to feel better. A group of Asian-American school kids will run around inside the second of the torqued ellipses, singing “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know” and making a holy racket. Where are the guards? Not in this wing, there’s nothing for them to guard here; visitors check their plasma torches at the door. A train goes by, blowing its whistle. Dia:Beacon stands on the site of a former box-making factory but the room we’re standing—or lying down—in used to be a railroad depot. Dad makes a joke about boxcars coming through here. To him, Serra’s ellipses suggest twisted titanic smokestacks.
Walk outside, and hope that another train will pass, but none does. The west garden was designed by Robert Irwin, apparently: did he design what looks to be a weeping hemlock, I wonder. Mom picks up a handful of the rocks that designate and constitute the path; later, back inside, we’ll see the same rocks laid on top of a mirror in a work by Robert Smithson. If the garden didn’t abut the railroad tracks, we’d have no interest in it, I think. There’s too much order to it, it’s too fashionably spare; it could easily be an aisle in Target. We have to invent our amusement; one tree is tied to another in order, as we see it, to keep the other from running away.
Eight to ten miles down the road in Newburgh, trains go by every three to five minutes during the dinner hour. You’ll see two Metro-North trains for every Amtrak, with freights being a rare treat. The tracks hug the river, and a New Yorker traveling to Montreal will also get to spend fifty miles of his trip looking out on Lake Champlain. The ride is lovely: is there a better way to see the Hudson? A pedestrian bridge spans the tracks, in the middle of which dad stops, waiting for a train, and as soon as one passes, he waves. The conductor sees him and waves back, to my surprise. It would never occur to me to wave.
Many of the visitors find the kind of Minimalism-with-a-capital-M on display at Dia:Beacon challenging. The muscles on the faces of the middle-aged men who come here with their daughters or their wives contract as they struggle to maintain the requisite gravity while examining the art of Dan Flavin or Robert Ryman. Others come here with their mistresses, who are thirty years their junior, and don’t have the same trouble. They can talk about art without looking constipated. A group of single women in their early to mid fifties, their hair shortly cropped and dyed a dirty blonde, in snug-fitting jeans that try to approximate a style they were wearing thirty years ago, make a big to-do over nearly everything. They wonder about the huge stacks of felt that make up part of Joseph Beuys’ exhibit; maybe his father worked in a carpet factory, one speculates. They’re clearly drunk, and I follow them from one exhibit to another.
The works of Richard Serra might not be possible without plasma cutters. Walking around Serra’s huge Torqued Ellipses makes us all feel dizzy and sick, and I already had a headache. I’ll lie down in the center of the final ellipse’s spiral but stretching out on the cement floor won’t help me to feel better. A group of Asian-American school kids will run around inside the second of the torqued ellipses, singing “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know” and making a holy racket. Where are the guards? Not in this wing, there’s nothing for them to guard here; visitors check their plasma torches at the door. A train goes by, blowing its whistle. Dia:Beacon stands on the site of a former box-making factory but the room we’re standing—or lying down—in used to be a railroad depot. Dad makes a joke about boxcars coming through here. To him, Serra’s ellipses suggest twisted titanic smokestacks.Walk outside, and hope that another train will pass, but none does. The west garden was designed by Robert Irwin, apparently: did he design what looks to be a weeping hemlock, I wonder. Mom picks up a handful of the rocks that designate and constitute the path; later, back inside, we’ll see the same rocks laid on top of a mirror in a work by Robert Smithson. If the garden didn’t abut the railroad tracks, we’d have no interest in it, I think. There’s too much order to it, it’s too fashionably spare; it could easily be an aisle in Target. We have to invent our amusement; one tree is tied to another in order, as we see it, to keep the other from running away.
Eight to ten miles down the road in Newburgh, trains go by every three to five minutes during the dinner hour. You’ll see two Metro-North trains for every Amtrak, with freights being a rare treat. The tracks hug the river, and a New Yorker traveling to Montreal will also get to spend fifty miles of his trip looking out on Lake Champlain. The ride is lovely: is there a better way to see the Hudson? A pedestrian bridge spans the tracks, in the middle of which dad stops, waiting for a train, and as soon as one passes, he waves. The conductor sees him and waves back, to my surprise. It would never occur to me to wave.
Many of the visitors find the kind of Minimalism-with-a-capital-M on display at Dia:Beacon challenging. The muscles on the faces of the middle-aged men who come here with their daughters or their wives contract as they struggle to maintain the requisite gravity while examining the art of Dan Flavin or Robert Ryman. Others come here with their mistresses, who are thirty years their junior, and don’t have the same trouble. They can talk about art without looking constipated. A group of single women in their early to mid fifties, their hair shortly cropped and dyed a dirty blonde, in snug-fitting jeans that try to approximate a style they were wearing thirty years ago, make a big to-do over nearly everything. They wonder about the huge stacks of felt that make up part of Joseph Beuys’ exhibit; maybe his father worked in a carpet factory, one speculates. They’re clearly drunk, and I follow them from one exhibit to another.