Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Dia Beacon is a hallowed site for the Modern-art pilgrim. In a leafy enclave an hour and a half north of Manhattan\u2019s Grand Central Terminal, it occupies the vast light-filled interiors of a former Nabisco packaging factory and a green 32-acre campus: since it opened in 2003 it has been able to accommodate work by artists who think very big indeed.There is more than enough room for a pair of abstract paintings by Richard Serra, half black, half white and 18 metres long. There are four vast geometric pits by Michael Heizer, excavated deep into its concrete floor. Interventions by the late minimalist Fred Sandback slice through space with nothing more than taut lines of coloured yarn and steel wire. But Jessica Morgan, director of Dia\u2019s 12 sites across the US and Germany since 2015, has worked hard to demonstrate that scale and abstraction are not in the sole ownership of old, or indeed deceased, white men. At Beacon she has recently introduced the work of 79-year-old Meg Webster, who makes imposing sculptures in natural materials \u2014 a curved glowing wall of beeswax; exquisitely piled sheaths of ash-grey branches complete with fragile flowering heads. An exhibition by Senga Nengudi, the African-American artist who uses everything from dry-cleaning bags to women\u2019s tights in her sculptural works, will be on show until 2026.In mid-May, Morgan revealed a new installation in the building\u2019s 30,000 sq ft basement that offers up Beacon-style scale and reduction, but this time using the most minimal means of sound and light. A concrete forest of 78 slender pillars that Morgan calls \u201cthe industrial Alhambra\u201d, alluding to Andalusia\u2019s fortified palace, has been filled with continuously changing colour and the deep throb of bass. To enter it is to feel very small indeed. Dia\u2019s existing light and space works, principally by Robert Irwin \u2014 optically confusing curves and rooms lined in fluorescent tubes \u2014 look decorative by comparison. \u201cIt is,\u201d says Morgan, \u201cquite radically abstract.\u201dThe work, called \u201cBass\u201d, is by the British artist Steve McQueen, 54, who is equally known for his successful feature films such as 12 Years a Slave and Hunger. In both his art and his cinema, he frequently deals with the inequalities of power and Black people\u2019s experience, and this installation is no exception. For McQueen, the bass instrument, and its reverberating sound, unifies the people of the African diaspora like a sonic travelling force. For him it is a way to reconnect a people thrown into limbo by the persistent consequences of slavery and the impact of racial politics. \u201cThere is a commonality in the bass, the vibration, the reverb, the tone. It seems like a calling, an interplay, a form of communication between scattered people,\u201d says McQueen. \u201cFor me it was a way of bringing a diaspora back together.\u201dWith Marcus Miller, a virtuoso jazz bassist who played with Miles Davis, he invited four musicians from west Africa, the US and the Caribbean who play bass guitar, standing bass or ngoni, a west African lutelike instrument in use since the 14th century. They included the reggae artist Aston Barrett Jr (his father Family Man, who led Bob Marley\u2019s backing band, was too unwell to attend) and the 18-year-old prodigy Laura-Simone Martin.The five assembled over five cold days in late January in the cavernous basement and their improvised response is now the soundtrack, played through three speakers placed at wide intervals. \u201cThe musicians were reacting to the space and the light. We\u2019d thought there would be further recording in a studio but there were things we couldn\u2019t replicate \u2014 the reverb, the sense of atmosphere,\u201d says McQueen when we sit down to talk in a cell-like office.The visitor is not a viewer here but a participant in a submersive experience that has been created with intangible meansFrom the high ceiling 60 lightboxes wash the space in slowly changing colour. It is a languorous journey through the entire spectrum which reveals shades not normally perceived by the human eye. The palest lilac or the lightest blue desaturate the space entirely, turning the concrete a ghostly monochrome. Doused in the most vibrant of reds, the space seems soaked in watery blood. The visitor is not a viewer here but a participant in a submersive experience that has been created with intangible means. With such immateriality at play, the sound itself seems to take on a haptic form.Because the light programme lasts 40 minutes and the music three hours, visitors are unlikely to have the same experience twice. \u201cFilm is linear,\u201d says McQueen. \u201cThis work is more of a sphere, with no beginning or end.\u201d Instead, as I sat silently in the cold space, images and feelings bubbled up, ebbed and flowed, many melancholic, thoughts of people lost in deep waters. You leave the space up several flights of industrial stairs and, by the top, it was hard to recall the sensations. It brings a whole new meaning to the idea of a site-specific work. Rather like a moving piece of music, remembering the tune in your head won\u2019t reduce you to tears, but hearing it played in a room will.The idea of playing with light had been in the artist\u2019s mind for a decade or two. \u201cI met a physicist in Croydon about 20 years ago who was using a snooker table to demonstrate the properties of light, and how it travels,\u201d he says. In 2012, he created a project in Amsterdam, saturating the city\u2019s Vondelpark by night with steely blue light, denaturing the grass and the trees, turning its colour temperature to zero. He had also spoken to the super-curator Okwui Enwezor about bringing together musicians from the Black diaspora not long before Enwezor\u2019s death in 2019. A conversation with Donna De Salvo, Dia\u2019s adjunct curator, united the two things.\u201cYou plant a lot of seeds as an artist. Some grow, some don\u2019t,\u201d says McQueen. \u201cMaking art is far harder than cinema, because it doesn\u2019t have a structure or a script. The only thing you can rely on is gravity. Apart from that, everything is up for grabs.\u201dDe Salvo says now that she had no idea how the work would pan out. \u201cOf course film is just sound and light, and that\u2019s Steve\u2019s terrain,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd you often see in his work moments where he plays with colour in a very distilled way \u2014 the suffused red of his film Charlotte, for example, where he focuses on Charlotte Rampling\u2019s eye. But here he\u2019s taken a complete departure. It\u2019s truly sculptural. It shows how well he understands space.\u201dFor McQueen, this need and ability to reinvent his practice is simply a consequence of who he is. \u201cAs Black people, we\u2019re post-apocalypse,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s mourning but there\u2019s also exploring. To survive you have to invent and reinvent. In that there is a sense of wonder. Wonder at being alive, wonder at being able to create. There is hope.\u201dUntil April 2025, diaart.orgFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Dia Beacon is a hallowed site for the Modern-art pilgrim. In a leafy enclave an hour and a half north of Manhattan\u2019s Grand Central Terminal, it occupies the vast light-filled interiors of a former Nabisco packaging factory and a green 32-acre campus: since it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-96254","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96255,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96254\/revisions\/96255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}