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Thursday, February 22, 2007

Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria, James Turrell … and Lead Pencil Studio

posted by on February 22 at 9:50 AM

In today’s Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green muses on the future of Dia, the sprawling artist-support network whose opening of a museum in a massive renovated factory an hour north of New York City in 2003 was a culmination of decades of production and collecting.

But what should Dia, this giant of late 20th-century art, do now? Earlier this week, Dia appointed a new director, Jeffrey Weiss, who will start this spring, and whose first task is to find a site in New York. Fine, except that the art world grows only less New York-centric, and Dia was always a champion of remote projects (one thinks of de Maria, Turrell, Heizer, and Agnes Martin all in the Southwest).

A champion of projects and artists, not a builder of museum spaces. That’s one of Green’s points. And when he thinks of which young, talented artists Dia might support?

If I were Jeffrey Weiss, I’d make an early phone call to Lead Pencil Studio, and then fund them to do something significant.

LPS (Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo, Stranger Genius award winners, represented in town by Lawrimore Project) would help to update Dia. Their investment in real, written history, and the way their work reacts to it by situating itself in a particular moment in time would be a major addition to the forever-and-ever monuments Dia is known for. Thinking about it, there’s no museum in the world where their gallery work would look better than in Dia:Beacon. Picture these small wall sculptures

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considered amidst the Heizer black holes of North, East, South, West, the Dan Flavins, the Fred Sandbacks, Smithson’s pile of glass, Hanne Darboven’s relentless serialism, and Judd’s box assortment. It’s difficult to imagine a better processer and inheritor of the classic Dia artists than Lead Pencil Studio.

But Green is talking about Dia throwing its weight behind more ambitious projects. Lead Pencil’s outdoor masterwork, Maryhill Double, was pulled off without institutional support except Creative Capital. Where will they get support next and what can they do with it? They’re determined and independent. Having day jobs as architects means they don’t—and they don’t have to—compromise on art. (In a recent proposal, they violated the single rule put forward by a committee jurying a public art project because they felt the infrastructure needed to change for the whole site to be transformed, and they handily lost the competition.)

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Maybe Seattle attorney Charles B. Wright is already onto this idea. He’s the son of collectors Virginia and Bagley Wright, former director and board president of Dia, and still a trustee. Maybe he’ll start that phone chain.

Meanwhile, Han and Mihalyo are out of town installing a new work, In Transit, at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The artists have been mum on the specifics of the piece, but here’s the museum’s description:

Han and Mihalyo create an installation that responds to the nervous energy, tremulous earth, and unknown site conditions that arise out of migration; the state of being in neither one place or another. They will employ common materials such as sculpted dirt, wire, and fluorescent lighting to transform the Exploratorium into a place from which to observe the condition of betweenness as it relates to buildings, identity, and memory.

In Transit, part of a group show including Seyed Alavi, Alex Clausen, Paul Hayes, and Erica Gangesi, opens March 8 and runs through June 3. In May, LPS has a show at Lawrimore.

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