On May 30, Pauline Oliveros, the internationally acclaimed experimental music composer and performer, turned 80. It’s been a joyful occasion, attended by several important releases of her music and new books about the experiential sound practice she invented called Deep Listening.
Dia:Beacon, a museum of mostly 1960s and 1970s vanguard art located in a former box factory on the Beacon waterfront, has put the Hudson Valley on the international art-world map. Stepping through the doors of the low-slung building into the narrow, high-ceilinged, brick-lined foyer, resembling the entrance to an ancient tomb, one stands on the threshold of 240,000 feet of exhibition space, whose sky-lit expanse of maple flooring surely constitutes one of America’s most sublime interior spaces.
Twice a day, two million gallons of crude oil fracked from the Bakken in North Dakota are transported through Saugerties, the Town of Ulster, the city of Kingston, and the Town of Esopus in a 100-car train.
After 34 years, JCPenney, an anchor of the Hudson Valley Mall since the mall’s opening in Town of Ulster in 1981, is no more. Also gone are The Children’s Place, Deb Shops, and RadioShack, the last two victims of corporate bankruptcy. And across Route 9W, Office Depot, located in the hangar-like building that once housed the area’s first supermarket, is set to close its doors in a couple of weeks.
Carl Andre’s self-effacing, ground-hugging assemblages of thick, squared-off timbers, firebricks, aluminum ingots, and metal square plates look completely at home in the sprawling galleries at Dia: Beacon. As a former factory with industrial-size spaces, the museum is a perfect complement to an art predicated on the system of industrial production.