A Beacon of Light

I promise to write about something other than the security (or lack of) of our public transit system today. But first I have to point out the New York Times magazine Q&A this week with Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, in which he says: "Unfortunately, this administration is derelict in how it treats homeland security. They're not interested in spending the necessary dollars. We spend $7 for every air passenger on homeland security. But we spend one penny for every mass-transit rider."
Okay, 'nuff said.
Today Victor and I braved two forms of public transit--the subway and Metro-North rail--to get out of town. It's something NYC-ers try to do most weekends between Memorial Day and Labor Day, three months when the weather in the city is typically characterized by the "3 Hs": hazy, hot, and humid (and often a 4th: Horrible smells, as the haze seems to trap all the city scents, including garbage, exhaust fumes, and often--on a weekend morning or near bridges or benches favored by the homeless--urine). And the city is filled with European tourists. My husband and I don't have a share in the Hamptons or a house on "The Shore." So we had to be a bit more creative this summer.
A couple days ago, we planned our Sunday getaway (Saturday was spent at my mom's in New Jersey). We debated between spending the day in Southampton or venturing up the Hudson River to check out the modern museum, Dia, in Beacon. After we compared round-trip fares and times, Beacon won. The train ride to Southampton would take more than two hours on the Long Island Railroad, and would cost $5 more than the hour-and-a-half ride to Beacon. And, according to a friend of ours who lived in Southampton, we'd need to take a cab--or a very long walk--to get to town from the train station. But the Dia:Beacon was only a 10-minute walk from the train station or a short (and free) shuttle ride. We opted to walk.
Victor wanted to take the 8:51a.m. train, which got us to Beacon at 10:21a.m.--39 minutes before the museum actually opened. But it took us 10 minutes to walk there, and the cafe and bookstore had opened at 10:30. By the time we'd visited the museum gardens, bookstore, and bathrooms, we only waited a couple minutes more before the doors to the galleries opened...onto Andy Warhol's "Skull" series: oversized, silkscreen prints of a skull decorated with neon splashes of color. In fact, the museum's current exhibition, "Dia's Andy: Through the Lens of Patronage," is all about Andy Warhol, from the perspective of patrons (of which Dia is high on the list) and other artists. It also includes a number of Warhol's works, both on canvas and on video, as well as four "time capsules" (numbers 5, 51, 68, and 237) that contain random paraphernalia from Studio 54 invitations to Polaroids he took of his assistants to a 91-page transcript of a conversation he had with Truman Capote (including many corrections he'd scribbled in). I find Warhol's portraits and "Screen tests" strangely mesmerizing. Maybe it is because I live in New York City, where I literally pass by thousands of people every day at close proximity. Yet how many of those faces do we remember at the end of the day? One, two, maybe three. And even when it comes to our friends, and certainly our colleagues, do we really study their faces? How often do we notice a distinguishing characteristic about someone from a photograph instead? To me, that's what is so striking about the screen tests. There is nothing to look at but the subject's face. And it's also so interesting to see how the subjects behave when they have nothing to do but stare at the camera for 2 minutes or more. One woman smacked her gum. Another woman alternated between smiles and sadness. The range of expressions he captured was amazing. I also noticed that the men seemed to stare straight into the camera as if to dare the audience to laugh. But the women, for the most part, squirmed uncomfortably, or--in at least one case--cried.
I have no doubt that Warhol was an intriguing and intelligent man. I wish I'd been able to meet him. And he grasped and exploited our fascination with celebrity in a way few artists of his era did. But I'm not sure if I would call him an iconoclast as much as he was a fervent follower himself, worshipping the celebrity idols that he helped create (and working hard to become one himself). If he had been born 50 years later, would he have been doing portraits of Paris Hilton and Kate Moss?
Of course, Warhol wasn't the only artist on display. Victor and I spent more than an hour and a half touring the 300,000-square-foot space. One of my favorite 20th-century artists, Gerhard Richter, was represented here as well. I didn't particularly like this piece, but I appreciated it. And I found some new favorites as well: Richard Serra, whose sculptures literally swallow you up in their awkward embrace; Robert Smithson, whose works incorporate both natural and manmade materials; and John Chamberlain, who used crushed car panels to make beautiful even delicate works of art.
After we made our way through the entire museum, my husband and I had planned to walk to Beacon's Main Street for lunch. There's been a concerted effort to spruce up the main street of town, but it appeared as if they had run out of funds after barely a block. When we first turned onto Main Street, it looked promising with three galleries, a tea shop filled with lace and antique furniture, and a sandwich shop that served paninis. But we turned a corner, and it was as if we'd stepped into a different (and decidedly downscale) neighborhood. Shop windows were broken or boarded up. The only place that was open and serving food was a fried chicken joint marked by a flashing neon sign. There were people standing or sitting on the corners staring at us as they smoked or drank from paper bags. Needless to say, we turned around pretty quickly. And we decided to hold out for lunch till we got back to the city.
So we caught a 1:50 train back to New York that put us in Grand Central at about 3:30. We were home by 4:15 with bagels and egg salad and a bottle of Australian shiraz. Next time, we'll eat at the Dia cafe.