Karen Rosenberg: "Land Art Comes Indoors as Dia Highlights Meg Webster"

Smell the beeswax. Nine sculptures shaped by verdant moss, soil and other outdoor elements at Dia Beacon offer a sense of healing and restoration.

For many years change came slowly to Dia, and that was by design. Since its inception 50 years ago, the Dia Art Foundation has maintained meticulous long-term presentations of Minimal and Conceptual art from the 1960s and ’70s at its exhibition spaces in Beacon, Chelsea and Bridgehampton as well as site-specific projects around the country. To be an artist with work in its care — a Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, or Richard Serra — was, and still is, to enjoy a form of eternal life.

Recently, however, Dia has been adding to its pantheon of immortals with the aim of increasing the representation of women and artists of color. Last year saw the installations at Dia Beacon of abstract paintings by Mary Heilmann and the water-filled vinyl sculptures of Senga Nengudi, both still on view with no closing date yet given, as well as the opening of a shorter-term exhibition in Chelsea (through July) of Delcy Morelos’s immersive environments of shaped earth.

Dia’s latest effort, a long-term installation of sculptures at Dia Beacon by the 79-year-old New York-based artist Meg Webster, is emphatic though not drastic. It takes up prime real estate in the building, and places Webster in direct and sometimes critical conversation with Serra, Heizer and other formative Dia artists of her generation. And, appropriately enough for spring, it’s a kind of rebirth.

It unfolds along the entire 285-foot length of a stunning gallery adjacent to Dia’s West gardens, where John Chamberlain’s sculptures made from crushed automobile parts had most recently been on view for the 20-year period since the building was inaugurated. Webster’s sculptures, made with soil, beeswax, moss and other outdoor elements shaped into simple geometric forms, interact with Dia’s outdoor landscape and at times seem to pull it indoors. Their placement also sends a message: We are witnessing a shift from industrial materials to natural ones, fabrication to human touch, aggression and violence to healing and restoration.

The eight-foot-high curved barrier “Wall of Beeswax,” for instance, seems to borrow from the formal lexicon of Richard Serra’s overpowering swoops of steel. But it presents an altogether different sensory experience, drawing you in with its sweet scent and golden color and the soft tactility of its layered surfaces.

“Stick Spiral,” meanwhile, inevitably evokes the most famous earthwork in existence: Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” owned and maintained by Dia in its original location on a famously difficult-to-access peninsula along the northeastern shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Webster’s spiral, however, consists of carefully arranged flowering branches and twigs. It is modest in scale, at just around 20 feet in diameter. You do not need an airplane to apprehend it.

 Webster’s relationship to Land Art (and Dia’s other core movements of Minimal and Conceptual art) is not always easy to categorize, even as recent exhibitions such as “Groundswell: Women of Land Art” at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas have explored her work in that context. She had a supportive friendship with Judd, who gave her a New York solo debut at his Spring Street studio, and she worked as a studio assistant to Michael Heizer (absorbing his interest in positive and negative space and, as is apparent from the tidy edges of the pieces in this exhibition, his perfectionism.)

The nine sculptures exhibited at Dia, which all date from her breakout period of 1986 to 1990, reflect those early influences. But Webster’s later installations, which take the form of gardens and ecosystems, embrace environmentalism in ways that may resonate more with emerging contemporary artists such as Precious Okoyomon, (who works with plants, butterflies and other organic materials in evolving site-specific projects). Webster’s recent examples include “Concave Room for Bees,” a series of pollinator-attracting plantings on the grounds of the Socrates Sculpture Park in 2016-17, and its indoor counterpart “Solar Grow Room.”

To viewers who have not previously seen Webster’s art and may not fully grasp her ecological interests, a few of the works at Dia could feel slightly generic; a cylindrical steel vessel holding chunks of rock salt (“Steel Containing Salt,” 1990) could have been made by a number of post-Minimalist sculptors. Most of the sculptures, however, transform familiar shapes and substances into something unknown or unknowable.

Consider “Cono di Sale (Cone of Salt)” — a precisely engineered, six-foot-high pile of salt crystals resting directly on the floor. It was first shown at the 1988 Venice Biennale, late in the Cold War, and Webster has linked its form to the nose cones of nuclear weapons. This re-emergent threat hangs over the version at Dia, but at the same time Webster focuses your attention on the properties of the salt itself: soft, delicate, pristine, light-reflecting. As she has said, one of the goals of her work is “putting you into material.” The work has been expertly installed (by the Dia curator Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, with the curatorial assistant Liv Cuniberti) in view of a gallery of Robert Ryman’s white-on-white paintings.

“Moss Bed, King” (1986), which layers dormant moss in various shades of green over a low platform, is almost irresistibly verdant and sensuous. It also has an air of fantasy (you can imagine it being used by a traveling hobbit) and a hint of Surrealism that must have appealed to Robert Gober, who has invited Webster to create similar moss beds for uncanny collaborative installations organized around the theme of a bedroom.

Other resting places are implied in Webster’s sculptures of earth shaped by forces including body weight, several of which are at Dia. “Mound” consists of crumbly yellow clay soil raked and tamped down with footsteps until it forms a perfect shallow dome. The more tumescent “Mother Mound,” which Webster has likened to a pregnant belly, uses a richer, redder clay soil packed with both hands and feet.

Both works date from 1990, and in 2024 it’s uncomfortable to see them presented without any mention of the mound’s role in Indigenous life. At the very least, it feels like a missed opportunity to connect Webster to contemporary artists who are reinterpreting the movement of Land Art and pointing out some of its historical erasures and appropriations. Jeffrey Gibson’s traveling monument based on ancient Indigenous Mississippean structures comes to mind, as does the Counterpublic triennial’s use of Sugarloaf Mound in St. Louis, the city’s last remaining Native American mound, as an exhibition site.

Overall, though, Webster’s arrival at Dia has the potential to loosen the institution’s grip on the past. For one thing, it seems to take place in a continual present: All of the work here was made anew for the occasion, with largely locally sourced materials that will require frequent tending and refreshing.

As Webster wrote in her instructions, from 1988, for the making of “Mound”: “The work may shrink slightly as it dries. It may be kept watered. Thorough watering, raking and hoeing will renew it. It can remain installed indefinitely.”

— Karen Rosenberg

On long-term view, Dia Beacon, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon; (845) 440-0100; diaart.org.