Low and slow / Frenzied and eternal

Today: David Moore, co-founder of Sludge; and Amy Kurzweil, New Yorker cartoonist and author of two graphic memoirs: Artificial: A Love Story and Flying Couch.

Issue No. 231

Steve McQueen’s Hudson Valley Elegy
David Moore

A Trip to The House on the Rock
Amy Kurzweil

Steve McQueen’s Hudson Valley Elegy

by David Moore

There are no images in Bass, an installation by artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen on view at Dia Beacon in New York through May 26. The work consists of light, color and sound alone, produced by 60 ceiling-mounted lightboxes in a 30,000-square-foot basement gallery space, bare but for its 78 concrete columns, and three tall stacks of speakers. The lights cycle very slowly through immersive colors, covering the complete visible spectrum over intervals of 40 minutes, with the accompanying soundtrack reverberating throughout. The music was performed by noted bassists Marcus Miller, Meshell Ndegeocello, Aston Barrett Jr., Mamadou Kouyaté, and Laura-Simone Martin, who improvised over the course of two days in the space, recording live under the slowly-shifting colors. 

Born in London in 1969, McQueen is perhaps best known as the first Black director to win the Best Picture Oscar, for 12 Years a Slave. He is also a highly regarded experimental filmmaker, the recipient of the Turner Prize and honors from BAFTA and the Royal Photographic Society. 

The artist and the performers of Bass are all part of the African diaspora—McQueen’s parents were born in Trinidad and Grenada—and in remarks before its opening in May, he said the work was “all about limbo,” evoking the forced Middle Passage of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

In thinking about last year in culture and what I found most fortifying, the hour I spent in Bass tops the list. The basement installation is captivating: the work creates an environment for introspection that is still lightly social. I spent time getting my ears into the droning music, seeing my friends’ faces swathed in purple-reds, looking at people far across the basement space milling about in the ambient light and sounds. People take up its invitation to sit on the floor, walk slowly around to hear the echoes, let their kids run in zig-zags.

The music in Bass is a threnody, performed with electric basses along with upright bass and bass ngoni. Photos of the recording session show Miller, who played and collaborated with Miles Davis, performing in a loose circle with the musicians, responding to the lights.

For visitors, the slowness of the color changes plays up their imperceptibility—suddenly it’s yellow, everything had just been green a second ago, hadn’t it. But a Dia manager of technology told the New York Times that the light procession along wavelengths is steady and linear, which I hadn’t realized while experiencing it; that came as a surprise to me. Stripped down to the most essential elements of emptiness, light and sound, Bass invites improvisation from visitors, too, who bring their physical presence and their own responses to join with the work. As McQueen said in the Times, “It’s about exploration and experimentation, and where we can go from here.”

One nice feature of the Dia Beacon is that you can reach it by train from New York City, you don’t need a car—it’s an hour-and-a-half Metro-North ride from Grand Central Station up into the Hudson Valley, then a short walk to the museum entrance. I visited in a short weekend getaway to the Hudson Valley in the first days of August, with two couples of dear friends and one well-nigh-unstoppable toddler.