Arena momentum

Since the mid-1980s, Rita McBride has, in her own words, “developed a conceptual, cross-disciplinary, intermedia, and feminist approach to art making that holds collaboration at its center”. She frequently works with architects, engineers, physicists, and other artists to produce works that simultaneously explore the relationships involved in their production and invite a variety of forms of participatory exchange. The exhibition Rita McBride: Arena momentum highlights the artist’s long-standing interest in architecture, design, and sculpture as they relate to the public sphere in forms such as commercial awnings, movement-guiding systems like barricades and fences, and seating structures.

This exhibition includes freestanding and wall-mounted artworks from the last two decades that reflect McBride’s ongoing fascination with how public infrastructures shape ways of looking. Guide rails (2020) comprises a modular system of white, wooden guiding-post and beam structures commonly found lining rural private roads and often associated with the famous Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. However, the Guide Rails transcend particular locations, resembling an almost universal form used to mark divisions between public and private spaces. The freestanding elements extend through the gallery, informing the movement of visitors, in both speed and direction, and creating controlled sightlines and vantages. Guidance “barriers” (2017) similarly suggests the ubiquitous manipulations of urban public space ¹. Guardrails (highway) (2023) is mounted on the wall at eye-level and painted in shades of blue and purple to give the illusion of an unlimited horizon line. For McBride, these works resent machine-age concepts of absolute speed and risk, bringing to mind automobile test tracks, where guardrails predetermine an itinerary that is repeated lap after lap. Meanwhile, Awning (Blue stand, city block blue) (2002) proposes a reading of the often-overlooked forms that inform our public spaces, rendering the familiar storefront awning as a moment of pause.

The site-specifically reconfigured Neighbors (2002/2023) is from a body of work that brings the form of the air duct, typically tucked away by architecture, from the background to the foreground, calling attention to these vital systems of cause and effect. Dislocated from their typically hidden status and painted in Osha orange, the ventilation-like units come together to illustrate McBride’s interest in a characteristic concern of modernism—namely, the tension between form and functionality as it applies to our built environment. At the same time, many of these forms were originally designed following modern technological and industrial developments, such as the rise of the automobile necessitating ventilation systems to combat resulting air pollution. As McBride has written in connection with Charlotte Posenenske’s modular Series D (1967), which was recently on view in these galleries and also borrows shapes from ventilation units, “Ventilation ducts are like lungs, the essential life-giving mechanism of the body”.

At the core of the exhibition is Arena (1997), a lightweight, modular structure in the form of a tribune that is activated by the presence of audiences and performers alike. McBride explains that Arena is “an ongoing investigation into the ways public institutional space, art, and audiences interact.” The artwork becomes fully itself when animated by people in an ongoing and open process that is punctuated by choreographed engagements. For the duration of the presentation at Dia Beacon, multiple members of Momentum—an expanding body of artists, performers, writers, musicians, and dancers initiated by McBride with experimental performance collective discoteca flaming star (founded by Cristina Gómez Barrio and Wolfgang Mayer) and choreographer Alexandra Waierstall—will activate physical and virtual spaces as part of a series of interactions with Arena.

Dia acquired Arena in 2021. As part of that process, the artist transitioned the digital files and conceptual parameters for the artwork into a copyleft license that is stewarded by Dia. This new status of Arena is emblematic of McBride’s commitment to the democratic principles of exchange, as well as her continued dedication to pushing the boundaries of institutional engagement. The copyleft files are freely available to the public in perpetuity, alongside Momentum manifesto (2023), a large-scale poster designed by David Reinfurt. In the spirit of artists such as Bruce Nauman and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, visitors may take one of the posters, which are placed within the exhibition (and available in the bookshop). The invitation to interact with Arena by taking materials from the gallery space is in dialogue with the conceptual impulse of these artists and highlights the expectations and limitations placed on bodies in public—especially institutional art—spaces.