There are neither images nor narrative in Steve McQueen’s newest work, Bass, at the Dia Art Foundation at Beacon, about an hour up the Hudson valley from New York. Nothing but three stacks of speakers standing in the low-lit gloom of a concrete basement, and a grid of 60 flat LED light boxes sitting flush with the ceiling, measuring out the space between the rows of pillars and providing the only illumination in the large, echoing space. The light boxes glow red then tangerine, through yellows and green, blues and magenta and back to red, slowly drifting round the spectrum like a dial being turned.
Along with the light, sounds hang in the air. Sometimes the reverb goes right through you, then it’s a ghost. Slick with dulled reflections, the concrete floor is scored with old cracks and worn-away markings. The throb of bass notes ricochet from the walls and pillars, an underground shooting gallery of dub. Aching and surging, tailing off and picking up again, the music creates a space in which riffs and licks come and go are lost in reverb and harmonics, like snatches of language being dragged out of nowhere. Notes pulse like a human heart or a rudder in a current. Enormous tonal weights slide like so much unmoored ballast, blues phrases shimmer in complaint and there’s a constant sense of the impending. At one point a low hollow sound tunnels through the air like disaster looming.
