"Les Pommes d'Adam" by Franz West at Mass MoCA

MODERN art has always had an affinity for the gargantuan. Ironically, its very reductivism—a preference for simplicity, stripped-down geometric form and a disdain for the exquisitely made objet d’art destined for a rich collector’s mantelpiece—often meant an increase in scale. From Vladimir Tatlin’s (never built) “Monument to the Third International”, designed just after the Russian revolution, to Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”, which he completed nearly two decades later, artists hoping to make an impact on a world dominated by mass media and mass production had to go big even to get noticed.

A tendency towards the oversized was particularly pronounced in the final third of the 20th century as modernism grew middle-aged and comfortable. Creating artworks on a scale so vast that no one could possibly buy them, and few galleries could even show them, was one way of demonstrating a contempt for the marketplace that cheapened creativity even as it inflated prices. Multi-storey creations made from industrial materials and acre-sized works bulldozed into remote desert landscapes offered an alternative to the empty glitz of chic urban spaces.

Of course an art work that no one can see gets about as much attention as a tree falling unobserved in the forest, and few artists (and even fewer dealers) are so ideologically pure that they are willing to accept the indifference that comes with total inaccessibility. In recent decades a number of institutions have taken up the challenge of bringing before the public works whose sheer avoirdupois makes them unsuitable even for museums and galleries. Conveniently, three of the most successful venues dedicated to large-scale late-modernist work are within a few hours’ drive of New York, along the well-travelled tourist corridor whose northern end lies in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts.

Storm King, in New Windsor, New York, is a scenic 500-acre (202-hectare) sculpture park with room to accommodate even the most colossal sculptural and site-specific works. Many of the earlier pieces on view, such as Mark di Suvero’s “Mother Peace” (1969-70) and Alexander Calder’s “The Arch” (1975), are classic examples of late-20th-century modernism: tall painted steel constructions whose abstract forms bestride the landscape like conquering heroes. But the sculpture park also chronicles the transition from modernist bombast to post-modernist humility. More recent pieces tend to be site-specific and to work in harmony with the natural environment.

Rather than dominate the landscape, Andy Goldsworthy’s “Storm King Wall” (1997-98)—a stone wall, built with artisanal masonry techniques, that slithers through water and forest—articulates the gentle contours of the land. Maya Lin’s verdant, undulating “WaveField” (2009) is even less intrusive; the rolling hillocks appear at first glance to be natural formations. Lynda Benglis’s “Water Sources”, installed earlier this year and on view until the end of the autumn, charts a playful middle course between nature and artifice. Resembling cascades of molten lava or beach castles made by dribbling wet sand, these sculptures could be mistaken for geological formations were it not for the crayon-box colours mocking the back-to-nature narrative.

If Storm King’s pastoral landscape encourages artists to work in harmony with nature, Dia Beacon and MASS MoCA, each housed within sprawling former factory complexes, engage directly with the region’s industrial past. One wonders what William Blake might have made of these “dark Satanic mills” transformed into temples of aesthetic contemplation. Both have taken the skeletal remains of an economy based on coal, iron and steam and repurposed them for the digital age. Industry gives way to information technology, the production of consumer goods morphs into the production of ideas.

Dia Beacon, just across the Hudson River from Storm King, is in a former Nabisco box-printing plant. With over 240,000 square feet (22,300 square metres) of exhibition space, it provides ample room for indulging in gigantism. Even in such spacious quarters, Richard Serra’s massive, rusting sculptures feel cramped, a confinement that adds to their intimidating presence. “Union of the Torus and the Sphere” overwhelms, pressing visitors against the gallery walls, demonstrating that, once a certain critical mass is achieved, the meaning of the art work no longer depends on how it looks but on how the viewer (or, more precisely, the participant) interacts with the work in time and space.

This is a point that is driven home often here: in Walter de Maria’s football-field-sized grid of metal slabs, in Michael Heizer’s weathered steel pits sunk into the gallery floors or in Donald Judd’s maze of plywood boxes—installations meant to be walked through, inhabited or avoided at all costs. New to the Dia Beacon galleries this season is Robert Irwin’s “Excursus: Homage to the Square³”, a series of rooms that the artist has reshaped using fluorescent lights and translucent scrims that alter the visitor’s perception of space. It is simultaneously massive and ephemeral.

Curiously, the same imperatives that lead artists to embrace heft—a resistance to the commodification of art and a rejection of preciousness—can also engender art so rarefied as to have almost no existence at all. The paradoxical synergy between expansiveness and evanescence is critical to the work of Sol LeWitt, a conceptual artist who shows both at Dia Beacon and MASS MoCA. Mr LeWitt’s work seems particularly apt in a post-industrial setting, since his hands-off approach to art-making resembles the anonymous methods of mass production in which an almost infinite supply of consumer goods can be cranked out merely by using a template that is endlessly repeated. His wall paintings and drawings occupy vast tracts at both sites, but because they emerge out of a set of simple directions for their own fabrication (and are usually executed by a team of volunteers according to the artist’s instructions) their physical manifestation seems secondary to their existence as pure idea.

Like Dia Beacon, MASS MoCA is a cultural temple built on an industrial ruin. Located about 100 miles (160km) north in North Adams, Massachusetts, and housed in the vast complex of the former Sprague Electric Company, MASS MoCA allows even the most ambitious contemporary artists the chance to strut their stuff. Franz West’s “Les Pommes d’Adam” (pictured) takes full advantage, with tumescent columns in bubble-gum pink that offer a playful counterpoint to their gritty backdrop.

Often, large-scale pieces can feel anonymous as techniques more typical of the factory than the atelier serve to distance the artist from the work. But two shows, Francesco Clemente’s “Encampment” and Jim Shaw’s “Entertaining Doubts”, both of which are on until early 2016, demonstrate how an increase in scale can reverse the process, making viewers feel as if they are in danger of losing themselves in an artist’s eccentric imagination. “Encampment” is a 30,000-square-foot installation made of six hand-painted canvas tents covered with images that reflect the artist’s personal obsessions. Self-portraits and erotic scenes, all drawn with Mr Clemente’s typical expressionist verve, merge with forms taken from mythology, mystical texts and vintage illustrations. Mr Shaw channels images culled from popular culture—comic-book superheroes, political icons like Dan Quayle and Barbara Bush—and filters them through the distorting lens of his own subconscious, as if the viewer has been sucked into the confused nightmare of someone who has fallen asleep with the television on.

For an artist, going big can be the most seductive of ego trips. But it can also offer an opportunity to disappear from view. Some large-scale works are boastful, whereas others are shaped by the lightest of touches; they are as likely to oppress as to inspire. But whatever the medium and whatever the message, there is no doubt that, when it comes to art at least, size really does matter.