
Le Va (rhymes with ICA) was there, of course, dressed in severe gray silk jacket and slacks, for the opening of this major show. Like his art, he’s not such an easy guy to be around, by turns challenging, gracious, explanatory and gnomic during the member walk-around. I got the sense that he wasn’t too crazy about explaining–he’d explain and then become evasive, uttering something obfuscatory.

All this is by way of my trying to give a sense of this work, which is tremendously influential and has a bad-boy undercurrent, a desire to change the terms of sculpture.
First of all, Le Va’s work keeps pushing the boundaries (figurative and literal) of what a piece of art can be or where its edges can lie. He came up against the boundaries early, in the 1967, when the professors who wanted work on a pedestal for the graduate show from the Otis Art Institute (Los Angeles).

But though I got the concept–thanks to his explanation–I couldn’t quite get the points of view, imagine though I might. I think he left some facts out here, but I couldn’t figure out what those facts were, at least not on opening night.

His pieces are puzzles. They may be artifacts of something that has happened, been thought, been experienced, but to describe them as mere artifacts, as merely residue, is inaccurate because this residue is planned for and exhibited as if it were a thing, an art object.
Le Va used the term archaeology last night at the ICA to describe the art-goer’s process, making sense of the artifacts by projecting back in time to their facture and projecting further back in time to their moment of intellectual conception.
There’s a crankiness here, a desire to confound, an unwillingness to totally please, a willingness to create a puzzle too hard to solve. He distributes voluptuous felt on the floor and then ends the process by dropping glass on top. Crash. The glass was “a period,” he said at the walk-through, referring to a mark of punctuation (see three images above, on the right, “Continuous and Related…”).
For all that, when someone stepped on one of his glass pieces (the noise stopped people in their tracks), he seemed undisturbed, even pleased–by the reactions, by his answer to the question of the inviolability of the art object (it’s not inviolable, and while he doesn’t want you to trash his work, he also doesn’t mind a random accidental disturbance).

As for the row of cleavers sunk into the wall about a foot above the floor, handles up, Le Va gave a demonstration of his process of standing, back- to-the-wall, raising up the cleaver, showing the arc that his arm followed to impel the tip of the blade into the wall, and then his repetition of the action a couple of feet further along the wall, over and over. Again, there’s a sound, an action, an idea–and a tactile and kinetic response to these and the materials and implications of the cleavers and the wall.
I liked learning that Le Va did not know about Joseph Beuys’ felt obsession when he started using it in his work. He credited a fellow student who was making banners out of felt. She suggested the fabric to him for both its drape and its edges that do not unravel.
I liked learning that Le Va placed the wonderful “Shatterscatter” layered glass piece on the stair landing both because of its proximity to the windows and because it’s in the way when gallery visitors want to cross the space. I also liked the description of how a single swing from a 10-lb. mallet shattered each of the six layers of glass successively.
It’s this physical relationship that Le Va’s work offers–not just the imagining of how it was done, how it made noise as it cracked, how the accumulated pieces impinge on one another–but how the viewer is in a space with things that surround and impede and how the viewer becomes not only a speculator about past causality, but a participant in a new cause-and-effect sequence in the course of moving around and through the work of art.
These ideas may be givens in parts of the art world today, but it wasn’t a given when Le Va first began raising these issues with his work. In fact, it wasn’t even considered a possibility, then.
Also on my list of favorites was Le Va’s use of the ramp–the best ramp piece yet. This space in the ICA has daunted some of the best and the brightest in creating art that fits there. But Le Va’s sound piece is just right, with its tape defining a running track, and the speakers spewing the sound of his running back and forth with 30-second pauses, taking longer and longer to cover the distance. Again, I’m grateful for the explanation, and I do not know that I could have decoded this with the clues given. But it’s a perfect fit.
Le Va said that he liked the sound spilling over into the galleries, reminding everyone of his physical presence performing his task.
I ought to add that part of Le Va’s pleasure in all of this cause-and-effect is focused on how causality can still result in random results–hence each time the 10-lb. mallet hits the glass, the glass shatters differently. Every length run is not exactly the same. All the sculptures, with all their component pieces, follow a plan but have different outcomes as he distributes them. (Right, a photo of “Bunker Coagulation–pushed from the right” from a 1995 installation. A very different version with some similarities, some differences, three photos below, left, at the ICA.)
This idea of chance and randomness and following a plan brings to mind John Cage. I suppose then that it’s no surprise that Le Va is also a music lover, from jazz to Schoenberg to Wagner.



If this show sounds prickly, well it is, but it’s the record of a mind grappling with the changes that have swept through the art world since the 1960s, and creating a few of those changes himself.
After I’d made up my mind that I was awfully glad I didn’t have to work with or live with Le Va, he gave a gracious thank you to the preparators and the rest of the crew at the ICA who helped build the puzzle-like piece on the back wall on the first floor, saying they were the best he’d ever worked with. That’s as close as I care to get (right, “9g-Wagner,” 2005, polyester resin and rubber-coated MDF, the piece the ICA crew helped build).
However, for all its difficulty, it also has an accessibility, a tactile visual quality that offers another path in.
I’d also like to pass on a final word from my favorite art guard at the ICA. She said that the minute she saw Le Va’s floor distributions, she thought of Polly Apfelbaum’s work. The guard, by now quite knowledgable about the art she lives with daily, said she liked the Le Va show, and she said she double-checked on her theory about Apfelbaum, looking through the ICA show’s literature. She’d hit the jackpot. Apfelbaum’s work, Karen Kilimnik’s work, although they have very different intentions, probably wouldn’t exist without Barry Le Va.