ART : For Barry Le Va, It’s Quite Logical to Study Seemingly Random Acts

A photographer asked artist Barry Le Va recently if he would perch on a white cube in one of the installations in his retrospective exhibit at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. Le Va obligingly sat down, and the cube began to give way with a dry, cracking sound.

“They must have cast it much thinner than the others,” he murmured as he examined the piece, made of plaster-like hydrastone.

The piece would need to be fixed, of course, but the accident was hardly a tragedy. Although some viewers admire his art simply because of the way it looks--the rambunctious disarray of “scatter pieces” from the 1960s, the austere, puzzlelike quality of later works--Le Va has no interest in making it seductive to the eye.

For this installation, “Stare Down (Abscessed Imprint)” from 1988, he deliberately left the plaster “absolutely unfinished,” Le Va said. He used mahogany to make a mazelike piece that hangs on the wall--not because of the sensuous character of the wood but “because there’s less warpage and less grain,” so the wall fixture can be read as “a continuous line.”

Slotlike components of the piece that hold huge aluminum balls in suspension are made of lowly fiberboard. Le Va even deglamorizes the balls by rubbing graphite on them to remove the shine of the metal.

“I try not to embellish them,” he said of his installations. “I try to keep them bland. The materials are based on the most immediate way the work can be done.”

For Le Va, making art is an intensely cerebral matter.

During the past 2 decades, his chief concern has been to investigate the logic behind seemingly random activities. Both his installations of three-dimensional objects dispersed on gallery floors and walls and the complex drawings he makes for these pieces (considered full-fledged works in their own right) require the viewer to re-create mentally specific sequences of events.

The quirky intellectual motivation behind Le Va’s art has its roots in his teen-age fascination with architecture and mathematics.

“When I visualize something in my mind, I visualize where things are locating themselves in space,” he said. “I tend to look at drawing as if I’m looking down at something, never as a frontal view.”

For “Stare Down,” he explained that the portion of the piece that hangs on the wall is supposed to be understood as if seen from above--as if the wall were the floor. The resulting disorientation is a major part of what Le Va is after.

Growing up in Long Beach in the 1950s, Le Va’s early interest in art was sparked by magazine illustrations of Abstract Expressionist paintings, which appealed to him mostly because of their huge scale. After dropping out of several universities, he finally enrolled at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1963 to study painting. But his restlessness was not appeased.

“The more I got involved with painting,” he said, “the more it was dissatisfying to me. Because no matter what I did, it was going toward a fixed end result.”

During this discouraging period, Le Va spent his time looking at art, reading widely and listening to the avant-garde jazz of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. As Art in America writer Stephen Ellis has pointed out, Coleman and Le Va have both used methods of improvisation involving rigorous, self-imposed rules to discover “patterns at the edge of disorder.”

“I was really interested in getting rid of every influence and trying to make art on my own set of terms,” Le Va said of his years at Otis. “I wanted art that really questioned the underlying structures of art.

“One day I was looking around at the process that led to (the three-dimensional pieces he was making at the time)--the remnants sitting in the studio, the overturned chairs, all of that. And that seemed to hold much more potential for me in terms of art making.

“Everything seemed to be logical in terms of the cause-and-effect activity I was going through. If a can was overturned here, it was overturned because maybe I needed to pour something and the can was left on its side. It may have rolled to that position because of the force with which it was laid down or because the floor was warped, or something like that. “(The materials I used) one day would overlap with the materials of another day and another day.

“That’s more or less (the notion) I’ve proceeded with ever since. . . . It’s not that I set out deliberately not to make an object. It’s just that I’m interested in how things locate themselves in space through time--whatever logic it takes for things to exist in space.”

Le Va says the logic underlining his work can be based on geometric patterns, mathematical formulas or even purely arbitrary events, like kicking an object across the floor.

One early (1967-68) installation re-created in the Newport Harbor show, “Black Felt With Flour Dusted and Glass Dropped” is a seemingly wildly anarchic scattering of felt pieces on the floor--large, irregular swaths, medium-size squares and tiny snippets--punctuated by layered sheets of broken glass and a tidy rectangular area covered with a thin layer of flour.

It is up to the viewer to figure out the sequence in which Le Va accomplished the events (scattering, dropping, “dusting”) that resulted in the surprisingly organized clutter visible in the piece. But in the absence of detailed explanations (Le Va’s “clues” are limited to the titles he gives his pieces), how are viewers supposed to follow the complex logic of each piece? Does the artist even care whether viewers understand his work?

He chewed on the question, answering it in a ruminative, somewhat self-contradictory way.

“(Viewers) have to work,” Le Va said. “I think art is something that has to be seen over and over and over again. You read a book the first time, you read it again and again, and the third time you have a whole different kind of understanding of the book than when you first read it.

“I’ve always maintained that for some of these (works), you have to spend as much time with the work as it did for me to make it, which is at least 3 or 4 days. So maybe somebody has to sit in that space for 3 or 4 days. But nobody is going to do it, and (the art) isn’t about that kind of (activity) anyway.”

Then again, Le Va said he doesn’t necessarily spend much time with other artists’ exhibits.

“I (may) walk out in 2 seconds because I immediately kind of think I know what they’re about and I’m not interested beyond that,” he said. “I think we all do it. The artists probably do it more than the public does. . . . Because (we’ve) seen so much, you know.”

And finally, Le Va admitted, “I may see the audience totally irrelevant to me while I’m making the work. Because I’m more after something I can learn from. The audience’s acceptance or rejection of it doesn’t matter too much.”

Le Va paused for a moment. “But I’m happy when they like it, sure,” he added with a smile. “Ultimately, the real judges--to me--are the peers I respect. My own generation (of artists).”

His generation of conceptually attuned sculptors and draftsmen--Le Va was born in 1941--includes such major American figures as Richard Serra, Vito Acconci, Mel Bochner, Richard Tuttle, Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse. But Le Va declined to specify the artists he most admired.

One important quality he shares with them is a disinclination to make work that overtly appeals to an art-market sensibility.

“I don’t think it’s about appeasing or amusing anybody,” Le Va said of his art. “I think at the moment there is a lot of work that seems to be only on an amusement level. Amusement does not interest me at all.”

“Barry Le Va: 1966-1988” remains on view through April 2 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Gallery hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. Admission: $3 general, $2 for students and seniors, $1 for children younger than 17. Information: (714) 759-1122.