Calculated Spontaneity and Schizy Serial Work : The works of Barry Le Va, Gunther Forg, are given long runs in Newport Beach

The contemporary art world has long since fessed-up that it, like the worlds of advertising and fashion, thrives on novelty. Since art also lays claim to seriousness and enduring purpose, its striving for novelty naturally has to take on a different coloration. When an artist sets out to be different, his purpose is not supposed to be the mere manufacture of ephemeral new-fangledness but the revelation of insight about the state of our vision, our spirit or our times.

This striving for revelatory experimentation went on for well over a century until everybody had the uneasy feeling that art had been reduced, expanded and reshuffled about as many ways as is humanly possible. Art started backing off and toying with more old-fashioned notions and conventional forms. In its most extreme version this impulse came to be called Post-Modernism and was something of a wholesale flight into historical pastiche.

In a more moderate rendition, the impulse simply hunkered down to an insistence on personal integrity and the striving for depth and inherent excellence. (Two recent local examples were commercial gallery exhibitions of paintings by veteran L.A. artists Ed Moses and Joe Goode. Goode’s works remain on view at the James Corcoran Gallery to Feb. 4. Their paintings are so self-evidently fine that it didn’t cross anyone’s mind to say there was something wrong with them because they dwell in a four-decade-old Abstract Expressionist aesthetic. That would be about as silly as accusing Peter Paul Rubens of being Baroque.)

All of which is to say that art seems to be coming back to a place where the acid test of artistic integrity is sneaking up to overtake the commercial faddism that has dominated the galleries in recent years.

It is a litmus test that must apply to the works of two artists on view at the Newport Harbor Art Museum until April 2--remarkably long-running shows considering how relatively easily they digest. One is devoted to the art of Gunther Forg, a West German in his first local museum show, the other--larger--exercise is a 20-year survey of Barry Le Va, an artist who launched his career here in the ‘60s and then moved to New York.

An Experimental Piece

Old-timers with a taste for trivia may recall Le Va’s very first show at the long-defunct Lytton Center for the Visual Arts. The piece consisted of bits of colored felt scattered on the floor. There may also have been some ball-bearings involved but it was long ago. At the time it was an authentically experimental piece. Who had ever heard of art made by just scattering stuff on the carpet? But hey, man, if that’s your thing, we’re ready for it. Looks kinda like autumn leaves made by Ronald McDonald. The good old ‘60s.

Late in the jaded ‘80s Le Va’s work has inevitably lost its little frisson of originality in a regular flood of Process art and a realization that the use of randomness goes back to Hans Arp dropping pieces of thread in the old Dada days.

At first, Le Va’s six big pieces make you feel like you’ve walked into a small factory where everybody quit work in the middle and just left everything lying. One work consists of heaps of black felt in various stages of tattering along with sheets of shattered glass and a painted rectangle on the floor.

A work called “Corner Sections” fills a gallery with slabs of fiberboard cantilevered from the walls and bits of wood scattered on the floor. Other installation pieces include trough-like boxes topped with big metal balls. They look like some sort of maze but they don’t go anywhere.

In between these installation pieces are some 80 abstract drawings that at first appear as scattered and chaotic as the large works. Then you realize they have been carefully planned to look random.

There is something about calculated spontaneity that puts one off.

The work is like a visual version of a sound composition by John Cage or a less clearly logical variant on the mathematically programmed art of Sol LeWitt. It all looks suspiciously as if it might have been done with a computer. You hear the tinny voice of HAL from “2001” saying, “I Un-der-stand. I will arrange the units in such a fashion that no two will appear to stand at the same angle but by using formula X-14 the results will be such that no unit can be moved without disturbing the underlying formula.”

You get the feeling of game theory at work and occasionally a kind of chilly stylish wit emerges from it all as in “Either Or 2” which looks like wallpaper designed by a robot Matisse that has been taught to draw schematized breasts.

Anybody who likes to draw can imagine the fun of using one installation as a still-life set-up. Titled “Animated Functions, Isolated Observations, Disconnected Numbers,” it is a concatenation of plaster cylinders and wheels scattered among fiberboard troughs. If you drew or photographed the thing it would yield all manner of contradictory perspectives despite the fact the model has the logic of its own existence. Reminds one a bit of the painter Al Held.

But whatever Le Va’s works reminds one of, it never extends beyond the boundaries of artistic formality. This is experimental art that has become academic art. A kind of dogged methodology pushes it forward but there is no lift to it and no poetry beyond a certain mannered and compulsive decorativeness.

Serial Works

Gunther Forg--who works in Switzerland--likes making serial works on large vertical formats of identical size. Some take the form of photographs, others are sculptural reliefs or paintings. That sounds contradictory and Forg’s work is a trifle schizy.

A series called “Barcelona Pavilion” presents a suite of color-photographs, blown-up details of Mies van der Rohe’s classic house. The right angles of the architect’s lush minimalism becomes abstract theme-and-variation fodder for Forg except that he introduces a female figure in one panel and makes another into a mirror. Evidence suggests he is poking at some meaning beyond pure formal variation. Maybe he wants to talk about how the events of ordinary life upset the calm of pure contemplation or how self-consciousness gets in its way. It’s just not clear.

His series of scratched and gouged sculptural reliefs have some of the qualities of painting and his “Newport Harbor Paintings” have aspects of sculpture since they are executed on sheet lead. Not half-bad minimalist paintings, they bring sonorous German hues to compositions reminiscent of Barnett Newman or Ellsworth Kelly. Forg makes the gray lead sheeting look like elegant watered fabric but we continue to be troubled by a sense of mixed motive in this art.

A couple of works hint at Jasper Johns flags without stars or stripes. You get the feeling this art thinks of itself as mordant and subtle when it basically just doesn’t have its act together.