Learning to Decipher Some Piles of Matter

“It’s something in progress that they haven’t cleaned up.”

“It looks like a junkyard.”

“It reminds me of the scraps of rubber at my husband’s plant.”

A few Orange County schoolteachers and administrators hesitantly offered their first impressions of a scattering of black felt pieces, a stack of broken glass and a rectangle of flour sprinkled on the floor--an installation by artist Barry Le Va.

The occasion was a program Tuesday afternoon at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, “Learning to Look at Contemporary Art: A Seminar for Educators,” designed to help dispel some of the mystique of contemporary art and to enable teachers to discuss museum visits with their students.

Led by Ann Bunn, an art educator and museum education consultant, the small group (some, but not all, of whom are art teachers) paused in each gallery of Le Va’s retrospective exhibition. Instead of lecturing, Bunn guided her listeners to an understanding of Le Va’s art by letting them discover it for themselves and unobtrusively enlarging on their remarks.

She asked the teachers again what they thought about the piece--”Untitled Felt: Separated by Flour Dusted and Glass Dropped.”

“The shapes are random, like leftovers from a pattern,” one woman said.

“It looks random, but it also looks carefully placed,” someone else said.

Bunn agreed. “There is a really strong element of randomness in the composition. If you (break sheets of glass), you might not be sure what configuration it might break in.”

One teacher said she was reminded of a phrase she heard at an art educator’s conference: “The necessary tension between coherence and chaos.”

Bingo. That, in a nutshell, is what Le Va is all about.

“He’s forcing us to think about the process, about cause and effect, time and duration,” Bunn said. “These elements are not traditionally thought to be part of a work of art, but they are fairly common in contemporary art.”

Looking at the drawings and installations, the group began to make connections between one piece and another. They talked about how the works made them feel, what the works made them think of, what a particular installation would look like if seen from above.

By the time they reached the final gallery, the teachers found themselves able to talk about shifting perspective (“It’s almost like we’re on the wall,” one teacher said, marveling at the artist’s most recent installation) and other notions relevant to Le Va’s abstruse work. And all this without having to endure a tedious lecture or even crack a book.

Newport Harbor’s Education Department offers a school program that begins with classroom visits by a museum docent who gives a slide talk about the artists whose work is on view at the museum and then invites questions from students. The children subsequently are bused to the museum (subsidies of up to $75 per school bus are available) and divided into small groups for a docent-led, 50-minute tour of the galleries, featuring the “dialogue” method used by Bunn.

To schedule the program at your school, call docent tour coordinator Karin Schnell at (714) 759-1122 3 weeks in advance of your proposed tour date.