WITHIN A TWO AND A half year period, from early 1966 to the present, Barry Le Va’s art has traced out a personal stylistic history of extraordinary repleteness. If his assumptions and terms are problematical and sometimes difficult to accept, they are eminently worth examining. In defining Le Va’s stylistic progression, several factors which evolved simultaneously must be considered: types of materials used, size and number of components, size of overall format, use of color, and approach to internal organization of parts. The successive decisions made with respect to each of these elements nearly always point to a gradually strengthening inclination toward a sense of impermanence and chaos, and a rapidly increasing sophistication in handling weighted groupings within a larger distributional scheme.
When Le Va first began making his “distributions,” his primary material was usually canvas, cut and folded in various ways; with this he used, in varying combinations, wood, string, paper, vinyl and puzzle parts. All components in the works from this first series (1-6, 1966) were painted, partly with a view to minimizing the referential character of the raw materials by homogenizing their surface quality. #1 included three quilted, cushion-like objects, a few handfuls of yellow-painted puzzle parts, and a narrow, twenty foot strip of perforated vinyl, also painted yellow. #2 incorporated one large and about a dozen smaller square or rectangular pieces of canvas, creased or folded and painted white, red or grey; these were placed over the large, dark blue bed canvas in a rather self-consciously “random” manner, and, over all, yellow puzzle parts were strewn. Both these works had strong overtones of whimsy; both were more sculptural than painterly, in terms of bulk and organization, and both were at the same time so rudimentary and so tremulous as to be affecting in spite of themselves. They worked in ways that could not have been entirely intended—namely as objects faintly tinged with a genuinely unconscious wit, though the esthetic notions which interested Le Va (he was still in art school at the time, and receiving little encouragement) were not unsophisticated. (I have sometimes thought it is chiefly in contrast to these that the recent grey felt works seem so advanced.) #4 of this initial series had a quite different sort of playfulness, as well as considerable abstract decorative merit; it consisted of 114 pieces of folded yellow paper, disposed in a grid pattern with 6 or 19 to a row; each unit was placed arbitrarily within the prescribed scheme. This work represents a somewhat anomalous gesture in the context of the rest. It is the only one employing a rigidly ordered format.
Halfway through the 1966 series, Le Va abandoned the application of light and unstable colors in favor of basic complementaries; this made it easier to concentrate his actual and perceived esthetic decisions on aspects of configuration and disposition of parts rather than on an arbitrary choice of colors. All the works in this series existed within an area of about 8 feet by 8 feet. In January of 1967, he enlarged his format to an approximately 15 by 15 foot area, and thus began a gradual movement away from rigorous spatial containment of compounded elements toward a spreading-out, and disintegration, of manifestly interconnected parts. The other major innovation at this time was the replacing of canvas by felt, enabling qualities of fluidity and casualness which were not possible with the stiffer fabric. His interest in attending to distributions as such, undistracted by weighted diversities in the components’ shapes, textures, etc., is reflected at this time in his substitution of metal ball bearings for the previously un-uniform small objects. (The ball bearings turned out to be an unsatisfactory solution, being even less neutral against the soft forms than the puzzle parts, for example, and seeming to be placed there as a sort of didactic conceit or superfluous afterthought.)
The disturbing gratuitousness of Le Va’s use of ball bearings in conjunction with cloth is plainly evidenced in his Streamer Piece of early 1967. In this work, a large rectangular piece of blue felt, several smaller squares of green felt and 8 blue, upholstered segments shaped as flattish, narrow boxes were distributed in an open configuration on the floor. Thirty or 40 ball bearings lay atop the felt pieces. Wires, tracing a five-sided zigzag pattern, were suspended twelve inches above the floor, establishing a linear continuity among the scattered components beneath; suspended from the wires were short streamers of red felt, spaced intermittently. Streamer Piece is one of the least schematically ambiguous and thus easiest of the distribution pieces; it is, in fact, all too accountable on every level. The vertical lines of stream.ers emerged somewhat interestingly as tenuous planes fencing off spatial areas, independent of their correspondence to the objects grouped beneath, but it was not enough a sustaining, or, one felt, entirely culminated device (practically or conceptually) to be considered as more than a diversionary episode in the whole context of the artist’s development. With the completion of this and another work incorporating rolled felt, piled and strewn streamers and ball bearings (#7, 1967), color was eliminated altogether and replaced by black and/or grey. #8 and #9, 1967, employed felt cut in sizes ranging from particles to large sheets, rolled or “dropped” in roughly rectangular or square formats, respectively. Ball bearings were reintroduced into #10; this piece was larger than the previous ones, measuring about 25 by 25 feet.
Le Va’s stated objective in maintaining certain obvious geometric relationships is to elucidate first the elementary concept that, whether “random” or “orderly,” a distribution is defined as “relationships of points and configurations to each other,” or, concomitantly, “sequences of events.” Beyond this, he wishes each work to “transcend its first appearance of disorder to another level of order. . . . When chance methodology is used extensively enough it does not necessarily produce a disorderly or accidental-appearing distribution.”
In a particular sense, the formal problems that have interested Le Va in his recent works are more akin to those of some post-Cubist painting than to environmental sculpture, in that what is most critical in these works is the two-dimensional ordering of parts, distributed within and relating to a set edge. That the ground is horizontal rather than vertical, that the parts are rearrange-able, and that elements both of topography and “literalist space” enter in, do not alter this fact. Paradoxically, as Le Va’s work became less decorative and less “pictorial,” it also became closer, in terms of flat design, to some abstract painting, though this affinity is clearer in photographs than in actual confrontation.
One of the most controversial aspects of Le Va’s recent works, and what strikes one most immediately on seeing them in the flesh, is the question of rearrangeability. It should first be emphasized that the works are not meant to be shuffled around or played with by the spectator; but neither are they intended to be physically inaccessible to him. By the extremely flexible and portable nature of the materials used, this very accessibility suggests the likelihood of physical disruption. The more significant issues are to what degree each work is rearrangeable by the artist each time it is set up, and how nearly the pieces in a set work must remain as originally positioned by the artist, in order to still constitute the work of art he intended. Le Va ordinarily works only from a very rough diagram. The only firmly preestablished dicta for a given work are the number and nature of components, the size of the area in which they are to be distributed and, usually, a predrawn but violable plan indicating prescribed locations for the largest elements. Because of this lack of a comprehensive diagrammatic scheme according to which the work can be set up in the artist’s absence, the answer to the first question is that, theoretically, there are no absolutely binding criteria by which any one work must be consistently laid down. In practice; the artist adheres rather closely to his initial plan each time he repositions a specific work. As to the extent that a work can be disrupted by the spectator as he walks through it, and yet maintain its original integrity, this is an issue that does not particularly concern the artist (though he insists that the works are not about “spectator participation”)—and thus it must be assumed that, short of radical or plainly intentional disarrangement, a considerable degree of disruption is permitted. There are, then, two aspects of chance occurrence implicit in these pieces—on the one hand fortuitous-seeming static distribution, and, on the other, the element of unpredictable change coming into play after the work has left the hand of the artist.
The semantical problems inherent in Le Va’s, or anyone’s, claims to deal with an “esthetic of randomness“ are serious; there are also problems of another kind, arising out of the viewer’s encounter with the situation the artist presents, apart from his ideated objective. First, if one attempts logically to define what it is that is meant in this instance by randomness, it becomes evident that we are treating the concept here only in the vaguest way, and that chaos, because it more clearly denotes “lack of order,” or “lack of structure,” might be a better term to apply. (With respect to Le Va’s distributions, there is no workable definition of order that can be set in opposition to randomness.) One’s perceiving of the art work as being chaotic seems to depend upon two determinants: that it is large enough so that it cannot be seen in entirety from any single internal position; and that one is immanently aware that his own movements as he walks through it will cause the configuration of parts to shift, and that, short of deliberate and radical “damage,” these disruptions will not significantly alter the sense of the whole. Whether owing to an innate or conditioned response, people are noticeably uncomfortable in the midst of these accumulations of debris. (One person, after having watched Le Va set up a piece on the floor of his gallery, asked him, “What do we do now? Sweep it up?”)
In the last analysis, the viability of Le Va’s work seems in large part to depend on whether it is enough simply to explore the abstract concept of “randomness” (chaos), or whether such a concept is by itself esthetic. The paradoxes involved when one attempts to demonstrate the look of “random ordering” of increments have absorbed many artists over this century; George Brecht has noted that, “It is not intuitively obvious that strict randomness is difficult to achieve . . .” Jackson Pollock, of course, brought the question of accidental imagery into full esthetic consideration, though his paintings work on other levels to transcend the mere fact of chance procedure in a way that Le Va’s distributions don’t. The latter’s progressive elimination of referential or individually evocative elements (color, sculptural shape, etc.) on the one hand, and overall expansion and multiplication of parts on the other, tend toward an increasingly specific emphasis on the evocation of chaos. What happens to the spectator’s perceived relationship to his environment when it is made to appear chaotic in one degree or another is the essence of what Le Va’s recent work is about; all other issues are residual. Whether the experience offered is felicitous or not, it is revelatory.
—Jane Livingston
