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Barry Le Va : the aesthetic aftermath PDF

232 Pages·2015·4.43 MB·English
by  Le Va
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BARRY LE VA A V E L Y R R A B m a t h T h e A e s t h e ti c A f t e r Michael Maizels University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Copyright 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401– 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maizels, Michael. Barry Le Va: the aesthetic aftermath / Michael Maizels. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-9468-6 (hc) ISBN 978-0-8166-9469-3 (pb) 1. Le Va, Barry, 1941—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. N6537.L428M35 2015 709.2—dc23 2015014119 Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my family, by whatever other names you call yourselves Let us try, Watson, you and I, if we can get behind the lie and reconstruct the truth. — Barry Le Va’s exhibited excerpts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Complete Sherlock Holmes Contents Introduction: The Clues Left Behind ix 1. Violence and Sculpture 1 2. Can the Mystery Be Solved? 31 3. Measure, Mind, and Matter 73 4. The Built Environment 109 5. The Aftermath, Again 145 Epilogue: Minor Saint of Postminimalism 173 Acknowledgments 181 Notes 185 Index 207 This page intentionally left blank Introduction THE CLUES LEFT BEHIND In November 1968, an unusual image appeared on the cover of Artforum magazine (Figure I.1). Phillip Leider, the journal’s head editor, later remembered that “this color photograph came in that was so stunning and so revolutionary, no one had ever seen a piece like this.”1 But while the image was plainly unusual, it was unclear what precisely it depicted. Visually, there were flakes and ribbons of yellow- orange felt that seemed to glow acidly against a wooden floor. But what was it? A new mode of sculpture? A kind of deconstructed painting? Descriptors such as postminimal- ism, process, and installation art— terms that would all be even- tually marshaled to describe such work, with varying degrees of success— had not yet emerged in the aesthetic lexicon. Jane Livingston, author of the feature story, called it “distributional sculpture,” a phrase admirably attentive to the work but unfortu- nately clunky in critical use. In fact, the one touchstone that Artforum readers had for this cover image suggested to many of them that it was a hoax.2 Robert Morris, a highly visible but somewhat controversial fig- ure in the New York art world, had recently exhibited a series of draped felt works that seemed to many to be the only possible ix

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Of the conceptual artists who began their careers in the 1960s and 1970s—Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, and Mel Bochner among them—Barry Le Va may be the most elusive. As this first study of his work reveals, his rigorously planned art was instigated to mask its creator’s intentions
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