The gallery is quiet. Perhaps too quiet. I can’t hear the gunshots or the sledgehammer. The bullet-holes peppering the wall, the glass smashed on the floor and the taped-off area by the doorway, demarcated “Slow Death”, are all a kind of evidence, but of what? Watch where you tread. Mind those ball-bearings and the vicious looking shards by your feet. And what about the chemical symbols and the diagrams, and the missing vanishing point? What’s with all that white powder? Do we need an art critic or forensics?
Barry Le Va liked the idea that the viewer should approach his work as a detective might, to figure out what he had done. But we’re not all Sherlock Holmes. The idea of the artwork as a puzzle to be solved has never interested me much. Once you’ve found the solution, you might well walk away and never return. If we keep going back, it is for other reasons.
Le Va died in 2021 at the age of 79, but we find ourselves in the middle of things, suspended between beginnings and endings at the Fruitmarket, in a much-reduced version of the retrospective that was recently at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein. “I didn’t want to complete anything. I wanted to leave everything incomplete,” the American artist said. His art presents us with a succession of arrested moments. Clean and dirty, messy and ordered, sprawling and contained, annotated with diagrams and instructions, isometric drawings and woodcut plays on shadow and silhouette, Le Va’s art spills across the walls and floors. Although intimations of violence and danger are inherent to some of what he did, and that actual violence and its aftermath were sometimes involved (he once ran into walls till he bled), his art was as much about space and sightlines, architectural projection and the ways in which art can inhabit a room as it is about psychology and the presence of the spectator. He has been called a post-minimalist but there are ways in which Le Va’s interest in materiality and presence goes beyond labels.
In the most dramatic work here, from 1968-71, four large sheets of glass are perfectly aligned in a stack on the floor, then hit with a single strike of a sledgehammer. A fifth sheet of glass has then been lowered on top of the cracked layers, trapping the crazed point of impact, with its cratered residue of pulverised glass, which optically hovers somewhere beneath the plane of the floor. At the end of the show the broken glass will be swept away, and the topmost unbroken sheet used for the next iteration of the work.
Le Va began using the floor as a field in 1966, and a year later made an arrangement of objects and materials that spill across an open area. Different lengths of shiny, square section aluminium bar, set at right angles to one another (and to the gallery walls) cross the floor. Cut squares of grey felt sit alone and in neat piles, or are thrown down like cards in a game of chance. Lengths of the same felt are rolled up or are partly unfurled around and between the aluminium bars, and further shreds of the stuff are sprinkled around. Ball bearings the size of marbles form rows and little clusters. Some have rolled away, driven by boredom or gravity. The whole thing made me think of Giacometti’s surrealist 1931-2 No More Play, a sinister gaming board with little objects whose rules we can never know.
The first time he made Equal Quantities: Placed or Dropped In, Out, and On in Relation to Specific Boundaries, it took Le Va all day to arrange the disparate elements. After the artist had left for the night the gallery janitors threw it all out, thinking it was discarded rubbish. Maybe they’d read the title. Le Va came back the next day and remade the work. It took 10 minutes, he said, and was no better nor worse than his original attempt. A short film, showing the artist remaking this work in 2020, shows him throwing his little scraps of felt, like a TV chef going large with fistfuls of parsley.
Sculptor Richard Serra acknowledged Le Va’s early influence on his own art, saying that Le Va’s scatter pieces “were a breakthrough that enabled countless other artists to expand on Barry’s original concept”. Serra’s early strewn and shredded rubber fanbelts and flung molten lead were but an early example of innumerable riffs on Le Va, made either knowingly or not by other artists (whether by Serra or Carl Andre, Martin Creed or Sarah Sze, Karla Black or Richard Long). There are undoubtedly precursors to Le Va, too. Nothing comes out of nothing. One thinks, primarily, of children arranging toys and other objects in their floor-bound imaginary kingdoms and battlefields, and of Lego strewn underfoot.
Le Va said he didn’t find the works he made with meat cleavers, thwacked at regular intervals into gallery walls and floors, violent at all. “I find them very calming,” he said. In other circumstances, this gruesome remark might worry an interviewer, or weigh heavy in the custody suite. As it is, the Fruitmarket has the wrong kind of walls and the wrong sort of wooden floor to have cleavers whacked into them. They tried.
Nor could the gallery allow anyone to shoot holes in the wall (they checked with the police). So a section of wall had to be taken to a firing range to get shot at, before having it reinstalled and plastered seamlessly back into place for Shots from the End of a Glass Line 1969/70. A one-inch diameter steel tube, like a rifle barrel, protrudes from the wall at eye-level. A marksman, standing a few feet away, aims at the hole in the tube and fires several shots (to avoid the danger of ricochet, the tube was replaced by a small target for the purpose of the exercise). Beneath the metal tube a low pile of broken glass snakes its way across the floor, marking out the firing line, from the position of the shooter to the pipe. When Le Va made this piece, the Vietnam war was at its height. In May 1970 the Kent State massacre took place. The following year the artist Chris Burden presented a performance during which he was deliberately shot in the arm by a live .22 caliber rifle round, fired by an accomplice. No one in the audience intervened. Art could not avoid real life and real violence, then as well as now.
One wants to see Le Va in full, at his most extreme. The big geometric forms he shunted about, the gigantic bowling balls, the splays and mess, the order and flux between discipline and play need full reign. What we miss above all is the artist himself. There was a way in which his sculpture and interventions were always performative, and depended on his eye and his actions, his rigour and his sense of space, his mischievousness and whimsicality. He likened his drawings (of which there are many here) to musical scores, and what Le Va probably needs now is for other artists, rather than dutiful curators, to reinterpret and install his work. Running with it keeps it alive.
Barry Le Va: In a State of Flux is at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, until 2 February
