Barry Le Va : the aesthetic aftermath / Michael Maizels.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Maizels, Michael, 1983- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Le Va, Barry, 1941-2021--Criticism and interpretation.

Le Va, Barry.

Le Va, Barry, 1941-2021.

Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xx, 209 pages ; 21 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, [2015]

Summary:

Of the conceptual artists who began their careers in the 1960s and 1970s, 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 and methods, presenting itself as an "aftermath" of modernism's claim to permanency and civil society's preferred mode of monumentalism. For Michael Maizels, Le Va's work articulates the interconnection among the avant-garde's distrust of autonomous art objects, two decades of social unrest, the emergence of information theory, and lingering notions of scientific objectivity. Barry Le Va: The Aesthetic Aftermath explores how Le Va used such materials as shattered glass, spent bullets, sound recordings, scattered flour, and meat cleavers to challenge the interlocking assumptions behind blind faith in lasting beauty, just government, and perfectible knowledge. Taking inspiration from popular crime novels as well as contemporary art theory, Le Va charged his viewers to attempt, like detectives at a crime scene, to decipher an order underlying the apparent chaos. Le Va's installations were designed to erode not simply the presumed autonomy of the art object but also the economic and political authority of the art establishment. In his concluding chapter, Maizels looks at the more fixed work of the past two decades in which Le Va turned to architectural themes and cast concrete to probe the limits of dynamism and the idea of permanence. Book jacket.

Contents:

Violence and sculpture

Can the mystery be solved?

Measure, mind, and matter

The built environment

The aftermath, again

Epilogue: minor saint of postminimalism.

Notes:

Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D.--University of Virginia, 2013).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780816694686

0816694680

9780816694693

0816694699

OCLC:

907495003

Publisher Number:

9780816694693