RADICAL ARTISTS OF THE 1960s/1970s: BETWEEN GEOMETRY AND GESTURE: Barry Le Va, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Dorothea Rockburne, stanley brouwn

As one of the leading figures of what would come to be known as Process Art, Barry Le Va upended the conceit that sculpture had to be fixed, contained or even beautiful. More interested in the actions of artmaking than the end result, Le Va claimed the entire gallery space as his arena with the enactment of his first Distribution Pieces in 1966, dispersing commonplace materials like felt, glass and ball bearings across the floor in a series of improvised gestures within the gallery’s fixed geometry. (The current exhibition includes drawings related to the installation’s various permutations that reveal the chaos to have been, in fact, meticulously planned.) In doing so, La Va not only expanded the concept of sculpture, but also opened it up to a new physicality, bringing the viewer into relationship with the artwork, and the work in relation to the architecture that surrounded it.

Rather than looking at a single object, audiences were invited to walk around and immerse themselves in the work. Le Va, a fan of Sherlock Holmes, wanted to arouse in viewers a curiosity about the past actions that had created the present arrangement of materials. Titles often offered clues, such as a stack of shattered glass he called 4 Layers: Placed, Dropped, Thrown (1968-71). Perhaps unsurprising given the turmoil of the time, many of Le Va’s early works allude to an unseen violence, such as his signature meat cleaver pieces or Impact Run Velocity Piece (1969), an audio work in which he repeatedly ran across a gallery, hurling his body at its opposing walls for an entire hour. When the recording was later played in the empty gallery, audiences had only audio clues (and the surrounding architecture) to piece together what had transpired.

Similarly, Dorothea Rockburne viewed drawing as a material way of thinking, a process in its own right rather than a means to an end. Extensively influenced by both mathematics and dance (she studied with mathematician Max Dehn at Black Mountain College and later joined the Judson Dance Theater in New York), Rockburne’s works of the early 1970s suggest both an intellectual rigor and an emotional depth. In her series Drawing Which Makes Itself, Rockburne combined the gestures of dance with the elegant geometries of nature: folding, scoring and unfolding a white sheet of paper and, in the process, dismantling all definitions of what constituted a drawing. Once again, the viewer is left with faint clues to the artwork’s making, ghostly remnants of prior actions, and a drawing that is as much a sculpture as it is a flat piece of paper.