Michael Ned Holte on Barry Le Va
Barry Le Va, Minneapolis Institute of Art, 1968.
BARRY LE VA came into my life in fall 2002, my first semester of grad school, when I chose a large drawing by him as the subject for my lengthy final paper in Bruce Hainley’s art-criticism seminar. The drawing in question had been recently acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where it hung alongside works by On Kawara, Adrian Piper, Ree Morton, and Lecia Dole-Recio. I remember this because I had never spent so much time looking at a single work in a museum. Its title
THE ART MUSEUM is represented by many metaphors: the palace, the temple, and the mausoleum; the theme park and the shopping mall; the cabinet of curiosities and the chamber of dreams. Its purposes, largely those of preservation and display, seem precise enough to need no explanation, but the questions provoked by the museum are legion. What values guide the amassing of the museum’s contents, the artworks or artifacts that are assembled, cared for, and shown, and whom do those values represent? Since the museum, as an institution, belongs to history as much as the objects it contains, can its