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This chapter examines Le Va’s work from the end of the 1970s to the early 2000s, a period in which the artist has turned to ever more rigid and heavy materials. It examines these increasingly architectonic works through the lens of Le Va’s early training in architecture, putting his work into dialog with that of his slightly younger contemporaries, Gordon Matta-Clark and Bernard Tschumi. It argues that Le Va’s turn to obdurate sculpture in fact makes explicit a longstanding strategy of using architecturally-inflected ideas to cultivate impermanence within his sculptural practice--to work against the historical durability and autonomy of the art object.

This chapter re-examines the period 1967-1972 but focuses on Le Va's powder works, which used materials such as flour, mineral oil, chalk and iron oxide powder. This chapter takes a closer look at Le VaZ's often-cited model for analysing his work, that of Sherlock Holmes scrutinizing the aftermath of a crime scene in order to reconstruct the event and its perpetrator. After exploring the history of the clue paradigm and its relationship to information theory, this chapter discusses the intimate relationship between these ideas in the work of Le Va and Robert Smithson. It ultimately argues that while many of the tropes of Le Va's work derive from The Tales of Sherlock Holmes, it is the world of postmodern detective fiction, especially Alain Robbes-Grillet’s The Erasers, that best models the interpretative framework implicit in Le Va's work.

This chapter examines Le Va's invocation of chaotic and violent scatter in the period 1967-1972. The discussion focuses on works such as his installations of broken glass, meat cleavers and bullets. The violence suggested in these pieces is examined in light of a post-minimal thematics of the injured body as explored by Le Va’s contemporaries such as Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and Chris Burden. It ultimately argue that Le Va’s violence does not “express” the upheaval of the period so much as comprise a set of specific art historical and political interventions within it

The third chapter addresses Le Va’s wooden dowel works from the mid- and late 1970s. Deceptively simple in appearance, these arrangements of wooden dowels realized complex measurements of their installation spaces or constructed Byzantine perspective systems that penetrated the gallery walls and floors. It argues that the dowel constructions use incomprehensible algorithms, mutable measurements, and impossible perspective systems to accomplish a kind of perceptual and cognitive splintering parallel to the earlier material fragmentation of broken glass, thrown flour and ripped fabric.

This chapter examines the frequent re-staging of Le Va’s art, which has been ongoing since the early 1970s. It interprets these re-stagings as historical precursors to the increasingly important museum recreations of ephemeral or site-specific works from the 1960s and 1970s. It analyses Le Va's reconstructed installations not as secondary imitations of earlier pieces but rather as later elaborations of open-ended works. Le Va’s strategies of repetition and reconstruction thereby become an additional means of undermining the singular and contained presence of sculpture that animated his work at the outset of his career.

The Epilogue addresses Le Va's historical position, examining the way in which a kind of “minor status” has been ascribed to him since almost the beginning of his career. It suggests that while a number of factors likely contributed to Le Va’s comparative lack of renown the best explanation is Le Va’s own demonstrated reticence to pursue a higher artistic profile. This must be understood not only as an expression of an individual’s understandable desire to work outside of the limelight but also as a part of a critique of the mechanisms of art world fame. By not seeking a place in the pantheon of great artists, Le Va insists on a kind of art history—multiple, fragmented and temporary—that echoes his own work.