In March 1969, Barry Le Va realized a haunting work in the original 1927 Walker Art Center building, which was about to be demolished in order to make room for the museum's next incarnation, a brick-sheathed modernist structure designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. Le Va may be one of the few artists--at least, the only one I know of--to make a work in a museum on the verge of being razed. The Walker's staff had already moved to temporary quarters in downtown Minneapolis, well before the wrecking ball would strike. Much as we anticipated the advent of the new building, it wasn't all that easy to leave the old one, with its long history in the region, and where so much had happened in the way of exhibitions and other activities. During one of my nostalgic wanderings through its now starkly empty spaces--the old Walker Art Center had been completely stripped of all its accoutrements, including its elegant brass railings and light fixtures--I came to a gallery, its floor covered with glittering glass shards, layers of red powder and shimmering pools of oil. Before me was Barry Le Va's solemn reflection on dematerialization, a magical work that had suddenly appeared in an abandoned, closed-to-the-public museum. Not only had his piece evolved in secrecy, it would remain a secret except to a few fortunate visitors--some Walker staff and artist friends of Le Va--who would see it during its brief days of existence.

At the time he created this piece, Le Va was a young instructor at the Minneapolis School of Art. He made the work at the invitation of Christopher Finch and Richard Koshalek, then members of the museum's curatorial staff. "When they approached me," he wryly recalls, "they said my work would go down with the museum." It was clearly an offer he couldn't refuse. Not long after accepting, Le Va and two of his students arrived at the shuttered building, to which they had been granted special access, bearing sacks of red iron oxide powder and bottles of mineral oil. Other essentials such as sheets of glass were fortuitously nearer at hand: there was a large supply in what had been a frame shop in the museum's basement.

Working conditions in the stripped and deserted museum as Le Va would soon discover, were far from ideal. There was neither heat nor electricity, and March in Minnesota can be bitterly cold. Because skylights were the only source of illumination, and the galleries grew colder in late afternoon, his time there had to be limited. "I worked as fast as I could before it got dark," he keenly remembers. "It was freezing in there." But there were also a few plusses. For one thing, Le Va could have all the gallery space he needed, and he was free to do whatever he liked with it, or to it. For another, he didn't need to worry about making a huge sticky mess that would have to be scraped up later. Under normal circumstances, he would have been politely asked to protect the museum's white terrazzo floors by covering them with sheets of plastic on which he could freely spill, stack, layer and otherwise manipulate his various materials. But these were far from normal times. Since whatever came forth would be the last work of art to appear in those galleries, the floors required no such protection.

Le Va, intrigued by the heady prospect of making a major work in a museum, even one about to be torn down, initially proposed a piece that would occupy three of the Walker's contiguous galleries. Intended to explore levels of humidity, it would range from desert-dry to liquid-dominated sectors. The same three ingredients--oil, glass and red iron oxide powder--would be present in each room, but in radically varying proportions. The idea was that visitors would move from one space to another, passing through three symbolic zones. On the floor of the first gallery, a space meant to represent aridity, would be a few shallow pools of oil, small amounts of glass and liberal sprinklings of red powder. The floor of the second galley, the area occupying the midpoint on Le Va's dry-to-wet scale, would be overlaid with the same materials in approximately equal amounts. The third gallery, in which mineral oil would be the primary ingredient, would represent total saturation. After studying the spaces available to him, Le Va revised his scheme. Invested as he was in the three-stage concept, there were a few inhibiting factors to consider. Given the limited time he would have to make the piece, the vast amounts of materials required and the paucity of daylight--not to mention the frigid conditions in which he would be obliged to operate--he decided to execute only one part of his ambitious vision. He chose to focus on the second gallery, the one whose floor would be overlaid with more or less equal amounts of oil, glass and red powder.

This would by no means be Le Va's first floor work, even at that nascent stage of his career. He had been making distribution pieces since the mid-1960s, starting while still a graduate student at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Improvisational as these might have looked to some, many evolved from drawings, which, in essence, carefully posited various thematic concepts. In fact, a 1968 drawing in ink, watercolor and felt-tip marker with the weighty inscription Three Arrangements of Different Quantities (of Iron Oxide, Glass, Mineral Oil) to be Installed as One; Divided into Three Parts foreshadowed the Walker Art Center piece. The drawing consists of three loosely defined rectangles, each filled with networks of angular lines overlaid with dark red marker blobs. In the first rectangle, a scattering of watery red shapes intrudes over the linear complex. In the second, the aggressive blobs have increased in size and number. So dominant are they in the third frame, only bits of the pattern underneath are discernible. Below each rectangle, Le Va provides a neatly handwritten list of the required materials and their relative amounts. Once he determined that the Walker Art Center piece would occupy a single gallery (and ever the careful documenter of his work), he added a handwritten line below the title of the 1968 drawing that reads, "To be installed as one, divided into three parts."

To date, Le Va has made about 50 floor works in varying sizes and materials, and in various locales. The earliest was a 1966 four-color, spray-painted canvas. Though initially enrolled as a painting major at Otis, he was increasingly attracted to alternative means of expression. His interests embraced such disparate 1960s phenomena as the mordant cartoons of the Swedish artist Oyvind Fahlstrom; the undulant Pop shapes then favored by young English sculptors such as Philip King and Eduardo Paolozzi; the chance-based, unfinished-looking works by Fluxus artists; and, in music, the compositions of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler.

Though Le Va ultimately confined his project to a single gallery, he still thought of it as full of episodes. While its origins were in the three-panel drawing, with all its specifications regarding materials and process, after he began working in the chilly gallery, intuition seems to have largely taken over. As Le Va describes the process, the evolution of the piece was almost random. Walking the roughly 50-foot length of the gallery backward, he would pause at various points, stacking whole and broken sheets of glass here, strewing handfuls of red iron oxide there--all within a viscous matrix of mineral oil. The process took two days. Upon its completion, he assigned the piece a title that matter-of-factly describes its making: Room 2 of a 3-Room, 3-Part Installation Utilizing Various Quantities of the 3 Materials. (The title, supplemented by the list of three materials, is also that of a 1969 composite photograph Le Va made from images he shot of the Walker piece.)

For those who saw Le Va's installation at the Walker, especially those who knew the galleries well and remembered what they had seen there earlier, first impressions of what he had wrought could be disorienting. What they encountered was an exotic topography of glittering glass shards, some afloat on, others partially submerged in, syrupy liquid. Within this glistening membrane were islands of red powder, their edges perceptibly dissolving. Because the piece occupied the entire floor, viewers were obliged to contemplate it from outside the wide gallery entrances. Le Va's creation seemed to be undergoing metamorphosis, an effect heightened by the fitful ways in which its panes of glass and pools of oil reflected fugitive images of sun and clouds. It was as though some mysterious organism had taken possession of the gallery.