James lee Byars
James Lee Byars
Rhetoric of Memory
At a time when the myth of the artist is being investigated on all possible fronts, when history and recollection are central to much of the art, when eternal life is the theme of an artwork that is luring hoards of visitors to the Rijksmuseum, the intriguing oeuvre of James Lee Byars also deserves lots of attention. This American artist (1932-1997) whose work has been shown at the Van Abbemuseum is the subject of a large retrospective in the Kunstmuseum in Bern.How does one write about an artist whose presence – both physical and mental – is central to his oeuvre, but whom one has never met? For James Lee Byars, so it seems, is first and foremost a figure of memory. Byars, this U.S. artist who didn’t want to be an American, who internalized the culture of Shintoism, and who preferred to roam as a dandy through Europe’s cities, museums and galleries than be counted as a fixed market value – this artist is the stuff of legends. And legends live longer. Their influence persists, sometimes below the surface. They remerge, sometimes in entirely different form.
Prince of an Imaginary Kingdom
Byars not only is a legend. Legend is the very core of his oeuvre. In his catalogue essay for the current Byars exhibition in Bern,[1] critic Thomas McEvilley finds a wonderful image for this person who presents himself as ungraspable – to whom precisely this ungraspable quality, this quality of appearing and disappearing, was so important – quoting Disraeli’s 19th century description of the dandy as the ‘prince of an imaginary kingdom’.[2] The dandy or the flaneur as discussed by Baudelaire and Benjamin does nothing. He simply is. His being is life as art. The dandy/flaneur thus anticipates what was to become an important current within twentieth-century art, associated with the name Marcel Duchamp. Or with Yves Klein, who once remarked: ‘The artist only has to make one work: himself, constantly.’[3] In Byars’ case, this translates as: ‘I’m full of Byars.’[4]Byars worked on creating himself, to the very end – an end that he anticipated in performances years before. The Death of James Lee Byars is a relic – Byars’ works exist only as relics – of the eponymous performance realized by the artist in 1994 at Marie-Puck Broodthaers Gallery in Brussels. It is a golden room that shimmers and glows mysteriously in the light. At the time, the artist entered the room in golden dress and, imitating his own death, laid down on the golden floor, merging with space and time. Today, this room stands for one of the central themes in Byars’ oeuvre: it is not just about transitoriness and futility, but often – for all the positively manic joie de vivre and vital energy radiated by the artist – about death. And about the void, emptiness and dematerialization.The same can be said of Byars’ own death. He died in Cairo on 23 March 1997, aged 65. He was buried in the American cemetery in Cairo’s old town. Instead of a gravestone, a flattened tin can was placed on his grave, with his name and dates written on it in felt-tip pen.[5] Originally, Byars had wanted to be buried in the churchyard of San Michele in Venice, that city of carnival and decadence.
Cultivating Aura as an Artistic Strategy
It is this combination of life/death and art, this ungraspable aura, that makes Byars topical again today. And for all the difficulty involved in showing such work, it is also one reason why Byars is currently experiencing something of a resurrection, over a decade after his death. Byars was unique, certainly more enigmatic than many of his contemporaries – and yet he was very much a phenomenon of his time: he repeatedly sought contact with Joseph Beuys; happenings, the expanded definition of art, individual mythologies, and altered/expanded states of mind were all part of the vocabulary of these years. The echo of this resounds, if quietly, to this day. In their essay The Temptation of Art. James Lee Byars in the Context of the Grand Gesture, Peter Schneemann, professor of contemporary art at Bern University, and Nicola Müllerschön see artists like Geneva-based agent provocateur Gianni Motti or Gregor Schneider as kindred spirits of Byars.[6] Motti because he once announced his own death and had himself carried in an open coffin through a Spanish town, documenting the event on video; Schneider because his Kaaba-inspired CUBE HAMBURG 2007 recast Malevich’s Black Square in three dimensions.In Byars’ work, as a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand, the grand gesture can also be very small, sometimes even consisting of nothing at all. An example of this is one of the many immaculately executed sculptures that Byars commissioned: The pedestal for the perfect (1978) consists of a 164-centimetre sandstone pillar, its surface covered in gold leaf. With this minimalist gesture, Byars creates a frame of reference that gives clues to the ingenuity of his art. On one level, this perfect pedestal for perfection makes a sculptural statement on the issue of the plinth, a recurring debate within the discipline of sculpture. And secondly, he satirizes and perfects the question of the absolute, spiritual artwork that runs all the way through the history of Modernism. He shows the absolute work – by showing nothing.
A Tiny Drop of Perfume in the Alps
Byars’ cosmos, which tended to the extravagant, can be described in terms of several circles: Fluxus and luxury, Bern and Buddha, gold and sandstone, whispering and silence – all these were ingredients out of which Byars created his art. With this art and with his perfectly staged, theatrical appearances, he fascinated his contemporaries, who still speak in awe of the artist’s ephemeral and often exclusive actions. One example of such an action took place on 22 June 1972 between 9 am and midday at the Zytglogge clock tower, a Bern tourist attraction: Byars, wrapped in a robe of red velvet, sat high up in the tower’s window and called German forenames down into the narrow street below. It was a happening he had already staged at the opening of Documenta 5 in Kassel the same year, and his small audience in Bern included Harald Szeemann. Byars had made his first appearance in Bern in 1969 in Szeemann’s When Attitudes Become Form show at the Kunsthalle, and for all his artistic nomadism, he maintained links with the city over many years in the form of happenings and, above all, friendships. Besides Szeemann himself, key figures for Byars at this time were Szeemann’s successor, the publisher Johannes Gachnang, and, for many years, also Toni Gerber, a Bern gallerist who was unconventional and keen to experiment.Gachnang’s unusual collection, which has been entrusted to Kunstmuseum Bern, supplied most of the material for the present Byars retrospective. Putting together and presenting such a show is no easy task, as Byars’ art was largely ephemeral, consisting of breathing, whispering a syllable, or depositing a tiny drop of perfume onto a stone on the Furka Pass in the Alps. As a result, much of what Byars left behind is extremely fragile: countless letters on tissue paper, sheets of gold leaf, props from actions. Typical in this respect is Autobiography alla veneziana (1986), an object deliberately made to resemble a reliquary: inside a small gilded shrine made of wood and glass, a small ball of bread rests on a satin cushion – bread chewed by Byars, shaped by Byars – a moment of life captured, preserved as if for all eternity.The Bern show is exemplary in the way it manages to recall all this without mythologizing. Curator Susanne Friedli relies on a sober presentation and gives the works space, daring to leave gaps. The remnants of the actions are treated not as holy relics but as part of an oeuvre that was always trying to elude fixation and the art market. All the more important, then, is the role played by the postcards which Byars sent excessively, as messages in the true sense, and for which he was constantly finding new and unusual forms and materials. These are sumptuously staged in a vitrine. Of course, there are also films documenting the artist’s actions, gestures and speech acts. They conjure up his mystical, sometimes portentous world and tell a great deal about the fascination Byars was capable of exerting.
Bringing Byars back?
Faced with the surviving documents, it is clear that this oeuvre is very hard to retrieve or bring back from the past. If at all, then perhaps in the sense of Søren Kierkegaard: ‘Repetition is a crucial expression for what recollection was to the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition…. Repetition and recollection are the same movement except in opposite directions; for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy – assuming, of course, that he gives himself time to live and does not promptly, at birth, find an excuse to sneak out of life again, for example, under the pretext that he has forgotten something.’[7]Byars laid traces in this direction. By cultivating his own legend. By suggesting that he was a figure of memory. In which case it would be wrong to believe that only someone who had known and experienced Byars firsthand could write about him. His physical and mental presence survives in the relics. And above all in pictures, from which Byars never tried to escape. He was forever calling himself to mind.‘Im full of Byars’. James Lee Byars – Eine Hommage Kunstmuseum Bern12 September 2008 through 1 February 2009
Konrad Tobler
