Puzzling Precision: With "Life, Love, and Death," the
Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt/Main has dedicated a comprehensive
retrospective to the work of James Lee Byars
He was an
artist of the nearly imperceptible transition between reality and
imagination. At the same time, the American artist James Lee Byars opened
himself up to the plurality of contemporary forms of expression in his
poetic work, always retaining a sense for the beauty of the perfect
moment. Seven years after his death, Byars is still a magician of quietude
with his performances, paper works, and golden rooms.
James Lee Byars, Four in a Dress, 1967, (c) Estates of James Lee Byars,
courtesy Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne/ New York
At the end of the 19th century, Paul
Cézanne was already having considerable problems with the
accelerating speed of daily life. Referring to the industrialization of
his native city
Aix-en-Provence, the French painter described an uneasiness that was
to become a key motif of artistic experience soon thereafter: "One had
better hurry if one still wants to see anything. Everything disappears."
Although it was possible to use the technical devices of photography and
film to represent the enormous speed at which the modern world was
changing to a fraction of a second and with the greatest precision, the
difficulty in artistically capturing the rapid transformation has
basically remained a question of perception: How can enough attention be
mobilized for the moment in which something is happening?
In
retrospect, the work of
James Lee Byars, chronologically laid out from room to room in the
exhibition "Life, Love, and Death" at Frankfurt's
Schirn Kunsthalle, seems like a single incessant search for the right
moment. Byars, who died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 65, was a master
when it came to creating a tension between suddenness and duration. In his
1970 film "Autobiography," for instance, the screen remains black for
several minutes; then the artist himself, tiny and standing far away from
the camera, appears in a single frame, in other words for 1/24th of a
second, followed by darkness once again. In the end, the viewer can't even
be sure whether the image wasn't a deception or a momentary disturbance, a
ray of light or a tear in the film material itself. Even the film still
offers little explanation: the blurry figure in light-colored clothing
isn't much more than a small bright dot.
James Lee Byars, The Death of James Lee Byars, 1994/2004, Composition in Gold,
Five Cristals, Plexiglas, Walter Vanhaerents, Torhout
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Concentration through disappearance? In response to cinema
and the mass media, Walter
Benjamin already analyzed the shift from a culture of immersion to a
culture of diversion in the nineteen-thirties. When the work of art loses
its aura through
its mechanical
reproducibility, the viewer's attention transforms as well: it's no
longer the unique original that attracts our interest, but the objects of
everyday culture, the
flaneur's fleeting glimpse of a larger world of goods. Byars, however,
embarked on the opposite path in his work. Modern art has seldom been
imbued with this degree of pathos as an expression of sublime perfection.
James Lee Byars, The perfect smile, The Perfect Smile, 1994, Performance, (c)
Sammlung Museum Ludwig Cologne
This is
particularly true in the case of Byars'
performances. In 1976, for "The Game of Death," he appeared together with
twelve doctors dressed in black on the thirteen balconies of the
Dom Hotel in Cologne, whispering the "th" sound (Greek for thanatos,
death) and then promptly disappearing again. At the award ceremony for the
Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 1994, he appeared in Cologne's
Ludwig Museum dressed completely in black and with his eyes covered, and
tossed the public a brief smile. The ephemeral action, which went by the
title "The Perfect Smile," has since become the first truly immaterial
work of art in the museum's collection. At the same time, the word
"perfect," as Viola Michely writes in her catalogue essay on the Schirn
exhibition, implies a fascinating dual meaning: perfect, yes, but already
a thing of the past.
James Lee Byars: The perfect Love Letter is I write I love you backwards in
the air, 1974, Performance, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brüssel, Photo:
Catalogue Schirn Kunsthalle
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