James Lee Byars was born in Detroit in 1932 and died halfway around the world in Egypt in 1997. It was not his first death, three years prior Byars staged The Death of James Lee Byars, a performance in which the artist practiced his own death when clad in a gold suit, he laid down quietly in a room entirely covered in gold leaf and seem to vanish into the background. This magical, transcendental quality permeated his impressive body of work and solidified him as one of the great conceptual artists of our time.
Before his deaths, Byars studied philosophy at Wayne State University and traveled to Japan on invitation from the artist Morris Graves. While overseas, he studied Noh theater, Zen meditations, Shinto ritual and taught English to Japanese monks. Upon returning to the Untied States in 1958, he hitchhiked to New York City in the hopes of meeting artist Mark Rothko and ended up at the reception desk at the Museum of Modern Art. There he met Dorothy Miller, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the museum, who arranged for his New York debut—an exhibition of his paper works in an empty stairwell at the museum that lasted only a few hours.
Byars spent most of his career as somewhat of a nomad, splitting time between New York, Bern, Venice, Kyoto, Los Angeles and the Southwest. In 1972 he solidified his reputation in Europe after a performance during the opening of Documenta 5 where he shouted German names through a gold megaphone while standing on the roof of the Fridericianum. Throughout his nearly four-decade career, Byars continued to exhibit and perform widely. His 1975 performance The Perfect Kiss at the Louvre was landmark of his career; the artist walked quietly into the room, formed a kiss with his mouth, and quietly walked out. Several important exhibitions followed, all woven with the same esoteric beauty, lead effortlessly and almost serendipitously by the enigmatic artist.
Years later when the director of the Guggenheim, Thomas Messer, began planning a retrospective for the artist, Byars insisted that the entire museum, inside and out, be painted matte black. Messier responded that “he would give him a show when he is dead”. Since then, several international institutions have held retrospectives for the artist, and his work continues to inspire and pose the same questions as it did during his lifetime. Most recently, the MoMA PS1 presented the most comprehensive survey of Byars’ work in their 2014 exhibition James Lee Byars: ½ an Autobiography, marking a return to location of his first major exhibition over fifty years later.
