James lee byars biography of donald

"I see my autobiography as an arbitrary segment of so many pages of time, of things that I have paid attention to at this point in my life," wrote James Lee Byars (1932-1997) in 1969. He was then 37, about half the average male lifespan at the time, and accordingly thought it appropriate to write his "1/2 autobiography." Byars' art ranged from highly refined objects to extremely minimal performance and events, and books, ephemera and correspondence that he distributed widely among friends and colleagues. Today, more than 15 years after his death, assessments of his art must negotiate Byars' performance of his charismatic self in his life and art. For his first major posthumous survey in the US, exhibition curators Magalí Arriola and Peter Eleey decided to produce a catalogue in two "halves," playing on his "1/2 autobiography" a catalogue of the exhibition itself, including new scholarship, and a sourcebook of primary documents. 1/2 an Autobiography, Sourcebook constitutes the latter volume--a reference guide filled with photographs and documents drawn from a variety of archival sources, including The Getty Research Institute, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, MoMA and Byars' own papers. This volume also includes a series of previously unseen interviews that artist and art historian David Sewell conducted with Byars in the late 1970s in preparation for a book that was never published. These discussions cover a number of Byars' major projects, among them The World Question Center, The Holy Ghost and the artist's time at CERN.

In 1956, James Lee Byars rented a sod farm for a midnight, full moon exhibition of his abstract figure sculptures; guests viewed the work from sleds pulled over snow. In 1959, he abandoned durable materials for paper and fabric. In 1965, a nun performed his A 1,000-Foot Chinese Paper at the Carnegie International. The wondrous story of James Lee Byars begins in 1932 and ends in 1997, and its unique synthesis of Conceptual art, Minimalism, and Fluxus reflects an unending striving for beauty and perfection. The story passes by way of Japan, a place where Byars lived for many years, and where he combined the formal and symbolic aspects of Noh theater and Shinto rituals with elements of Western science, art, and philosophy, developing an appreciation for the transient, ceremonial character of performance as an essential quality of his art. Over his lifetime, he was known for works characterized by an extreme simplicity of form and material that simultaneously appeared astonishingly luxurious. Life, Love, and Death presents a critical review of Byars' oeuvre and traces his development as an artist from his formative period in Japan to his later years in New York--ranging from his performances and works on paper and fabric devoted to the theme of life, to his splendid late sculptures in gold, marble, and velvet which deal with death as the embodiment of perfection.

Buried deep within the labyrinthine halls of PS1 is a dark, silent void. Walk in, and the blackness hovers menacingly, amplifying every rustle of fabric into a supernatural roar. No matter how big the room may be (you don’t really know) or how many people are in it (no way to tell that either), or how close you could be to some invisible precipice, the space feels queasily claustrophobic. This assertive emptiness is “The Ghost of James Lee Byars”, made in 1969, a living artist’s impalpable monument to himself. He died in 1997, but his buoyant spirit haunts PS1’s enthralling retrospective.
 
Byars took perverse pride in being what he called “the world’s most famous unknown artist”, bopping between Japan, Berlin, Venice, Brussels, Santa Fe, Amsterdam and New York, and finally choosing to die in Cairo, where he wanted to rest beside the pyramids. He was cheerfully obsessed with mortality – just one of his cultivated contradictions. He abhorred materialism in its cruder forms, but savoured silk, gold and fine tailoring. He elevated simple classic forms such as cubes and spheres, yet his art erupts into baroque flamboyance. He was a perfectionist of the fleeting moment and the elusive star of the perpetual performance that was his life. He rarely showed his face, but sauntered through the world’s capitals like a dandy in his gold suit and top hat. He was all costume, pose and razzle-dazzle, yet his work was also profound. This gorgeous show, curated by Peter Eleey and Magalí Arriola, salutes those incongruities without attempting to beat them into rational sense.
 
Byars was born in Detroit in 1932, but he beat it out of Michigan right after college and made for Kyoto, Japan. Even then, he was a quirky outsider with a hankering for international celebrity. He immersed himself in Shinto rituals and Noh theatre, but didn’t n

JAMES LEE BYARS DIED in the Anglo-American Hospital in Cairo late on the night of May 22 or early in the morning of May 23, 1997. Cancer had planted flags of occupation in his body for several years, and finally claimed it all. Toward the end he said ruefully, “My bones stick to the chair.” Yet in the days and hours before his death, he was engrossed in the lingering issues, problems, and satisfactions of his life—working on a new will, speaking on the phone with friends on other continents and vigorously pursuing his artwork up till, literally, the final minutes.

Late on May 21 a turn for the worse caused him to go into the hospital, a pleasant place which he liked, in the midst of tall old trees on an island in the Nile. When I asked him, on his last night, whether he wanted me to take him elsewhere (Venice? Cologne?), he said, “How could I find anyplace better than this?”

As visiting hours ended, about 10:30 PM, James asked his friend and driver Magdy Hafez to take certain pieces of mirror to his brother Said’s workshop to be cut the next morning. “Thank you for coming,” he whispered, clasping my hands warmly. And we left for the night.

Ismail Abdullah, the night-nurse on duty, thinks he died peacefully in his sleep about 1:30 AM. But the next morning, when I uncovered him to make sure there had been no mistake, his eyes were open in an expression of surprise.

This was a man who, the second he entered any city in the world, was the strangest person in that city—who at various times in his life had sported a pink, silk tail, or a straitjacket, as everyday garb, and who, recently, in Egypt, had gone out walking with a flower apparently growing from the top of his bald head. He had arrived in Egypt three months or so before his death, convinced that there were Egyptian gold-blowers who could blow gold the way glassblowers blow glass. He wanted one of them to blow him a sphere of molt