By Alexandra Goldman

This article was originally published in Cultbytes.

Above: Installation view. “James Lee Byars: Perfect is the Question” curated by Vicente Todolí at Reina Sofia Museum Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid, Spain, May 10 – Sep. 1, 2024. Photo: Alexandra Goldman.

James Lee Byars occupies an interesting place at the intersection of minimalism and spirituality. Recalling the spiritual abstract painters Agnes Pelton and Hilma Af Klint who preceded him, there is this idea of the spiritual abstraction of the earlier half of the 20th century seeping into the conceptual minimalist sculpture of the latter half, which coalesces harmoniously in Byars’s work. Within it, he’s secured his unique position in art history, in a way that feels sincere.

Visiting “Perfect is the Question,” the American conceptual installation and performance artist Byars solo exhibition at the Reina Sofia Palacio de Velázquez in Madrid, I became interested in Byars’s unique ideas. I was excited that this was the “old stuff”—the good stuff. Even though his work is large and takes up space, it is quiet and pensive, rather than an overt visual spectacle. Presenting work from the 1950s-1990s, “Perfect Is the Question” at The Reina Sofia was curated by Vicente Todolí, and was the second iteration of a traveling exhibition that began at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan.

The exhibition emphasizes Byars endorsement of the color gold, asserting it is not decorative, but rather, is spiritual, closer to god, like halos in fifteenth-century religious oil paintings. He also worked frequently with the colors white and red, also spiritual and powerful in their own ways – elemental colors. He works with the idea of the perfection of the circle, Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and “perfect proportions”, the “perfection” of death, and the physiological effects of minimalist sculpture on the viewer (think Tony Smith’s Die, 1962 as a six-foot gold pillar) He works with the ideas of myths, beliefs, transcendence, religious relics, architecture, and coveted objects. For example, he created a fantastical reliquary-like sculpture based on the once-held belief that narwhal tusks were unicorn horns. He combines the aesthetics of 1960s minimalism with Eastern philosophy, medieval Christianity, and the Renaissance interest in mathematical perfection in aesthetics.

Upon my return to New York, I looked at the “50 Years of Dia” webpage. I could not believe I did not see Byars’s name listed. He seems to fit in perfectly with this group of artists, and his spiritual twist to minimalism deserves recognition at this major establishment for installation art. It is not that Dia Art Foundation is the be-all and end-all of institutions, but for conceptual installation and large-scale minimalist sculpture (especially from the second half of the 20th century), it is hard to beat. Nor did I hear Byars’s name in my 2019 graduate-level Art History course on minimalism at Hunter College.

Michael Werner Gallery’s co-owner Gordon VeneKlasen, who represents the Byars estate, has been working on getting Byars into Dia for years. He thinks that Byars is excluded from the history of U.S. minimalism because of his interest in the immaterial: “Byars had a very different way of dealing with things than the minimalists because of his interest in the dematerial. He spent a ton of time in Japan and wanted to make immaterial work. He wanted to make the work disappear. The Minimalists would make an object and then would write a theory about it. He, conversely, would take an idea and make it concrete. No wonder he connected so closely with Beuys and Broodthaers. He was also really in with Rudi Fuchs and Harald Szeemann—the European curators.”

Byars had a retrospective at MoMA PS1 in 2014, 17 years after his death. Furthermore, he has had a significant exhibition history in the U.S. I might be the last one to the James Lee Byars party, or as the death-obsessed artist might have said—the last guest at his funeral. VeneKlasen emphasized: “He was a hero to so many artists. Dia artist Anne Truitt started every lecture of hers by saying: ‘We need to talk about James Lee Byars.’”

A versatile artist, Byars worked with a lot of natural and found materials; not only the narwhal horn, but dried roses, silk, wood, marble, paper, and sandstone. He was doing performances that involved choreography, geometry, and spirituality. He was experimenting with photography in the ‘60s and ‘70s, photo-documenting his performances as well as incorporating books and written ephemera into his practice. In 1969, his performance “The World Question Center” was broadcast on Belgian national television and comprised of intellectuals asking him significant questions—among them were Marcel Broodthaers and John Cage, writer Simon Vinkenoog, doctor Robert Jungk, and Knesset member Uri Avnery. The piece inspired The Reality Club, a New York-based group of intellectuals who met between 1981-1996.  And, the title of the Madrid retrospective. Byars’s inquisitive practice touched the lives of many artists and intellectuals across the world.

In one of Byars most famous performances, “The Death of James Lee Byars,” the artist symbolically staged his leaving the physical world. It ook place shortly after he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1994. The performance was set in a gilded gold room with crystals configured in a five-point shape representing his body, himself physically absent. It incorporated his ideas of spirituality and Da Vinci’s “five points” theory to represent any human body, as well as Eastern ideas learned from his years spent in Kyoto, Japan in the late 1950s. A couple of years later, in 1997, he died in Cairo where he was making art with artisans.

Byars has been lauded and recognized worldwide for half a century. He was included in Documenta 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 in Kassel, Germany, and the Venice Biennials of 1980, 1986, and 1999. Apart from “James Lee Byars: Back in Detroit” presenting the artist’s performances at Wayne State University, Byars work is mostly being reexamined in Europe. In Europe, the traveling show “Perfect is the Question” and a dual retrospective held during this year’s Venice Biennial at the Palazzo Loredan, the seat of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, alongside works by Seung-taek Lee are incredibly dense in further contextualizing the multi-faceted artist. The exhibition in Venice was a follow-up exhibition to one organized in London by Michael Werner Gallery and Lee’s Seoul gallery, Gallery Hyundai.

Byars left the U.S. in the late 1960s upon an invitation from Anny De Decker to join her gallery Wide White Space Gallery in Antwerp, and he never moved back. Veneklasen, who is based in New York, explains: “He just didn’t really fit in here. His first [seminal] performance was in 1969 in Belgium. He made his career in Europe. He disconnected. He was the American artist who was never an American.” He is quick to add: “But he was and is truly an American artist; he was born in Detroit.”

Byars is more present in European institutions than in the U.S., even though he is American. Is it because he spent a long time living in Japan, or because he died in Cairo? Whatever the reason it is time to bring him back to New York.