A tour through the works of James Lee Byars at Pirelli HangarBicocca

The exhibition brings together a wide selection of sculptural works and monumental installations created between 1974 and 1997, from international museum collections and made with the support of the James Lee Byars estate, allowing the public to admire the work of an artist who has left an indelible mark on the history of art, developing a layered visual and performative language that transcends the limits of knowledge and subverts its logic.
 

Along with the retrospective, a monographic catalog will be produced and will be released in November 2023 and published by Marsilio Editori. The volume will include texts by various historians, a joint contribution by the artist Maurizio Nannucci, with whom Byars maintained a long relationship and correspondence, and an introduction by Vicente Todolí. The book will be completed with detailed entries of the works on display, a detailed chronology of the artist, and extensive photographic documentation of the retrospective.


The Diamond Floor by James Lee Byars, 1995. Glass crystals. The Estate of James Lee Byars, courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London.

The artist
James Lee Byars, one of the most widely recognized American artists from the 1960s to the present, influenced an entire generation of artists in the fields of conceptual and performance art. Born in Detroit in 1932, Byars was always fascinated by Japanese culture, which exerted a deep influence on his artistic practice throughout his life. Indeed, from the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s the artist lived between Japan and the United States. After that, he lived and worked nomadically, moving between different places and cities, including New York, Bern, Santa Fe, as well as California. He also developed a close relationship with Italy, especially with the city of Venice—where in 1975 he enacted the famous performance The Holy Ghost, then deciding to live and work there for most of the 1980s. In 1989, he was invited by Castello di Rivoli to realize his first retrospective in an Italian museum.

Throughout his oeuvre, Byars combined motifs and symbols from Eastern traditions and civilizations, such as elements of Nô theater and Zen Buddhism, with a deep knowledge of Western art and philosophy, offering a unique personal view on reality and its physical and spiritual entities. Making use of different media, like installation, sculpture, performance, drawing, and speech, the artist created what can be described as a mystical-aesthetic reflection on the ideas of perfection and cyclicity, and on the human figure—its representation and dematerialization—often involving visitors directly in temporary actions or large-scale interventions.

Central to his work was the artist’s relationship with the public, who were often invited to engage with the artist himself, responding by their presence to questions that he posed directly and indirectly through his works. Many of the installations were designed by James Lee Byars to be performatively activated by himself. Since his death, this particular aspect raises questions about the presence-absence of the artist, who, throughout his life, focused his practice on his own persona and its depiction through actions, gestures, rituals, and clothing that had visual and symbolic connections with the works.


James Lee Byars in front of The Door of Innocence by James Lee Byars, 1986-87. Gilded marble. Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi. Installation view, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin 1989. Photograph by Elio Montanari.

The exhibition
Arriving more than three decades after his last institutional exhibition in Italy, Pirelli HangarBicocca’s retrospective to James Lee Byars gathers large-scale works, in which precious and refined materials, such as marble, velvet, silk, gold leaf, and crystal, are harmoniously combined with minimal and archetypal geometries, like prisms, spheres, pillars, and Baroque-like objects, in a play of symbolic and aesthetic cross-references between form and content. One exemplary work, amongst those presented in the exhibition is also one of his most historic: HEAR TH FI TO IN PH around this chair and it knocks you down (1977). The artwork consists of a black silk tent that houses a nineteenth-century gold pivoting chair above a gold-embroidered silk carpet.

The empty seat, illuminated by a vertical light, and the subtle preciousness of the environment recalls imagery from various Eastern traditions, such as Buddha's throne, a Zen symbol of enlightenment through the disappearance of the self, or the Shinto practice of offering seats to the spirits that inhabit shrines. The installation was first exhibited in 1977 at the opening of Marian Goodman gallery in New York, during which Byars carried out a performative act: dressed in black and hidden in the folds of the curtains, he pointed a flashlight at the chair and exclaimed the phrase "Hear the first totally interrogative philosophy around this chair and it knocks you down," from which the work's title is derived.

At Pirelli HangarBicocca, beginning with multiple allegorical and formal meanings of matter, the exhibition dwells on themes that have run through the artist's practice such as the search for perfection, doubt as an approach to existence and the finitude of the human being, inviting visitors to reflect on the alchemical potentialities of art to shape reality.


The Tomb of James Lee Byars by James Lee Byars, 1986. Bernese sandstone. Installation view, IVAM, Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, 1995. The Estate of James Lee Byars, courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London.

The exhibition opens with the monumental The Golden Tower (1990). The audience is welcomed by a golden tower 21,5 meters high, which sums up the artist's investigation into the interaction between perfect forms and immutable materials. James Lee Byars made the first conceptual drawings of the work back in the early 1970s: conceived to be displayed in public spaces, in the initial idea it was supposed to be over 300 meters high. It was first realized in 1990, when it was presented at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.

According to the artist, archetypal forms, similar to obelisks and totems, become the symbol of the human figure and its more transcendental and spiritual aspects, of which The Figure of Death (1986) is representative. The sculpture, a vertical structure composed of ten basalt cubes, offers a moment of reflection on the nature of death and on its memorialization and monumentalization. Cycles of life and temporality, on the other hand, are symbolized by the elements of the circle and the sphere, which are found especially in two of the works exhibited.

The Door of Innocence (1986-89) is a gilded marble sculpture in the shape of a ring and evokes a moment of passage and transformation, through which metaphysical and abstract concepts acquire physicality and concreteness in the artwork. While in The Tomb of James Lee Byars (1986), the artist metaphorically encloses in a sandstone sphere the intangible and absolute concepts of spirituality and purity, which are in contrast with the porous and layered material. The Cubo space at the end of the exhibition display is dedicated to Red Angel of Marseille (1993): a thousand red glass spheres arranged on the floor create a sumptuous anthropomorphic and, at the same time, floral form. The work reduces the human figure to its essence, while the angelic connotation, suggested by the title, opens again to a reflection on human metaphysical potential and relationship with the divine.