James Lee
Byars

James Lee Byars (b. 1932 in Detroit; d. 1997 in Cairo) came to West Berlin in 1974. The Conceptual artist and self-proclaimed mystic, always elegantly clad in monochrome red, black, white, pink, or gold outfits, sought nothing less than to manifest “perfection” through his art. From the early 1970s onward, he became known in Europe above all for his objects, sculptures, installations, and performances. These included a performance at documenta 5 in Kassel (1972), where he stood on the roof of the Fridericianum, shouting out German names at random through a golden megaphone. Joseph Beuys, who had installed the office of the “Organization for Direct Democracy by Referendum” at the documenta that year, declared Byars to be his adversary.

Byars’ frequently multimedia installations combine western concepts of art with elements from Asian cultures, and evoke classical forms of respect such as tombstones by using precious natural materials that include marble, gold, and silk. Like many of the fellows in the early days of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Byars was profoundly influenced by the divided city and its visible traces of World War II and the Holocaust. His wish to welcome in the year 1974 by standing in a gold lamé suit in the opening of the tower of the Gedächtniskirche church remained unfulfilled, however. During his time in Berlin, Byars created The Black German Flag as a pendant to his piece The American Flag; both works address the symbolic potential of flags with regard to nationality and historic events. The pictorial object, which is made of black silk perforated with the words “MOVE ALL THE J.’S FROM I. BACK TO G. ?”, can also be read as a hermetic shroud.

In 1974, with support from the Artists-in-Berlin Program, an exhibition was held at Galerie René Block, where Byars installed a glass pane with a diameter of three meters and a thickness of one centimeter in the garden in front of the gallery; the pane of glass had a hole in the middle through which he communicated with visitors. That same year, Byars collaborated with Joachim Sartorius on The Golden Tower, which was published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König and the Artists-in-Berlin Program. It was a black cassette containing a book with black pages perforated with cryptic terms, and was published in an edition of 333 copies. In an exhibition at Galerie Springer in Berlin in December 1974, Byars for the first time showed his designs for Golden Tower/Der goldene Turm, which was originally envisioned as a 333 m-high golden cylinder on Steinplatz in Berlin. Although the work he conceived as the “eighth wonder of the world” could not be realized in Berlin, it was later shown—albeit on a less monumental scale—in numerous variations and locations, among others at documenta 7 in Kassel. In one iteration, Byars stood on a bridge in Amsterdam, wearing a gold lamé suit and holding up a long, gold-plated wooden rod as a vertical extension of his body. In 1982 he created The Golden Tower with Changing Tops, a 340 cm-high cylinder with a diameter of 80 cm, whose semicircular dome can be removed and replaced with a different form. At the Venice Biennale in 2017, a twenty metre-high Golden Tower was installed at the end of the Canale Grande—the first presentation of this work as a monumental installation in public space.

James Lee Byars participated in documenta 5, 6, 8, and 9 (1972, 1977, 1987, and 1992) and took part in the Venice Biennale in 1980 and 1986. In 1977 he had a solo show at the Städtisches Museum Mönchengladbach; major retrospectives of his work have been held at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main (2004); and MoMA PS1, New York (2014).

Text: Eva Scharrer

Translation: Jacqueline Todd