James Lee Byars, the art of emergency exit

James Lee Byars was 23 years old when he presented his final year project at the Detroit College of Arts: he dismantled the doors and windows of the family home, emptied it of furniture and filled it with large spheres of polished stone. The exhibition (and the house!) was open to anyone and lasted only one day. Later, for his first museum solo, he traveled to New York and stood at the MoMA reception desk. He ended up convincing one of his curators to let him hang his works in the only available space: the emergency staircase. That lasted even less, only one afternoon, but it was enough for him to find buyers for all the pieces and he spent the night traveling through Manhattan to deliver them to their homes.

We know the rest: his career was international and brilliant until his death in 1997. But it is striking to see how from the beginning he knew how to condense his leitmotifs and its procedures: the spheres and forms tending toward the absolute, the seductive charisma, the love for the ephemeral and the aspiration for the eternal, the swing between the intimate and the immense, the ability to transfigure spaces. And above all the very personal tone: the gift of speaking directly to each of his spectators with solemnity and sympathy at the same time, the directness of the Midwest deactivating any hint of bombast or grandiloquence.

Byars is a very difficult artist to label, and he rubbed shoulders with minimalism, conceptualism and Fluxus without marrying any of them. He defined himself as a “baroque minimalist”, and there goes the shots of the formal and conceptual game of counterweights that allows him to evoke beauty and serenity through simple forms and a playful attitude, bordering on the sublime in his best works without ever falling into his first cousin, the ridiculous

Vicente Todolí, who knows his work well and has already exhibited it at the IVAM and the Serralves Foundation (Porto), now proposes a route that does not lose sight of that double balance. On the one hand, the intense and spectacular installations, based on refined, rounded and symbolic forms (towers, spheres, pillars or cylinders) and sumptuous and sensual materials: marble, gold, fresh red roses, crimson satin or even the fabulous ivory of a gigantic narwhal tusk. He knows how to take advantage of their scenographic qualities: in the Biccoca Hangar in Milan, the first stop of the exhibition, they were shown in the vast diaphanous space painted in black, all of which can be seen at a glance and yet each one creating its own intimate sphere. : they appeared dramatic, imposing, full of baroque terribilità. In the Velázquez Palace, with its soaring volumes, its milky and ethereal natural light and its white walls, they occupy separate rooms, play with perspectives and echoes in an enfilade, encourage gradual discovery as we move from one to the other, and evoke a more introspective serenity, closer to minimalism and its silent, meditative and almost modest theatricality.

They are two very different ways of presenting them, and it is very revealing how continents and content feed off each other and change the viewer’s experience. Because Todolí hits the nail on the head in the introduction to the catalog when describing the unifying poetics of Byars’ work, the way in which “the aesthetic experience is conceived not so much as the direct encounter with an object that must be appreciated or understood, but as the experience of inhabiting a world of your own. That was what his art was about: inhabiting a space and transforming it through a shake.”

The other success is to dedicate a large room to contextualize and document the other thousand faces of Byars: his performances and collective actions, halfway between the playful (and almost hooligan) and the prophetic, such as the recording of his Calling German Names, which he made in 1972 for Documenta 5 with brilliant staging, climbing the façade of the Fredericianum in Kassel, dressed in scarlet, wrapped in a cloud of red gauze and haranguing the curious with a megaphone. The transformation of him into a character and walking work of art, with his iconic gold lamé suit and antique sorcerer’s hat. His incessant correspondence, conceived as art, with friends, colleagues and kindred spirits, through letters, postcards and reams of beautifully alien and often indecipherable calligraphic paper.

Byars preferred the simple and almost naive question over the haughty statement as an artistic tool. He made it clear in his amusement (on purpose or in spite of himself or a little of both?) World Question Center 1969: I imitated the TV contests and telephoned Carl Sagan and many other wise men and scientists from around the world live to ask them, looking at the camera with an angelic smile, about the fundamental question of their lives, the one they wanted to share with everyone. The humanity. It is worth watching the video for a while: the responses of the bewildered heroes, from phlegmatic caution to rapturous harangue, are not wasted.

Byars preferred the simple and almost naive question over the haughty statement as an artistic tool.

Byars did not imitate anyone, although Byars and Beuys sound similar, and for some reason the German always supported his work. And they do give off an air, yes, but only if we change the shape of the hats, the lamé for the raincoat, gold and ivory for felt or grease, and the exalted and Wagnerian displays of the guru Beuys for the kind sphinx smile and the manners of a Zen monk of Byars. And that’s a lot to change.

Perhaps we should add, to complete the three great bes of post-war art, Broodthaers (who hated Beuys, but was a friend of Byars), with his inscrutable sarcasm, his interest in definitions and language, his taste for scenography. and the theatricality of its décors and mises en scène, its half-invisible and half-imaginary architectures and museums.

“James Lee Byars’ installations are landscapes of the soul.” The much missed Ángel González said it in one of the two wonderful texts that he dedicated to him and are included in his collection of essays The rest: a resounding, solemn phrase, unexpected in someone who valued his irony so much. As if surprised by that solemnity himself, he immediately downgrades it: “the fair booth is the place that best suits you. Its genre is the parade: an undulating curtain…”. He was very right: between Beuys and Broodthaers, between the sublime fire and the emergency exit, there are the most beautiful landscapes of Byars.

‘James Lee Byars. The question is perfect. Velázquez Palace. Madrid. Until September 1st.

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