James Lee Byars

…not only what and how, but also with and on what you write…..

This exhibition reunites writings and objects that date back to 1974, the year of Byars’ DAAD scholarship in Berlin (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst)1 .

One part of the artworks on view here was given to Dieter Hacker , a friend of James Lee Byars, while the other part consists of texts addressed to DAAD and most of them directly to Thomas Deecke2, assistant of Karl Ruhrberg, the director of the DAAD.

James Lee Byars was a ferocious writer of letters, texts, missives, aphorisms, etc. and the first challenge to enter his world is to decipher his handwriting, the many abbreviations, his five point star writing and the many super and subscripts he frequently uses. Deciphering is not facilitated by the fact that he wrote with black, or polychrome color pencils – preferably gold – on gilded paper, on black crepe or silk paper.

Some of his artworks ore black on black, white on white or blindstamped.

This collection of writings is an archival web, a hub with many interconnections in time and places, it would cost years of study to unravel this web.

His stay in Berlin was important, though, it is here where he started to develop one of his most ambitious projects: ‘The Golden Tower’. In several of the ‘scrolls’ he writes about this project:

“my project is so simple in structure that a word sketch seems best (in reality – interpretation complex.) I’d like to construct a gold cylinder 15-20 meters high as a sculpture tower of a slim diameter of a 100 c.m.’s enough to be to be supported only by a ground(sic jvdd) foundation (no cables) small holes (“6” approx.. 15 cm jvdd) starting above the public reach on one side only would permit a rare celebratory climb and even add a faint musical element mostly a great beam of reichgold (sic) on the steinplatz would be hopefully an inspiring symbol (perhaps even accepted as a tribute to the insightfulness of DAAD.) eagerly hoping your approval

james lee byars”

and even more explicit he becomes in letter to Tomas Deecke:

«come on DAAD do someth. for wunder me. Lets put up the golden tower as a wunder german wunder amor gift to venice».

Paper has been Byars’ preferred medium since he lived in Japan in the late fifties, early sixties. Silk paper, crepe and all kinds of tissue paper, as well as gold leaves, gilded paper leaves, or scrolls are used to create ‘paper sculptures’ or to write on. They come in the colors black, red, pink, gold and white and their shapes and formats are circles, ‘snakes’, steles, scrolls, horizontal or vertical strips.

Language and communicating through language is central to the work of James Lee Byars. It is not so much the production of meaning that has fascinated me in describing the material in this exhibition, but the physical aspects of writing, the way Byars confronts us with the act and the materials of writing.

I started to imagine his writing posture while writing scrolls that are nearly 10 meters long and 30 centimeters wide.

While flattening some of the circular works on which he wrote ‘mr. joseph beuys makes documenta 8’, it felt as if I was caressing the paper.

There is one piece black square silk paper (53 x 53 cm) with a text that reads: «every time you fold a piece of paper think of me».

Some pieces have small paper restorations done by Byars himself.

While writing on another strip of black silk paper he pierced the paper in a few places. Around these tiny holes he wrote «sorry sorry» and around one bigger hole «sorry sorry sorry».

We will never know if Byars apologized to the reader or to the paper he was writing on….

1 The German Academic Exchange Service

2 Most of the material on view here has been exhibited before in Galerie Volker Diehl in Berlin in 2014. A catalogue was published on that occasion with a text by Mark Gisbourne.