James Lee Byars (April 10, 1932 – May 23, 1997) was an American conceptual artist and performance artist specializing in installations and sculptures, as well as a self-considered mystic. He was best known for his use of personal esoteric motifs, and his creative persona that has been described as 'half dandified trickster and half minimalist seer'. Byars was born Detroit, Michigan, and died in Cairo, Egypt. Byars' notable performance works include The Death of James Lee Byars and The Perfect Smile, and in terms of multiple sculptures, the many letters he wrote that were composed as decorated sculptures.

Themes and motifs in his works

Byars' works are often noted as constantly incorporating specific personal themes and motifs, leaning towards the esoteric while simultaneously being ritualistic and materialistic: Robert Clark, writing for The Guardian on the occasion of a Milton Keynes exhibition of his work, described it as 'impenetrably yet intriguingly hermetic'. Most in particular was gold as a material, which served as an elemental identifier. As well as this, works of his demonstrate a fascination with the symbolism of numbers: Clark quotes in the same exhibition, referring to a specific piece of his, writing that he 'imbued the number 100 with symbolic significance, having made a symmetrical arrangement of 100 white marbles and draping 100 nude volunteers in a collective red garment'. A common theme in his works is perfection (especially upon the word 'Perfect'), which he extended into a personal journey that led to his ambiguously celebratory exploration of shapes, numbers and precious materials. A MoMA text explaining his oeuvre, in the context of his piece The Table of Perfect, noted that while it "looks pristine, it—like any other object—can only ever exist as a sign of perfection and can never embody the total concept." Byars was in 1972 the first artist invited to visit the physics laboratory CERN in Geneva—an event that was featured on the cover of the CERN Courier. Later many artists have passed through the laboratory, since 2012 mainly within the framework of the Arts at CERN programme. Arts resulting from his visit to CERN was exposed at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004 and is digitally available from the Harvard Art Museums. The American artist Matthew Barney played Byars in the film River of Fundament (2014), a work loosely based on the Norman Mailer novel Ancient Evenings. Barney has argued, "I think Byars had this Egyptian subtext through his work. [...] Ancient Evenings is to do with the ambition of the Pharaoh and the ambition of the nobleman to live again and again and again. So there's something about Byars that has always interested me in his work to do with its ambition to become pure gold and its failure to be pure gold. It's always a veneer. It wants to be something it can't be. And I love that about the work, I love the theatre of it." Byars also showed fascination in predicting his own death and others' deaths.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions include: Group shows include: