James Lee Byars Reaches for the Heavens

The spectre of James Lee Byars – or, rather, his extravagant persona, clad in a gold suit and a top hat – looms over this captivating retrospective. But what would this self-declared mystic, with his aristocratic bearing and reverence for beauty, have thought of his works being exhibited inside the cavernous, former-industrial spaces of Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca? Perhaps it would have appealed to Byars’s Detroit roots, a coming full circle of sorts? Or, perhaps more likely, the concrete venue would have been a non-starter for a man who travelled to Cairo to see its resplendent pyramids from his hotel as he lay dying from cancer in 1997.

The exhibition opens with a bang: The Golden Tower (1990), Byars’s largest work at 21 metres tall, comprises stainless steel covered entirely in gold leaf. Against the dark walls of HangarBicocca, the tower appears to reach endlessly heavenwards. In a 2017 interview with Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, Byars’s wife, Wendy Dunaway, recalled that the artist had referred to it as his ‘monument to humanity’, its verticality symbolizing the human figure on a quest to some mystical rapture. The tower drew crowds that same year at the Venice Biennale, when it was installed in a public space – Campo San Vio – per the artist’s lifelong wish. Here, it is flanked by The Capital of the Golden Tower (1991): the tower’s dome-shaped top on a square black plinth. Side by side, the two works recall Islamic architecture – a minaret and the Dome of the Rock – further enhancing its spirituality.

While it is often said that Byars’s work defied categorization, he excelled at understanding that two things could be true at once: minimalism could coexist with a rococo aesthetic; conceptual art could be theatre; embracing life could also mean embracing death. The golden thread weaving through it all is his pursuit of flawless beauty, evident throughout this show. The Unicorn Horn (1984), for instance, is a narwhal tusk – impossibly long and ivory white – which rests on a pearly white silk sheet atop an antique wooden table. Its title alludes to the illustrious past of the narwhal’s canine tooth, which was once collected by the Inuit and traded to Europeans as real unicorn horn prized for its magical ‘healing’ properties.

Byars’s Sisyphean quest for perfection and predilection for contradictions is further exemplified in The Rose Table of Perfect (1989), a one-metre-wide sphere made from 3,333 red roses, destined to decay over the duration of the show. It speaks of the transience of beauty and life itself, of passion and death, as well as of Byars’s idiosyncratic take on numerology. At the very end of the show, in the only space illuminated by natural light, 1,000 spheres of red Murano glass are assembled on the floor (Red Angel of Marseille, 1993). The sunlight plays across the ruby orbs, adding to their texture, while the sculpture echoes the form of Gustav Klimt’s The Tree of Life (1909) as much as it does the titular angel.

Byars’s show poses many questions– not least how to exhibit the work of an artist whose presence was integral to their practice, and who systematically eschewed documentation during their lifetime. Perhaps Byars’s biggest achievement is not the objects he left behind, but the stories. The time in 1969, for instance, when he contacted ‘the 100 most brilliant minds’ to determine the 100 most important questions for his project The World Question Center. Or when, in 1993, he stood at the main gate of the Venice Biennale, bedecked in gold and blindfolded, handing out gold paper coins on which he had written: ‘Your presence is the best work.’

James Lee Byars's retrospective is on view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, until 18 February 2024

_{Main image: James Lee Byars, 2023, exhibition view. Courtesy: The Estate of James Lee Byars; Michael Werner Gallery, New York, London, and Berlin, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; photograph: Agostino Osio}