JOCELYN MILLER

The most comprehensive museum survey of James Lee Byars organized in North America since his death, this exhibition was presented at Museo Jumex in Mexico City and at MoMA PS1 in New York. Including documentation and works across a range of mediums, the show confronts the absence of Byars himself, and more generally highlights the inherently incomplete summary that a retrospective offers of an artist’s life. 

 

Obsessed by the idea of perfection, Byars produced a remarkable body of work that strove to give form to his search for beauty and truth. Making and proposing art at scales ranging from the vastness of outer space to the microscopic level of subatomic particles, Byars attempts to delineate the limits of our knowledge while enacting a desire for something more.

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The show includes a series of restaged historical performances presented at The Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with Lucinda Childs and Jimmy Robert, and is accompanied by a two-volume bilingual publication documenting both the exhibition and a never before published archive of the artist's extensive and elaborate ephemera.