James Lee Byars was always asking questions. The prevailing theme throughout his oeuvre, questions posed in one way or another, appear in several works from this period. In 1969, Byars staged The World Question Center, a performance in which the artist answered questions asked by 100 intellectuals and broadcast the discussion live on Belgian television. For his 1971 work, The Black Book, he printed 100 questions in impossibly small gold text on black paper. Byars was undoubtedly more interested in questions than answers, and believed that the question was more important than the answer, or perhaps that they were one in the same.
Watch a clip from the 1969 broadcast of The World Question Center with John Cage.
James Lee Byars 1932–1997
James Lee Byars was born in Detroit in 1932 and died halfway around the world in Egypt in 1997. It was not his first death, three years prior Byars staged The Death of James Lee Byars, a performance in which the artist practiced his own death when clad in a gold suit, he laid down quietly in a room entirely covered in gold leaf and seem to vanish into the background. This magical, transcendental quality permeated his impressive body of work and solidified him as one of the great conceptual artists of our time.
Before his deaths, Byars studied philosophy at Wayne State University and traveled to Japan on invitation from the artist Morris Graves. While overseas, he studied Noh theater, Zen meditations, Shinto ritual and taught English to Japanese monks. Upon returning to the Untied States in 1958, he hitchhiked to New York City in the hopes of meeting artist Mark Rothko and ended up at the reception desk at the Museum of Modern Art. There he met Dorothy Miller, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the museum, who arranged for his New York debut—an exhibition of his paper works in an empty stairwell at the museum that lasted only a few hours.
