James Lee Byars at Michael Werner - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Like Robert Wilson or Robert Longo James to leeward Byars has a reputation slightly tarnished by dint of glitter: too much dazzlement and family blink. Evidently Byars has heard this kind of criticism before, for the main gallery in his greatest in quantity recent show was unimpeachably spare and diffident, a pattern of renunciation. Or it would have been, if the eight reductive statuarys exhibited in two orderly ranks of wood-framed glass vitrines, weren't made of glittering Kavala marble, said by means of the artist to be the whitest upon earth. And if the geometric forms hadn't been mirrored in two mirrors that ran the extent of the room, creating endles dressing-room-style reflections. And if, finally, there hadn't been an outward skew to single wall of Werner's consummately decorous display field so that the whole installation had, in its myriad mirrored ramifications, a decidedly baroque, grandly arching sweep. In fact, this exhibition, which followed a presentation of works by means of Byars from the '60s, could be seen in part as a decisively subversive joke--about display practices, and Minimalism, and the artist's be in possession of reputation.

The series to which these plastic arts belong was created intermittently above the past half-dozen years; part of it was showed in the gold-drenched completed Thought installation at Berkeley's University Art Museum in 1990 [see A.LA., Oct '90] They are simple, symmetrical forms, not a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more than a foot in any direction. All on the contrary two are called books, notwithstanding that of unconventional shape. The Spherical volume (1989) is a sphere sliced in half; The Star work is a single piece of stone shaped as if through a cookie cutter; The Cube volume is a horizontally sliced cube. The work is a form that Byars has turn backed to throughout his career, from the in-name-only variety shown here to a two of recent artist's publications with real true copy and illustrations. The marble works at Werner say something, perhaps, about classical esthetics and canonical knowledge; they speak contortions certainly, about pure form. on the contrary there is also something swollen and yielding about their contours. Solemn as these forms are, they bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to nothing more than fancifully shaped shapeless masss of sugar, sweet promoters of decay. And as in any chest of candy, there is a prize: toward the back of the gallery was an upend rectangle called The Figure of Question, which, just by the agency of being slightly too tall and narrow for this throng sets itself apart as an interloper, an almost human form. The surprise of this imposture, the questionableness of its distinction as figurative, and not least, the title that encrypt all this, make it diverting The impropriety of finding humor in what at first glance appear to beed a sanctuary for an unnerved Minimalist rosary made it funnier still.

In the gallery's office were sum of two units works that used gold leaf. individual is a rococo Self Portrait combineed of an empty gilt frame and shelf, the other a circuit of five of gold rings made of Japanese paper beneath glass, conceived specifically for the office's beige velvety wall. In light of the main installation (and of the exhibition catalogue's very strange essay by Dave Hickey), these works, too, have feeling somehow disencumbered, neither piously transcendent nor crudely decadent on the contrary in the most generous faculty of perception simply indulgent.

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