James Lee Byars The Death of James Lee Byars, 1994 and Zad Moultaka Vocal Shadows, 2019. Simulated installation view in Venice.
Set to occupy Venice's Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione is The Death of James Lee Byars, an exhibition curated by Walter Vanhaerents pairing conceptual American artist James Lee Byars and Lebanese artist composer Zad Moultaka. The historic church along the banks of the Giudecca Canal is best known for its classic Renaissance façade and wooden-paneled ceiling. It was a fascination with museum architecture that originally drew Walter Vanhaerents to the arts in the first place, years after he had joined the family construction business. Eventually, he founded the not-for-profit Vanhaerents Art Collection in 2006.
Now in May 2019, Venice serves as the perfect location to host an exhibition devoted to artist Byars, given his long-standing affinity for the city and its prominence within his career. Born in Detroit, Byars was a charismatic nomad. Frequently traveling across European cities including Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Cologne, London, Paris and Marseille, as well as Venice, he engendered a vast, cult-like following and became one of the leading performance and installation artists of his generation.
Byars first visited Japan in the late 1950s, and it was there that he began to develop an interest in rituals and mysticism. As his artistic practice evolved over the following decades, he infused tenets of Fluxus and Duchampian art-making with Eastern culture.
I hope that people will experience my way of practicing my own death as something useful for themselves. — James Lee Byars
© Michael Werner Gallery, The Estate of James Lee Byars
On view in this show, Byars' work, The Death of James Lee Byars, was created in 1994 when the artist was battling fatal cancer. Comprising gold leaf, plexiglass and Swarovski crystals, the installation piece—one of the artist's most intimate and iconic—expresses a final resting place outfitted in "ethereal gold." Byars' body of work explored presence and absence and the visual aesthetics of disappearance, but in this piece, the artist is wholly absent. Notes the Vanhaerents Art Collection, "only a bier and five crystals indicate that his body actually ever lay there." Byars eventually lost his battle to cancer in Cairo, Egypt in 1997.
To complement this haunting golden chamber, the Vanhaerents Art Collection has commissioned a new audio work by composer and visual artist Zad Moultaka. Born in 1967 in Lebanon, Moultaka splits his time between Paris and Beirut. He gave up a career as a successful solo pianist in the mid-1990s to devote himself to art.
Produced with sixteen loudspeakers interspersed on pedestals, which will occupy the interior space of the Venice church as one approaches Byars' symbolic tomb, Vocal Shadows is an immersive audio installation. Conceived specifically for this exhibition, it "evokes a funeral choir whose requiem guides the passage of a disembodied spirit" and features a singing style that the artist describes as a mix of "polyphonic chant and tantric breathing." In his approach to bridging Eastern and Western culture, Moultaka "finds a natural companion in James Lee Byars," says Vanhaerents.
© Zad Moultaka
Vocal Shadows recalls The Play of Death, one of the first performance artworks in which Byars tackled the theme of mortality. Much like his American counterpart, Moultaka has created a work with "strong and arresting presence...and conceptual vigor."
Byars had intimated to close friends that he ultimately wanted to be buried in Venice, a city that, for him, possessed a certain uniqueness and "perfect-ness." In tandem with Moultaka's bespoke composition, Byars' ethereal Venetian resting place becomes a reality.
Walter Vanhaerents in front of The Death of James Lee Byars
Curated by Walter Vanhaerents, The Death of James Lee Byars is on view at the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione, Venice, from 11 May - 24 November 2019. Most recently, artist James Lee Byars has been honored with comprehensive surveys including James Lee Byars: Perfect Moments at Wiener Secession, 2016, and James Lee Byars: 1/2 an Autobiography at MoMA PS1, 2014.