James Lee Byars

ACTIVE BACKLIST

JAMES LEE BYARS: I GIVE YOU GENIUS
Edited by Heinrich Heil. Text by Heinrich Heil, Gabriele Uerscheln. Photographs by Claudio Abate.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783863350161 | US $49.95
Pub Date: 2/29/2012
Active | In stock

JAMES LEE BYARS: THE WHITE MASS
Essays by Thomas McEvilley, Friedhelm Mennekes and Barbara Catoir. Foreword by Henrich Heil.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783883756189 | US $55.00
Pub Date: 6/15/2005
Active | Awaiting stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

JAMES LEE BYARS: IM FULL OF BYARS
KERBER
ISBN: 9783866781559 | US $55.00
Pub Date: 3/1/2009
Out of print | Not available

JAMES LEE BYARS: LIFE, LOVE, AND DEATH
Edited by Klaus Ottman. Essays by Viola Michely and Martina Weinhart.
HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9783775713689 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 6/2/2004
Out of print | Not available

JAMES LEE BYARS
Artwork by Joseph Beuys, James Lee Byars.
HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9783775709392 | US $35.00
Pub Date: 7/2/2000
Out of print | Not available

James Lee Byars

James Lee Byars: I Give You Genius

Edited by Heinrich Heil. Text by Heinrich Heil, Gabriele Uerscheln. Photographs by Claudio Abate.
Published by Walther König, Köln

This elegant volume collects Claudio Abate’s photographs of works by James Lee Byars (1932–1997) as installed at the Benrath palace in Düsseldorf and its surrounding parkland. This regal setting for Byars’ white marble and stone spheres and fabric works makes for an ideal backdrop, as Abate’s photographs so beautifully demonstrate.

James Lee Byars: Im Full of Byars

Edited by Susanne Friedli, Matthias Frehner. Text by Thomas McEvilley, Viola M. Michely, Peter J. Schneemann, Nicola Müllerschön.
Published by Kerber

James Lee Byars--who was born in Detroit in 1932 and died in Cairo in 1997--was one of the twentieth-century art world's most unusual and elusive figures. Enamored with the imaginary and fleeting, pitting the immaterial against the material, Byars was not just an artist, he was a visionary and a dandy, who, always seeking perfection, knew how to cast a spell over his audience through his enigmatic performances, installations and sculptures. Using sandstone, marble, glass and gold, Byars created classical sculptural forms like spheres, circles, gates and columns. Im Full of Byars reveals his work to be a symbiosis of Fluxus, Minimalism and Conceptualism, that has lost none of its mystery or poetry with time. The volume includes a selection of sculptures, installations and never-before-seen documentation of his performances.

James Lee Byars: The White Mass

Essays by Thomas McEvilley, Friedhelm Mennekes and Barbara Catoir. Foreword by Henrich Heil.
Published by Walther König, Köln

The works of influential cult artist James Lee Byars explore themes of death, transformation and transience, and are deceptively simple in form, yet pack a tremendous existential punch. Legendary for his performances, sculptures and installations across the U.S. and Europe, Byars today can be seen to have pioneered a stance that combined dandyism with a generous spirituality. Explored here is one of his last pieces, The White Mass.

James Lee Byars: Life, Love, And Death

Edited by Klaus Ottman. Essays by Viola Michely and Martina Weinhart.
Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers

In 1956, James Lee Byars rented a sod farm for a midnight, full moon exhibition of his abstract figure sculptures; guests viewed the work from sleds pulled over snow. In 1959, he abandoned durable materials for paper and fabric. In 1965, a nun performed his A 1,000-Foot Chinese Paper at the Carnegie International. The wondrous story of James Lee Byars begins in 1932 and ends in 1997, and its unique synthesis of Conceptual art, Minimalism, and Fluxus reflects an unending striving for beauty and perfection. The story passes by way of Japan, a place where Byars lived for many years, and where he combined the formal and symbolic aspects of Noh theater and Shinto rituals with elements of Western science, art, and philosophy, developing an appreciation for the transient, ceremonial character of performance as an essential quality of his art. Over his lifetime, he was known for works characterized by an extreme simplicity of form and material that simultaneously appeared astonishingly luxurious. Life, Love, and Death presents a critical review of Byars' oeuvre and traces his development as an artist from his formative period in Japan to his later years in New York--ranging from his performances and works on paper and fabric devoted to the theme of life, to his splendid late sculptures in gold, marble, and velvet which deal with death as the embodiment of perfection.

James Lee Byars

Letters to Joseph Beuys

Artwork by Joseph Beuys, James Lee Byars.
Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers