Vocal Shadows

This exhibition – the second major exhibition of the Vanhaerents Art Collection outside Belgium – takes its cue and its title from a key work in the collection: The Death of James Lee Byars. Created in 1994, at a time when James Lee Byars was battling incurable cancer, it is arguably one of the artist’s most emotional and intimate works. With this installation Byars presents a haunting image of his final resting place: a grand and simple chamber, bare of any everyday ornamentation, but covered in ethereal gold, his most favourite material. The artist himself is wholly absent. Only a bier and five crystals indicate that his body actually ever lay there.

While it is obvious that the prospect of an imminent death prompted this installation, it is also difficult to ignore The Death of James Lee Byars as the creation of an artist who had been practising ‘an aesthetics of disappearance’ all of his life. As various critics have noted, Byars consistently produced works influenced by his own biography and individual experiences, but he was as equally intent on undermining any link with self-portraiture by moving himself out of sight, dissolving into the background or shrouding himself in darkness. In so doing, he enacted what Roland Barthes famously termed ‘the death of the author’ – a symbolic withdrawal from any authoritative stance, opening his works up to the viewer and a process of free interpretation.

The exhibition The Death of James Lee Byars allows the public to connect with this remarkable installation by one of the leading performance and installation artists of his generation – an artist who was always compelled by the unknown, the out-of-reach, the ever-fleeting. Standing in front of his arresting golden ‘void’, visitors can immediately sense the artist’s absence on both a physical and emotional level, eliciting ideas about what it means to be alert – to be present in the world (a process the artist commonly referred to as ‘IS’). What Byars’ installation warrants us, then, is to not abide to preconceptions, routine and habitual rules, but instead to engage freely and craft our own individual meanings.

This exhibition not only highlights one of Byars’ most iconic installations, it also succinctly reflects upon his artistic legacy and how his investigations on absence continue to impact artists today. In this respect, the Vanhaerents Art Collection has commissioned composer and visual artist Zad Moultaka to create a new audio work specifically for this occasion. Through his interests in the ephemeral, symbolism, rituals, and ancient cultures, Zad Moultaka bears close affinities to James Lee Byars. Much like his American counterpart, the artist creates works that enjoy a strong and arresting presence, aesthetic appeal and conceptual vigour.

In his new installation Vocal Shadows, Zad Moultaka subtly advances on Byars’ work and ideas, offering a profound meditation on death as an existential condition, as well as a symbolic generative process with regard to signification. Consisting of sixteen loudspeakers, his immersive audio piece evokes a funeral choir, performing their many-voiced requiem serenely but unceasingly in the immediate surroundings of Byars’ chamber tomb. As their words and sounds disseminate rhythmically over all of the exhibition space, they combine into ever- changing acoustic patterns.

The presentation of the exhibition The Death of James Lee Byars in Venice is particularly significant because of Byars’ profound connection to the city.

– James Lee Byars lived off and on in Venice beginning in 1982. It was by far his favourite city, as artist and colleague Maurizio Nannucci recounted: ‘He loved being there on the lagoon, breathing beauty, the uniqueness and the “perfect-ness” of Venice – he interacted with the image as well with the historical physical presence of the city, and celebrated the “perfect” in it, in the sense of its irrevocable glorious past and inimitable nature. The big “Q” – the Question – the driving force of James Lee Byars’ early artistic career – had found an answer in Venice.’ To many of his friends, Byars even intimated that he ultimately wanted to be buried at the cemetery of Isola di San Michele, Venice’s famous Isle of the Dead.

– Throughout his career, Byars enacted numerous performances in Venice, including The Holy Ghost (1975) and The New Pink Flag of Italy (1980) at Piazza San Marco. In 1994, he staged The Death of James Lee Byars – Five Points Make a Man at the Punta della Dogana. Byars also participated in four editions of the Venice Biennale, performing Be Quiet at the opening of the 39th International Art Exhibition (1980) and The Poet of the Gondola in the 1986 edition. In 2017, The Golden Tower was erected at the Campo San Vio.

The lyrics of Vocal Shadows were inspired by :

– The Gospel of John, 3:8 (KJV):

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

– The Book of the Dead, the ancient Egyptian funerary text about the afterlife:

I made the four winds, that every man might breathe in his time.

I have created the gods from my sweat, and the people from the tears of my eye.

I made the great inundation, that the humble might benefit by it like the great.

I am yesterday, the present and the future: I organize the rebirth of souls, of all nature and her mysteries.

O land of silence and secrets who is with its companion, may I rise up and see the sun-disk. May I travel in peace and walk on the celestial waters. May I fly up, that I might see the bright expanses of gloriousness in the presence of Re, the one who gives life anew each day to everyone.

“Breath: The most intimate thing in humans. The idea is that everything starts with the center of the church with the breaths that are everywhere. When the visitor walks, he experiencse the interiority whilst this matter of breath is changing little by little, it will come out of the center to fill more and more the space of the church, the breath is transformed into singing and the piece ends behind the altar. One wonders if the singers are there! Everything is played on the notion of absence and presence, a concept on which I worked a lot and dear to James Lee Byars.

The instruments are the breath and the human voice. We hear like bells that cross the space from one place to another of the nave towards the entrance of the church: they are bronze sculptures on which I knocked, like a broken clock as if the clock had aged and stopped the momentum.”
Zad Moultaka

The Death of James Lee Byars – Zad Moultaka in dialogue
Sound installation
dimensions variable each audio cycle: 10’46
In collaboration of IRCAM-Centre POMPIDOU

May 11 – November 24, 2019
Biennale Arte 2019, Collateral Events
Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione, Fondamenta Zattere Ai Gesuati, 30123 Venice, Italy