James Lee Byars: The Perfect Audience

Après Documenta 5

Michel de Rivaz: Après Documenta 5, 1972 (stills); 8mm film transferred to DVD; color; silent; approx. 7 mins.; gift of James Elliott.

James Lee Byars found his “perfect audience” on a sunny summer afternoon in 1972 on the ground beneath the Zytglogge, a fifteenth-century clock tower in Bern, Switzerland. At the invitation of Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, Byars had performed Calling German Names at Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, earlier that summer. Szeemann, the young director of Documenta, revolutionized the event by inviting artists to present not just paintings and sculptures, but also performances and “happenings.” Byars repeated his performance in Bern, where the action was captured on film by local filmmaker Michel de Rivaz. Recently digitally remastered, the film Après Documenta 5 is presented for the first time in an American museum in the exhibition The Perfect Audience.

The seven-minute film opens with Byars in the apex of the Fridericianum, on the Documenta exhibition grounds, and then moves to Bern. With dizzying camera moves, Byars appears atop the clock tower, shrouded in red, calling German names through a golden megaphone to a perplexed crowd on the ground below. Later we see Byars exiting the house where Albert Einstein lived between 1903 and 1905 as he developed the Special Theory of Relativity; at the site, Byars dedicated his performance to the legendary scientist. The film concludes with art-world types, including the artist, Szeemann, and others, sipping aperitifs and soaking in the sun in an outdoor cafe. Byars had a way of bringing a bourgeois air to radical art, redefining the concept of hot fun in the summertime.

The Perfect Audience presents this film along with artist’s books, mail art, ephemera, and documentation drawn from the James Lee Byars archive in the museum’s Conceptual Art Study Center. Works by two other Conceptual artists represented in Documenta 5, John C. Fernie and Lawrence Weiner, are on view in Held Rectangles in the Stairwell Gallery.

Stephanie Cannizzo
Curatorial Associate