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The plausible, ongoing, and disappearing acts of James Lee Byars: early performance works (1955-1967)

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The plausible, ongoing, and disappearing acts of James Lee Byars: early performance works (1955-1967)

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The Plausible, Ongoing, and Disappearing Acts of James Lee Byars:
Early Performance Works (1955-1967)

by
Samantha Gregg

A thesis presented to the
Faculty of the USC, Roski School of Art and Design
University of Southern California
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
Masters of Art and Curatorial Studies in the Public Sphere
May 2015
Gregg 2
Dedication
For Richard J. Gregg.

Gregg 3
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Amelia Jones, Bruce Hainley, Rhea Anastas, John Tain and
Suzanne Hudson.

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Table of Contents
Dedication 2
Acknowledgments 3
Abstract 5
Introduction 6
Wayne State University 7
Rolled, Folded, and “Flash” Paintings 9
Performable Paper Objects 16
Air Pieces and PEACE 41
Conclusion 45
Bibliography 49

Gregg 5
Abstract
By identifying three key developmental shifts in the early performances (1955-1967) of
American artist James Lee Byars this paper argues for the significance of this body of work with
critical attention given to the fact they strategically projected issues of ephemerality, duration,
originality, documentation, viewership, participation and historicization that are still unresolved
within presentations and representations of performance art in our current moment. I consider the
conditions that have disregarded Byars from the general history and foundations of performance
art as well as review and amend available texts on the subject and related works. I also examine
recent enactments of two performable paper works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
using this presentation as an example by which to reconsider Byars’s original notes on the work
and the possibilities that such notes allow for in the event of curating future enactments. The
performances at large are argued to exist simultaneously as definitive of the period that they
were conceived in as well as still “occurring” today in a deliberately ongoing and fluid state of
perpetual presence.

Gregg 6
Introduction
To argue for the importance of the early performance works of James Lee Byars is also to
assume that they, in fact, happened at all. The use of the word “happened” here, however, refers
to two separate types of performances by Byars. For the first section of works, those that will be
reviewed in the first two chapters, the fact of their occurring in the sense of having happened at
all is in question since we have been left with only a hash of their remnants, mostly in the form
of brief, often mysterious, texts, which will be discussed in what follows. Outside of a few
contact sheets of photographs and props that exist from one series of performances (from 1962-
1965), these texts – comprising correspondence about project, invitations, and Byars’s own
recollections – are our sole access to Byars’s early performance work. For the other group, which
will be reviewed in the last two chapters, the word happened is appropriate by the fact of it being
in the past tense. As will be deduced, the works having “happened” is inaccurate; these
performances are most accurately described as still very much occurring in the present.
The nature of these works has meant that they have not attained their deserved place in
history, in relation to both Byars’s personal oeuvre and foundational texts on early performance
movements including Gutai, Fluxus, and Happenings. These performances, in their early timing,
nonetheless place Byars at the foundations of contemporary performance art. His works also
anticipate many of the central issues that would soon define the field, as reflected in his spirited
explorations of the role of audience, questions of participation, and issues of temporality and
documentation. In the early 1960s, Byars introduced performative objects into his practice, using
them consistently in each performance-based work thereafter as a tool to frame the conditions of
interaction for viewers and participants alike. These objects, structured by eternal fluctuation,
animate the stagnant art object through movement-based gestures. A recent enactment of one of
Gregg 7
these works at the Museum of Modern Art in 2014 will be reviewed in depth. Furthermore, as a
nomadic artist living in various parts of Japan and the United States during the 1950s and 1960s,
Byars also had a career that provides a convenient case study of the simultaneous development
of performance art practices in Japan and the United States. This text will aim to define the core
performances of Byars’s formative years as prime examples of the formation of the field of
performance art at large, arguing for the value of their critical reexamination through the artist’s
strategic anticipation of issues of ephemerality, duration, originality, documentation, viewership,
participation and historicization that are still unresolved within presentations and representations
of performance art today.
Wayne State University
To begin, the first documented performance by Byars has been variously dated anywhere
from 1955 to 1958.
1
Byars was at the time living at home with his parents in a working-class
neighborhood of Detroit. This performance was his thesis piece for his undergraduate degree at
Wayne State University. To prepare for the untitled work, Byars emptied the contents of his
home, including all of the furniture, doors, and windows, and stowed everything in the family
barn. (His parents were restricted to watching television in the barn during the performance.) He
then invited the faculty members overseeing his thesis to his home at a pre-determined hour.
Upon arriving, they walked throughout the empty house. The experience of uncertainty on the
part of the audience is crucial to this particular work and is often revisited in much of Byars’s
later works. By the time they reached the second floor, they encountered Byars sitting in a chair,
motionless, silent and blindfolded.

1
Thomas McEvilley, “James Lee Byars: A Study in Posterity,” in I’m Full of Byars (New York: Kerber,
2009), 104.
Gregg 8
The only information available to us about this piece, however, is Byars’s own oral
history. Photographs of the event do not exist, nor does Wayne State have record of it having
taken place.
2
Given that he was a twenty-something college student, this may not be surprising,
but historically speaking this lack of documentation is inconvenient. Beyond the dates, there are
additional inconsistencies in Byars’s accounts. At times he has mentioned an exhibition of large
spherical stones throughout the first floor of the house, at other times not.
3
Between Byars’s
constant penchant for myth and the imperfect variable of memory, the founding history of his
performance is unapologetically slippery. What are we to do with the memories of Byars,
especially when they are our only point of access into this event? This question solicits another
vital one (that Byars would have likely been delighted by): does it really matter if this event
occurred?
This question resonates closely with the performances such as VALIE EXPORT’s
Genital Panic, which, depending on your notion of the limits of a performance and its resulting
documentation, could have taken place between 1968 and 1969. In a highly limited description,
EXPORT’s performance (of which the details vary considerably)
4
likely took place at a theater in
Munich in 1968 and, one year later, was documented in a photograph. There is no evidence
outside of EXPORT’s own wavering oral history that can prove the fact of the performance’s
occurrence. Mechtild Widrich has sorted through this history, concluding, “Did EXPORT’s
Genital Panic ever actually take place as a performance? Certainly it continues to do so. But the

2
Ibid., 112.
3
See: Ibid; and Gay Morris, “Props on a Stage,” Art in America 78, no. 10 (1990), 197; and Marsha Miro,
“James Lee Byars in Detroit,” in I’m Full of Byars (New York: Kerber, 2009), 22.
4
Mechtild Widrich, “Can Photographs Make It So? Repeated Outbreaks of VALIE EXPORT’S Genital
Panic since 1969,” in Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, ed. Amelia Jones et al. (Chicago: Intellect,
2012), 90-94.
Gregg 9
act of the artist in a movie theater in Munich might not have taken place.”
5
Documentation is, of
course, a choice that can be omitted in the interest of a work maintaining its perpetual status as
an unresolved mystery in the present. Byars made it his life-long mission to mythologize himself,
through his performances and in his life. Byars’s myths are the performance.
Rolled, Folded, and “Flash” Paintings
In a 1981 interview with art critic and close friend Thomas McEvilley, Byars impatiently
responded after a few questions, “Oh, Thomas, just make me up!”
6
Byars enjoyed the precarious
nature of “facts;” it was malleable and performable. McEvilley was well versed in this aspect of
the Byars’s method, noting that he was “uninterested in [chronology] – he was even attracted to
the idea of confounding it in the cause of ahistoricism. He liked things to seem to appear out of
nowhere rather than out of causes.”
7
Byars’s interest in the seduction of happenstance would play
into his personal biography as much as it would the structure of his performance works, perhaps
because these two entities were interchangeable for him. A letter written in Kyoto (around 1960)
from Byars to Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy C. Miller (a crucial figure for the artist,
as will be elaborated on later) reads:

With my work, I wish whatever the air wishes. The Kozo paper lasts up to 600
years, exposed, naked. My paintings, like all of us, must take their chances, I am
happy with them, like life, that way.
8

In this document, Byars literally (albeit poetically) aligns the life of an artwork with
embodied life. Likewise in this period, Byars produced two types of ink-on-Kozo-paper

5
Ibid., 101.
6
McEvilley, “James Lee Byars,” 106.
7
Ibid., 105.
8
James Lee Byars, written letter to Dorothy C. Miller from Kyoto, Japan, ca. 1960, “Collection: Byars,”
Series Folder I.2, Archives, MoMA.
Gregg 10
paintings. The first were standard gallery objects made solely for wall-mounted exhibition. The
second were similar to the first, except each of the Kozo paintings were affixed to a larger roll of
bright orange paper with a cylindrical drum at each end and a small metal handle at the top for
hanging. This allowed for the paintings to be “presented” (as an object in a gallery or as part of a
performance) just as easily as they could be rolled up and stored away. So if in this letter he is
writing about the “life” of his rolled paintings, he is referring to the anticipation of the rolling
mechanism to the pluralistic capabilities of the paintings that he exaggerated in a number of
provocations – in short, the paintings possessed the ability to become animated.
It is an issue to discuss the rolled paintings – their history as “activated” performance
objects remains largely inaccessible. The images that we have of them from an exhibition in
Kyoto depict them as objects that embody a singular presence: paintings. But even in their
exhibited state, the paintings have the rolling mechanism that alludes to action in addition to the
state currently at play. They are not in motion now, but they could be. Motion in the case of these
works indicates two types of engagement that lead to performance. The works are for one
capable of being ephemeral; they can be present (open, unrolled), “exposed” like film to light for
a fleeting moment, and also dormant (closed, rolled). The potential for dormancy also suggests
periods of storage, which in turn anticipate re-enactment.
The other contribution to Byars’s history that these works embody is that, in both their
dormant and active states, they behave as documentation. The fact of their opposing states and,
simply, of their very objecthood confirms their physical existence—state that ephemeral action,
within its own terms, cannot partake in. The objects are essentially props spontaneously imbued
with “life,” which in fact links this example of Byars’s work to the history of both Western and
Eastern models of theater versus that of traditional visual art, performance art, or dance. Within
Gregg 11
the scope of Eastern influence, Byars’s performances often referenced Japanese Noh theater by
appropriating its characteristic minimal yet dramatic approach to movement along with the use
of ceremonial dress in an effort to dematerialize objects through the act of performance.
9
And in
the vein of theatrics, it is evident that Byars was interested in documentation as a means to
further myth, to complicate his own history in an intriguing way for future audiences. This is
emphasized by the fact that the future audiences of a work were often the only audiences of a
performance, as in the case of Byars deliberately choosing remote, uninhabited locations to
execute a work.
Boris Groys observes the fact of documentation as, on one hand, functioning as utilitarian
– “art documentation is neither the making present of a past art event nor the promise of a
coming artwork but the only possible form of reference to an artistic activity that cannot be
represented any other way”
10
– and, on the other, as the production of an object analogous to life
itself. The latter consideration, once expanded on by Groys, resonates deeply with Byars’s
“props” as objects that carry on with a certain degree of life-like animation or pending presence:

For those who devote themselves to the production of art documentation rather
than of artworks, art is identical to life, because life is essentially a pure activity
that does not lead to any end result. The presentation of any such end result – in
the form of an artwork, say – would imply an understanding of life as merely a
functional process whose own duration is negated and extinguished by the
creation of the end product – which is equivalent to death.”
11

9
Klaus Ottmann, “Epiphanies of Beauty and Knowledge: The Life-World of James Lee Byars,” in Life,
Love, and Death: The Work of James Lee Byars (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2004), 30-31.
10
Boris Groys, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artworks to Art Documentation,” in Perform, Repeat,
Record: Live Art in History, ed. Amelia Jones et al. (Chicago: Intellect, 2012), 210.
11
Ibid.
Gregg 12

Looking to ephemerality as a generative focus in the production of his performance
works, in September of 1963, Byars wrote the following letter to Miller from New York:

Dear Miss Miller My final unreasonable request my last exhibition in Japan I did
out in Temple grounds the Imperial Palace and by a dry River and with scolls [sic:
likely meant to be scrolls in a reference to the rolled paintings] quickly and simple
to elevate re roll and leave the same with fold up paintings
12

Inversely to the exhibition of his own body, blindfolded and seated still, in this case
Byars had an affinity for mobilizing the motionless. His interest in the presence of stagnant
objects would be a significant theme throughout his career. In 1958, Miller organized the first
known performance of the kind noted in the letter. The two had met that same year. Byars first
arrived at the Museum with photographs of his paintings, requesting to present them to a curator
of the institution. Miller was introduced to Byars and became intrigued by his unusual
personality. She agreed to be a contact for the artist in New York, an offer that resulted in a
decade-long relationship of regular correspondence, which she conserved as the subsequent
archive that exists today.
Remarkably, the 1958 exhibition was the only occasion that Miller would ever include a
work by Byars in an exhibition. It was also, notably, off-record. For a few hours in an emergency
stairwell at MoMA, Byars exhibited several folded-paper pieces, marking his New York debut.
13

Events of this kind would develop later into what Byars referred to as his “flash” showings. The

12
James Lee Byars, written letter to Dorothy C. Miller from New York, 1963, “Collection: Byars,” Series
Folder I.1, Archives, MoMA. The original text was written as a single string of words. Please note that imperfect
language, spelling and grammar were characteristic of Byars’s correspondence.
13
Roberta Smith, “James Lee Byars, 65, Creator Of Art The Lived in a Moment,” The New York Times,
May 30, 1997.
Gregg 13
term announced a soon-to-be exhibition of paintings, at times even a single painting, which was
also soon-to-end, though the exact “end” or closing of the showing was often not made clear.
In a letter sent about one week prior to the text listed above regarding the Imperial Palace
performance, Byars writes to Miller, “pardon the unreasonable asking but I wonder if I could get
permission to flash a painting for a few minutes in the museum Garden the streets and the
Segrams [sic] building.”
14
For a moment, it is curious to look at the locations Byars selected for
the “flash” showings: a garden, a dry river, a city street, the Seagram’s Building, and the
Imperial Palace. There are many things that could be said about these locations, but in the
interest of brevity only one aspect will be foregrounded: though the performances are at times
located within art institutions, they consistently evade the context of the gallery. It seems that
Byars the asking the question: How far can we push our conventions until they begin to tip? The
exhibition of a painting is now the exhibition of a fleeting exhibition of a painting. Here, the
painting has been given a deliberate yet momentary presence that radicalizes more normative
tendencies under the presentation of objects, ultimately bringing the inactive painting into view
as a representation. As in the gallery, they remain the central characters, but their status too will
fall into dormancy. Nothing would be safe from the incoming wave of performance; all forms of
presentation would soon be questioned.
There is of course no evidence that the flash paintings actually occurred. Byars himself
seems to inadvertently allude to, or at least permit, the possibility of their not having occurred in
one undated notification, a square of vellum with tiny black text, that states: “In quiet places out
in the city there will be flash showings of my paintings during the next few weeks may I invite

14
James Lee Byars, letter written to Dorothy C. Miller from New York, 1963, “Collection: Byars,” Series
Folder I.1, Archives, MoMA.
Gregg 14
you to watch for them.”
15
Which is to say that Byars’s proclamation that he would display of the
paintings outside of the context of a gallery is perhaps the performance. The “flash” idea is a
parody of the ephemeral that plays with the conditions and limits of performance, as well as the
exhibition of static objects. It commits itself to the conditions of live movement as fleeting,
largely ungraspable by human memory. The flashes formally mirror how we remember our past:
in spurts of images burned into our minds by the sheer grasp of the impressing moment.
This point resonates with another work of a slightly later period by Vito Acconci, Blinks
(1969). For it, the artist walked down a street in New York trying not to blink, though each time
he did he would take a photograph of the scene in front of him. The resulting documentation is a
series of images depicting the movement and duration of an action – it alludes to materializing
time and ephemeral gesture, as well as the process of viewing and its relationship to
photographic representation. Acconci’s documentation admits that the action did occur albeit as
constructed by the artist (versus Acconci employing someone to document the performance on
his behalf, which would indicate a present viewer aware of this everyday gesture of walking and
blinking as being a performance). Blinks, like the “flash” showings, is designed to materialize its
ephemeral condition. For Groys, deliberate documentary gestures such as these “refer to life
itself, that is, to a pure activity, to pure practice, to an artistic life, as it were, without wishing to
present it directly.”
16
The direction of Acconci’s documentation is constructed around the limits
of its existence; the documentation of the blink imitates the blink, the act that cannot be captured.

15
James Lee Byars, copy of exhibition invitation sent to Dorothy C. Miller, undated, “Collection: Byars,”
Series Folder I.1, Archives, MoMA. The original text was written as a single string of words in all capital letters.
16
Groys, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics,” 210.
Gregg 15
Philip Auslander accurately describes the central issue of Blinks as “the performativity of
documentation itself.”
17

The lack of conventional audience in these two works, Blinks and the “flash” showings
(if it could even be argued that there was an audience for either), also exaggerates the point of
the documentation as such. To create documentation is to presume a second audience, even if
that second audience is also the artist as performer or initial viewer. To create a deliberate type of
documentation is to have a hyper-awareness of one’s control over said second audience.
Auslander describes any performance as having two audiences, the “initial audience to which the
performer assumes responsibility as well as a second audience that experiences the performance
only through its documentation.”
18
For Acconci and Byars, the first audience is deliberately
eliminated with the works, which are produced in the sole interest of the second audience.
Auslander elaborates on this notion, concluding that:

It may well be that our sense of the presence, power, and authenticity of these
pieces derives not from treating the document as an indexical access point to a
past but from perceiving the document itself as a performance that directly
reflects an artist’s aesthetic project or sensibility and for which we are the present
audience.
19

These performances are made to be experienced as a document, a performative document
that appears in a variety of forms – a group of seemingly sequential photographs, a muddled oral

17
Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” in Perform, Repeat, Record:
Live Art in History, ed. Amelia Jones et al. (Chicago: Intellect, 2012), 53.
18
Ibid, 54.
19
Ibid, 57.
Gregg 16
history, or a dormant-yet-once-active scroll painting. And if they are continuously performing for
audiences in the present then the performances will consequently never conclude.
Byars adored “play” in the most serious and productive sense of the word, allowing it and
its neighbors—spontaneity, openness, and built-in variables regarding the objects and individuals
that would interact with them—to constitute much of his practice. Even when Byars appears to
be participating in the conventions of performance (e.g., documenting several with 35mm film)
he manages to complicate their historicization. To demonstrate the development of Byars’s
performance processes, as working consciously against and within the limits of performance by
playing out the range of possibilities within the framework of ephemerality, let us shift to some
performances that did, unquestionably, happen.
Performable Paper Objects
Beginning in 1962, perhaps to counter the issues of ephemerality that were literalized in
the “flash” paintings, Byars developed a series of performable paper objects that anticipated their
own re-enactment – a gesture that simultaneously anticipated an openness to the type of
performer that could execute the works (more or less, anybody). These visually simple objects
were comprised of either stacked or long reams of paper hinged or folded in a variety of Shinto-
influenced constructions. The objects (there are five in total) are made deliberately to perform –
or rather, they are made deliberately to be animated. Each, as in the rolled paintings, is designed
to collapse neatly back into itself. It should be mentioned that Byars did not aspire to present the
objects in this state and that performances with them would either commence or terminate while
they remained partially spread-out or unfolded. Which is to say, if the collapsible function was
not designed with performance in mind. These objects were also designed for the utility of being
easily packed, stored, and transported.
Gregg 17
The images from this series are of three works that were performed between 1963-1964:
Untitled Object (a 200 by 1-foot sheet of joined Japanese flax paper, with a single line of crayon
running the length of the sheet, folded like an accordion), A 1,000-Foot White Chinese Paper (an
800-foot by 4-inch sheet of paper, folded like an accordion), and The Performable Square (an 18
by 18-inch stacked cube of white Japanese handmade flax paper that, when unfolded, becomes a
large square). Taki Sachiko, Byars’s then-girlfriend, performed the first two works at Shokoku-ji
Monastery in Kyoto by unfolding, re-folding, and creating basic geometric shapes with the paper
objects. For the presentation of The Performable Square at the National Museum of Modern Art
in Kyoto the work was in fact not performed but displayed, in its collapsed cube state, atop a
pane of glass in an otherwise empty gallery. Notably, in its unfolded state, The Performable
Square was the largest performable paper object that Byars had made within the series. Upon
entering the gallery, viewers were offered white paper fans. This subtle gesture implicates the
viewer in a critique of viewer-audience relations via participation. To use the word performable
in the title emphasizes that stagnant objects are not necessarily to be activated but can be acted
upon by external forces, both assigned and oblique. As such, in this presentation, Byars has acted
upon a central but often marginalized stagnant object: the audience.
The Performable Square was not unfolded for fifteen years until its display at the
Berkeley Art Museum in 1978. This would also mark the first time that it was performed in a
conventional sense where a single performer would engage directly with the object. For an artist
who deeply enjoyed the potential theatrics of visual impact, abstaining from the display of a
work to its greatest degree of being “unfolded” is a curious decision. It is therefore possible that
the installation of The Performable Square in 1964 formally demonstrated the paradoxical issues
of performance re-enactment by choosing to await the complete un-folding of the object.
Gregg 18
Accordingly, when Byars gifted The Performable Square to MoMA in 1966, along with
two other works of Japanese handmade flax paper (one, Untitled, was not performable, the other,
The Mile-Long Paper Walk, was), he drafted two separate documents that outlined the conditions
for future presentations of the works. There is a curious shift between the documents. They were
written four months apart from each other, though both were received by Miller prior to the
acceptance of the works into the collection. It can be logically assumed then that the second
document was intended to be a revision.
In the first set of notes, received by Miller on New Years Day in 1966, Byars writes that
these notes are a proposal, “some useful suggestions for the ‘Pieces’.”
20
The most prominent of
Byars’s concerns in this letter is the peculiar introduction of technology into his work that
includes audio and video components in anticipation of audience engagement. Up to this point,
the installation of his works had not included anything of the sort. In the case of The Performable
Square, he suggests installing the work partially unfolded and lit with a central hanging bulb.
The audience and duration would be highly controlled. Only one person could enter the space at
any time and the show would last twenty-four consecutive hours. Notably, the roles of
“performer” and “audience” here are collapsed into the single viewer who enters the space.
For Untitled, although not performable, a similar scheme of technology and audience is
proposed for the animation of the work. Byars suggests that this piece be seen “in a setting where
the people make the action suggested by the show.”
21
Again, this is formalized with a centered
light bulb and a highly controlled audience. But now Byars proposes that the actions of the
audience are recorded throughout the day (on video and audio tapes). Then on the following day
the same audience members are invited to return to the installation, only to find that the paper

20
Dorothy C. Miller, transcribed acquisition notes by James Lee Byars, 1966, “Collection: Byars,” Series
Folder I.6, Archives, MoMA.
21
Ibid.
Gregg 19
object has been removed and replaced by an immersive projection of the recorded film on all
four walls of the space along with the sound recordings from the previous day.
Finally, the letter culminates in the description of The Mile-Long Paper Walk. Byars asks
that the work be installed for an entire year in an all-white room, changing daily by the efforts of
the museum staff and others, including “invited mathematicians and physicists.”
22
This offers a
prime example for what Umberto Eco would later, famously, describe as an open work. Defined
at once as “the poetic theory or practice of the ‘work in movement’,”
23
Eco would explain the
limits of the method:

[It] allies itself openly and self-consciously to current trends in scientific method
and puts into action and tangible form the very trend which aesthetics has already
acknowledged as the general background to performance. These poetic systems
recognize “openness” as the fundamental possibility of the contemporary artist or
consumer.
24

This text resonated with many artists of the 1960s pursing works that had a more
meaningful or thoughtful engagement with two uncontrollable though prominent variables:
audience and time. And while Byars addresses these themes in each of his performance paper
objects, his interest in collapsing widespread audience engagement over an extended period of
time is perhaps best demonstrated in his detailed notes for The Mile-Long Paper Walk.
The point of scientific method in the Eco text is useful, as Byars himself notes an interest
in the use of performers from the fields of mathematics and physics research. Byars’s point to

22
Ibid.
23
Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 2006), 39.
24
Ibid.
Gregg 20
include persons in the field of mathematics and science strongly echoes what Ken Friedman
would describe as an interest of Fluxus, as the group found that “in mathematics and science, an
elegant idea is that idea which expresses the fullest possible series of meanings in the most
concentrated possible statement.”
25
Friedman goes on to echo further points that Byars makes in
his notes on this work, describing how Fluxus works “embody a different sense of duration [...]
lasting days or weeks[;]… performances [can even] take place in segments over decades,” as
time is “a central issue in Fluxus and in the work that artists in the Fluxus circle create.”
26
These
points certainly draw Byars’s works closer to American and European-based performance.
Additionally, the point of daily audience engagement is strikingly similar to a later
performance by Yvonne Rainer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, aptly titled
(from a Robert Morris process piece of the same name and year) Continuous Project—Altered
Daily (1969), asserting the same type of constant engagement over an extended period of time
that Byars was interested in provoking within the museum. Using a range of props to carry the
action out with variety, the work consisted of “interchangeable and rearrangeable solos and
group dances—but the order of its elements was left up to the participants and improvised during
the performances.”
27
The relationship between Byars and Rainer will be re-visited in depth at a
later point. Here, “open” is clearly a key element in both of these works that engages the
spectator by making them a participant. In this section Byars also introduces the term “put out”–
a concept that would further develop in his second letter to Miller.
Four months later, as noted, Byars sent to Miller a revised letter regarding the exact same
three pieces. Byars’s original notes regarding lighting, technology and audience were excluded in

25
Ken Friedman, “Fluxus and Company,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley,
1998), 249.
26
Ibid., 250.
27
Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2011), 203.
Gregg 21
his second letter. Here, all notes or mentions of lighting, technology, audience and duration were
edited out with a new focus in place: the “put out.” This term is used in the description of all
three works and is noticeably more developed than in his previous letter, where the phrase is
written in parenthesis prior to the phrase “put up,” written also in parenthesis. Generally, the
introduction of “put out” marks a specific artistic development for Byars and the works in the
second proposal are conceptually tethered together by the phrase.
Regarding The Performable Square, he writes, “any portion of plane may be reduced by
simply closing it up. The entire object is performable or may be used as a put out.”
28
Similarly, of
The Mile-Long Paper Walk, he specifies that it can be, “put out as a halo (100 feet), as a star, as
any perimeter – or maybe performed however – (this piece also may be hung by means of the
hollow eye rivets).”
29
This note demonstrates the malleability of the work. Outside of “put out”
setting a clear precedent for 1964 presentation of The Performable Square, the phrase itself sets a
relationship between sculpture and performance worthy of analysis.
In Miller’s initial notes related to the acquisition, she queries the source of this phrase by
referring to it as something potentially made-up by Byars.
30
It is unclear where Byars adopted the
phrase from (if at all) but more importantly Miller’s questioning of it indicates that it was not a
phrase of common use in the field. Therefore the inclusion of this uncommon phrase, at base
value, suggests that at the time there a phrase or word for the specific type of presentation that
Byars was attempting to describe in relation to the works did not exist. The fact of this document
being private and internal also suggests that Byars was not making a larger public statement
about the term “put out” but was merely using it as a tool to relay information about the work.

28
James Lee Byars, letter written to Dorothy C. Miller, 1966, “Collection: Byars,” Series Folder I.5,
Archives, MoMA.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid.
Gregg 22
Byars therefore appears to have either created or used the phrase “put out” to avoid using the
word that describes a three-dimensional object placed in a gallery: sculpture. The works are not
malleable in the sense of their being both of performance and of sculpture. The “put out” is an
object created to be exclusively in the service of performance. Even the phrase suggests action; it
alludes to the often-unobserved movement and activation of the performance object as it is being
taken out of storage and into a space of viewing. The fact of it being simply out of storage is, in a
sense, suggested to be the performance.
It is critical at this point to digress slightly and draw a connection to the artistic practice
of Lygia Clark that, similarly to Byars, arrived at a vital shift in 1963. Though Clark notoriously
refuted aligning her work with of this period to the designation of performance art, her interest in
viewer participation in relation to the endless possibilities of an artwork within that interaction
resonates with Byars.
31
The aforementioned shift occurred upon developing her now infamous
work Caminhando. As described by Cornelia H. Butler,

[In 1963,] Clark, previously an abstract painter, made Caminhando (Walking),
one of the most radical proposals in twentieth-century art. The viewer—or more
accurately the participant—was invited to make a Möbius strip out of paper, then
to cut it along its length until the paper became too narrow to cut further. Simple
in both form and execution, Caminhando was and is an invitation to participate, a
provocation to emancipation and empowerment through a simple activity.
32

31
André Lepecki, “Affective Geometry, Immanent Acts: Lygia Clark and Performance,” in Lygia Clark:
The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988, ed. Cornelia H. Butler et al. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 279.
32
Cornelia H. Butler, “Lygia Clark: A Space Open to Time,” in Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art,
1948-1988, ed. Cornelia H. Butler et al. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 14.
Gregg 23
The similarities between Caminhando and the performable paper objects are numerous.
The Möbius strip is not only an object made out of paper, but also an object that provides
seemingly endless activation between participant and object—by its very nature every
lengthwise cut to the strip affords the opportunity engage with the object, now thinner, again. As
introduced at the start of the text, works such as Caminhando have perhaps never happened
because they propose that their duration is ongoing; the act of cutting the Möbius strip is always
available for further engagement, anywhere, at any time, forever. The stagnant paper object is a
perpetual invitation for action. Butler expands on this notion, stating that the participatory
engagement of the viewer (participant) insisted upon by Clark’s objects indicate, “the desire for a
full transfer from object to action.”
33
André Lepecki has organized the properties of her
performance-based works into four categories that also aptly echo Byars’s interests in
performance:

Clark’s work and writings advance a critique of performative reason on at least
four levels: a critique of time (linked to Clark’s notion of the ‘time-act’); a
critique of objecthood (linked to her notion of the relational object); a critique of
presence (linked to her notion of anonymity); a critique of participation (linked to
her notion of immanence).
34

It is perhaps of little coincidence that Clark and Byars, given their interest in activating
stagnant art objects through their relationship with time, objecthood, presence, and audience,
would arrive at performance by way of the ultimate category of art that embodies self-referential
inertia: abstract painting. The properties of Caminhando illuminate those in the performable

33
Ibid., 15.
34
Lepecki, “Affective Geometry, Immanent Acts,” 285.
Gregg 24
paper works. The fact of Clark adamantly rejecting the title of performance also inversely
reverberates with Byars rejecting the “put out” as a sculpture. Artist’s notes and semantics
withstanding, there is effectively no difference between the movements of taking a “put out”
from storage and moving it to a gallery than the similar movements relating to a sculpture. The
same could be said of any painting, drawing, photograph, film, video, or, most notably, article of
ephemera. The period in contemporary art in which Byars was working was brimming with
gestures based on concept and the case of the “put out” exemplifies his practice. Byars
championed absurdity by using it as a tool for reflective critique.
The phrase “put out” anticipates future enactment (especially given the fact that these
performance works were in the collection of a museum and therefore resigned to being
performed again for eternity, untied to a single moment of presence) and the focus on residual
objects of performance (ephemera: photographs, scores, films, text, and so on). Ephemera at
large, for any artist, has taken on the role of enabling an extension of live performance into the
present, proving its previous existence, surmising access to the original and asserting that it
continues to exist today, albeit in a compromised and detached form, materially. Yet in Byars’s
terms for the objects—as put outs—he essentially suggests that they are not re-enacted but
perpetually original. The objects are at once the archive, stand-in, and actual stakes of the
performance. For Byars, the object was always at risk of becoming just material, and thus he
animated it.
Absurdly enough, the only documentation that we have of Byars’s early performances is
of those that have no “original.” What does a photograph represent to Byars’s objects of
performance? Their perpetual originality alleviates the nagging impulse to document the
ephemeral nature of any action. And if a performable paper work were to be documented (again),
Gregg 25
the conditions that allow for its perpetual originality would only reinforce the inability of any
documentation to convey the pre-determined, eternally pending presence of the actual object of
performance. Its life perhaps never ends.
In 2014, MoMA hosted a series of performance works by Byars in conjunction with a
comprehensive survey exhibition of his work at MoMA PS1, James Lee Byars: 1/2 an
Autobiography, the first large-scale museum exhibition of its kind in North America since his
death in 1997.
35
One performable paper object, The Mile-Long Paper Walk, was performed
twice. A copy of the original paper object was made for both performances so as to archivally
preserve the original. (This is not to say that the copy made it any less the performance, as Byars
did not appear to maintain a precious or spiritual relationship to the objects or believe that their
value was heightened by the fact of their originality.) Of the four performable paper objects that
MoMA has in their collection only The Mile-Long Paper Walk was re-created and presented for
the series.
Before discussing the performances in detail it must be stated that the installation at PS1
devoted three gallery spaces to the years of Byars’s career that are considered in this text. Of
those galleries, the four performable paper objects from the collection were on view in addition
to one scroll-like painting and a performable (unpainted but with a large circular hole cut-out of
the mid-section) paper scroll in the subsequent room. The issue, however, was not the lack of
works in the installation, as this can often be an affect of issues related to loan agreements and
financial constraints, but the fact that they the objects were installed as ephemera. The majority
of the performable works in the exhibition shared a single plinth, each covered in individual
Plexiglas boxes, with only one of those works, Untitled Object, displayed partially unfolded. The

35
A smaller version of the exhibition was first installed at Museo Jumex in Mexico City before traveling to
MoMA PS1. There was only one enactment of a performance at Museo Jumex, which falls outside of the relevant
date range of the present text.
Gregg 26
remaining works were presented in their collapsed states. To reiterate, Byars almost never
exhibited the works this way during performance. In the one case that he did, in his one and only
documented “put out,” the 1964 installation of The Performable Square, the collapsed state was
enhanced. For this installation, Byars included the distribution of white paper fans, placed the
collapsed, cube-shaped paper object atop a large plane of glass, installing it alone in the room,
surrounding it with both ample gallery and viewing space.
The point of this distinction is to say that the display did not lead the viewer to see these
as objects that were still capable of being performed.
36
The performable paper scroll in the
subsequent room occupied its own plinth but shared the room with works unrelated to
performance. If dates of production and formal similarities are placed aside, this object is
otherwise conceptually and functionally unrelated to the adjacent works of the same space –
scroll-like paintings, simple ink on paper paintings, and an unassuming sculpture of a painted
stone.
To return to the performances, it should be stated that their having been presented in two
separate events was perhaps the most critical and apposite move on the part of the curators. It
well illustrates Byars’s noted decision for the works to be malleable, adapting to the performer,
and to the setting and time in which he or she finds him or herself. Accordingly, the two
performances also took place in relation to separate sites, performers, and uses of the object. The
first of the two performances was by Katie Dorn, a member of the Lucinda Childs Dance
Company. Correspondingly, the performance was, as listed in the MoMA announcement,
“choreographically constructed” by Childs. This lineage is of great importance to the history of
Byars in New York.

36
The installation at PS1 did include transferred film documentation the 1965 performance of The Mile-
Long Paper Walk located adjacent to original object. The video was however one amidst a series of videos that were
compiled onto the same projection, which disallowed the footage to be viewed for the majority of the loop.
Gregg 27
In 1965, Childs had been the premiere (and, up until recently, only) performer of The
Mile-Long Paper Walk, a performance that took place in the Hall of Sculpture at the Carnegie
Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. At the time, Childs, previously a student of Merce Cunningham,
was a member of the illustrious Judson Dance Group in New York. It is not clear how or when
Byars and Childs first met, but there is documentation of Yvonne Rainer, a core member of
Judson, in attendance at Byars’s one-day exhibition at Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery of New
York in 1963 – the same year that Childs joined the Judson Dance Group.
37
(This would also be
the first time that Byars was involved with a specific community of artists.) The residual image
of Childs, cloaked in white feathers, at the Carnegie Museum has arguably come to define
Byars’s performance work in a single, iconic photograph. As such, it is crucial that its
foundations and development are closely observed.
The formal influence of Japan (most notably in his consistent use of the Kozo paper in all
drawings, paintings and performable paper works of this period) upon Byars in this time period
is undeniable. Available critical writing on Byars tends to dwell on this point. In nearly every
survey text on Byars’s work (there are, admittedly, not so many), the fact of his living in Japan
as being extremely influential is now boilerplate.
38
Though this connection is historically correct,
it is unproductive to lend the entirety of Byars’s artistic growth of this period solely to his being
in and out of Japan. This is not to dismiss the importance of his stay there – his studying the
characteristics of the Mingei with Japanese philosopher Yanagi Sōetsu in Tokyo (1958), living in
the home of the director of the Kurashiki Museum of Folkcraft for two years (ca. 1959-1960),
studying with the Buddhist monk Masao Kodani (1960), and subsequently learning about Zen

37
Yvonne Rainer, photograph, 1963, “Yvonne Rainer Papers: Series VII. Photography, 1933-2004,” Box
90, Archives, Getty Research Institute.
38
See: Ottmann, “Epiphanies of Beauty and Knowledge,” 15-40.; McEvilley, James Lee Byars; and Gay
Morris, “Props on a Stage,” Art in America 78 (No. 10, 1990).
Gregg 28
Buddhist notions of impermanence, along with viewing Shinto rituals and Noh theater (as was
previously mentioned), are all confirmed as having happened.
39
But after these initial leaps into
Japanese culture Byars reverted away from immersion. And, notably, even amidst all of his
learning, in the early 1960s he was still unable to speak a word of Japanese.
40
Perhaps the most
significant limit of such historical methods is that it avoids addressing the fact that Byars was
working consistently and largely in Kyoto, a city lacking direct contact with the major avant-
garde artistic movements of postwar Japan and where none of the momentous contemporary
works of art were extant (generally speaking, those of the radical movement Gutai developed in
Osaka and those of Mono-ha in Tokyo). Though Byars appears to be precisely more interested in
engaging, in his experience, seemingly ahistorical and atemporal aspects of Japanese culture, the
fact of his geographic exclusion from the majors sites of avant-garde performance production in
Japan, while being consistently nearby, places him at a contextual and resultant historical
disadvantage. Inversely, this fact maintains his status as being, even after a near decade of
regular travel, a working-class American in Japan.
The most direct criticism on this topic was introduced by artist and critic Dave Hickey in
a Flash Art article from 1994, three years before Byars passed away. Hickey argues for Byars to
be considered in all aspects of his production as an American artist, or more specifically, a
Detroit-born, Midwest-raised, American artist heavily imbued with “the depths of the Great
Depression, […] race riots, labor violence, and squalor.”
41
This already presents a very different
narrative of escape fueled by social and cultural turmoil that requires the transposition of place
in order for Byars to reflect upon his origin.

39
Yoann Gourmel and Elodie Royer, “Once Upon a Time: Byars in Japan,” in I Cancel All My Works at
Death, ed. Triple Candie et al. (Detroit: Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 2014), 41-42.
40
Ibid, 42.
41
Dave Hickey, “James Lee Byars: Just Make Me Up,” Flash Art International 177, (Summer 1994), 87.
Gregg 29
Hickey considers Byars an underrepresented artist in the history of both performance art
and art at large. By inserting this concept at the forefront, Byars can be removed from the
romantic visions of an artist imbued with the poetics of Japanese culture (visions themselves
connected to a Western attitude that exoticizes Japan at large).
Hickey continues in his critique, going on to address the place of Orientalism in Byars’s
iconography during this period, stating that it “never fails to acknowledge its concomitant
sources in American pastiche,” and that the “gaudy ambience of Chinese restaurants in snowy
Michigan is never not there in Byars’s evocation.”
42
In this assessment of the work, Byars is in
fact using the icons of Orientalism to merely signify a place as it stands in his eyes—those of a
working-class American outsider. While this is not to say that borrowing or appropriating from
Eastern spiritualism is a profoundly American act, this does highlight Byars’s formal distance
from an Eastern culture that he so proactively involved himself with. The article continues on,
making a case for Byars as equally exploring and taking from American culture during this time,
noting an extensive American bus tour that he took in both 1963 and 1964 that shuttled him from
Los Angeles to New York and later through the deep South – a trip that likely solidified and
reminded Byars of what Hickey described as the “profound basis either in the Midwest of his
youth or in the latent postmodernity of dissenting American culture of the 1950s” that is so
prevalent in all of his works.
43

Esther Pasztory writes, in Identity and Difference: The Use and Meanings of Ethnic
Styles, that “the basic function of an ethnic style is to create a coherent visual form that functions
as a badge of identity within the group; by projecting the image of a self, ethnic style

42
Ibid.
43
Ibid.
Gregg 30
immediately implies the existence of others who do not belong.”
44
From this quote, it should be
considered that Byars was using the available “badge of identity” (here, icons related to Japan) as
a tool to project his outsider status as a working-class American. It is perhaps easiest to assume,
as with numerous young Americans who teach English in foreign countries after college, that
Byars went to Japan because he quite simply wanted to experience something wholly different
from the US, likely without the concentrated intention of absorbing its culture in a particularly
serious way. In 1960, Byars wrote a reflection of his first year in Japan to Miller, describing it as
being “white free”
45
– a short phrase that alludes to the artist pursuing an alternative to the white,
working-class culture of his youth. He continues on in his description, positing his experience as
being a “pure year” that allowed for experimentation, where, at last (and certainly with a dose of
romance), “then I became me.”
46
The last comment suggests that this period provided an escape
for Byars in an environment that he enjoyed as an opposite to the grip of 1960s Detroit.
Byars’s curiosity for foreign places also only began with Japan. A persistent traveler, he
pursued journeys to distant lands his entire life, perhaps best illustrated by the chosen location of
his deathbed: in a room at the historic Mena House Hotel of Cairo that overlooked the pyramids.
He savored all that was exotic in relation to his roots; Byars enjoyed standing out, rarely making
the choice to blend in or abstain from attention unless such a choice would further the myths that
circulated around his persona. With this in mind, it is also notable to confirm that his departure
from Japan was contentious. A close supporter and collector of his work in Japan, whom he
lovingly nicknamed Mrs. S during his travels, best describes the reasoning as unresolved – either
a result of an issue with customs, medical needs, or depression – and after his last trip in 1967 he

44
Esther Pasztory. “Identity and Difference: The Uses and Meanings of Ethnic Style,” in Thinking with
Things: Toward a New Vision of Art (Austin: University of Texas, 2005), 159.
45
James Lee Byars, written letter to Dorothy C. Miller, 1960, “Collection: Byars,” Series Folder I.2,
Archives, MoMA.
46
Ibid.
Gregg 31
cut off all communication with his contacts in Japan. Mrs. S has noted that, “[b]ack in the United
States, Byars’s desire for recognition and his growing renown apparently lead him to suddenly
change his attitude and abandon his longtime Japanese relations without any explanation.”
47

While Byars’s rejection of Japan does not deter from the residue of its influence upon his work,
by the early to mid-1960s he was also intersecting and overlapping with two major artistic
movements developing in America which would both play a prominent role in his performance
practice, the Judson Dance Theater and Fluxus.
As mentioned previously, Yvonne Rainer attended a one-day exhibition by Byars in
1963, where a series of ink-on-paper scroll paintings were presented, individually and by hand,
on a surface made up of one hundred white boxes that filled the length of Green Gallery. The
details about the show are limited but Byars himself noted that the audience was at one point
invited to view a “1/4 inch drawing […] with a 10X magnifying glass.”
48
These minimal facts
confirm a certain level of performance (the works were either laid out or unrolled by a man and
woman, evoking a presentation at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art from one year earlier that
was described as being a performance
49
) and audience participation in the exhibition. As for the
photographs of the event, Peter Moore, a key photographer to many New York-based
performance artists at the time who also documented over half of Rainer’s lifetime of work, is
the name stamped along the backside of the sole contact sheet that remains.
50
One written
account by a member of the audience still exists today. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, by Rainer.

47
Gourmel and Royer, “Once Upon a Time,” 44.
48
James Lee Byars, 100,000 Minutes, or the Big Sample of Byars, or 1/2 and Autobiography, or the First
Paper of Philosophy (Antwerp: Galerie Anny De Decker, 1969), unpaginated.
49
Magalí Arriola and Peter Eleey, eds., James Lee Byars: 1/2 an Autobiography, Sourcebook (Cologne:
Buchhandlung Walter König, 2014), 20-22, 26-29.
50
Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched, 16.
Gregg 32
Dated as written in either 1963 or 1964, the text titled Some Thoughts on Improvisation
(for the painter James Byars) is at once an account of the Green Gallery presentation and an
investigation of Rainer’s thoughts on improvisation as spawned by her experience as a
contemporary dancer and an audience member in the event. She recalls first approaching it with
hesitation (“I keep on sizing up the situation, see”
51
), describing it somewhat briefly and then
coming to a consensus on her feeling of the work through the act of describing of her own
presence in the space:

The scrolls are made of white white [sic] paper mostly. The boxes are a snowy
field. The walls rise white and flat. His bird’s-egg head gleams whitely [male
performer]. Her cameo face is placid [female performer]. I share a common
impulse with many people in the room: We want to defile, to desecrate, to shit on
this whiteness, to crush this fragility, to smash this silence, to silence this
shrieking purity. Enough poetry. Anyway, the thing is that I DON’T HAVE TO
DO IT. Any of it: all that smash and smudge. I choose not to do it. I choose to
play the game his way and in so choosing I am freed from wanting to destroy his
image. I become powerful and happy. I become knowledgeable: I know what is
appropriate to do. I find his image beautiful.
52

In this section, Rainer demonstrates a coming-around to Byars’s performance, concluding
after her three-page reflection that the tension felt in any improvisation is from it being
simultaneously “spare, unadorned, highly dramatic, [and] loaded with expectancy.”
53
In many
ways, these four articles jointly describe conditions associated with Byars’s performance works.

51
Arriola and Eleey, James Lee Byars, 23.
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid, 25.
Gregg 33
The text currently resides in Rainer’s personal archive, leading to the conclusion that the word
“for” in the title refers to being “for” Byars in a metaphorical sense—which is to say, the text
was truly for Rainer’s personal reflection on a work that she witnessed and its residual effects on
her conception of improvisation. Regardless of the addressee of the letter, Rainer and Byars were
likely to find a connection in the overlapping structural decisions of their performance works as
interested in what art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty has described as performances prevalent in
the Judson Dance Group, Happenings and Fluxus throughout the United States in the early 1960s
which “stress haptic experience, participatory action, and unmediated contact produced through
techniques of indeterminacy, spontaneity, ephemerality, and audience involvement.”
54
The
relationship marks a definite connection to the Judson Dance Group that would later grow into a
crucial image that defines Byars’s performance work, Childs performing The Mile-Long Paper
Walk at the Carnegie Museum.
Returning to this “original” performance in 1965, the film documentation and resulting
images are now iconic within Byars’s oeuvre: Childs unfolds the work silently, patiently and
carefully, almost motionless, while wearing a full-length ostrich feather gown with a matching
turban-like headpiece. The fact of the movement being markedly slow is pertinent. Carrie
Lambert-Beatty has accounted for the common use of slow-motion movement in performances
by Judson Dance Theater, stating that it “suggests how the ephemerality of performance was
marked—and marked in some way as a problem—by the dancemakers associated with Judson.”
55

Lambert-Beatty goes on to state that, while this gesture does not escape ephemerality, it resists it
by making movement, “tediously visible, […] altogether more solid and enduring than

54
Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched, 24.
55
Ibid, 61.
Gregg 34
performance theory tends to allow.”
56
Byars himself would later describe his interest in slow-
motion movement for performances as “an exercise in carefulness.”
57
In relation to Byars’s
previous work that played with unannounced spontaneity and ephemeral “flashes” of work, this
gesture via Childs deliberately conveys the opposite pole of experience: rather than focusing on
future audiences who will activate the works, in this case the performance and performer are
apparently trying to be seen by what Auslander previously defined as the “initial audience”
(versus the second audience that views only the documentation of a work).
There was also, notably, a second performer in the series at the Carnegie Museum, which
took place in the Hall of Sculpture as well, although a few months earlier, in 1964. A nun, Sister
M. Germaine, performed in the same space as Childs, enacting a different performable paper
work, A 1,000-Foot White Chinese Paper.
58
While the connection between Byars and Sister M.
Germaine is not clear, the curatorial choice reflects the interests of other American performances
of the 1960s. The composer Robert Dunn, also the accompanist to Merce Cunningham, had led a
choreography workshop in Cunningham’s studio in 1960 (Rainer being one of many significant
participants).
59
Dunn, by way of John Cage, pushed the dancers towards inclusivity, which
“opened movement performance to artists who were not trained in dance (musician Phillip
Corner and visual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, Carolee Schneemann, and Alex
Hay were all relatively regular Judson presenters) and allowed professional dancers to question
the traditional limits of their art.”
60
By the time Rainer and Childs would have met Byars, the

56
Ibid, 61-62.
57
Byars, 100,000 Minutes, unpaginated.
58
Sister M. Germaine, press photograph caption, dated 13 January 1965, “Collection: Byars,” Series Folder
I.5, Archives, MoMA.
59
Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched, 42.
60
Ibid, 42-43.
Gregg 35
instinct to reconsider the restrictions of carrying out a performance with solely a professional
dancer would have been customary.
After the performance at Carnegie, The Mile-Long Paper Walk was not performed again
in Byars’s lifetime. Its performance at MoMA was the second time the piece was ever shown in
an “open” (non-collapsed) state. For it, the performer Katie Dorn had the object laid out in the
shape of a large spiral; she slowly walked the lines of the spiral, unfolded the final center three
sections, and then walked backwards out of the spiral again to conclude the performance. Unlike
in the earlier iteration with Childs, here the performer wore a simple outfit of plain white pants
and a white cotton shirt. It was undeniably different from Childs’ earlier version, but also
undeniably tied to the object’s history as tied to a dancer of Judson Dance Theater. It cannot be
forgotten that Byars’s notes on the work asserted it as incredibly flexible – it could be laid out in
many designs, even hung in the air by its rivets.
61
The point of this all is to say that while the
performance at MoMA was different from its previous enactment at Carnegie, the gesture on the
part of the curators to create a historical tie to the past performance of the piece actually
disregards Byars’s interest in allowing any person, not solely a dancer, to perform his works.
Indeed, the works are designed for re-enactment, but this is not to say that they were designed to
be re-iterated; their strength is that they are designed for perpetual originality, untied to the past
in the interest of proving this fact throughout the future.
The choice of Dorn comes out of a historical interest that today has found satisfaction
through the common gesture of institutional re-enactments. It proposes contact with the
“original” performance, which at once suggests the existence of an original while also allowing
viewers a chance to experience an artifact via the time machine of formal likeness. But the

61
Dorothy C. Miller, transcribed acquisition notes by James Lee Byars, 1966, “Collection: Byars,” Series
Folder I.5, Archives, MoMA.
Gregg 36
obsession in this case was also taken to a further extreme: at MoMA the piece was performed in
the same way at three different times. This repetition resulted from the Museum’s desire to
accommodate viewers, but how does this repetition function in the case of a viewer who stays at
the museum long enough (the time between each presentation was three hours) to see the
performance two or three times? The basic issue of this possibility is simply that the work was
not meant to be experienced in such a capacity and therefore betrays its foundational structure—
one that relies on viewing a performance that is at once careful and delicate while also morphing
and adapting to external conditions.
An additional problem is posed by the fact that the history of the enactments of The Mile-
Long Paper Walk is now most accurately listed as: (1) Carnegie Museum of Art, 1965; (2)
MoMA, 2014; (3) MoMA, 2014; and (4) MoMA, 2014. This strategy of repetition single-
handedly places MoMA as the site of institutional dominance for the performance while also
contaminating its built-in aspirations through the contribution of three identical performances to
the history of a work defined by perpetual mutability. Dorn’s chosen gesture was one marked by
its simplicity and while the piece could have varied to a greater, more deliberate degree between
performances, the institution chose rather to emphasize similarity.
These performances, it should not be forgotten, are always based around Byars’s objects.
It is the object that preserves the title and sets the parameters of the work; the object is the sole
consistent condition of the work. This is of course represented most clearly in the fact of status as
a “put out” in that it can relay performability on its own terms. And while the performance
history of these objects is admittedly thin, there is still much to be taken from Byars’s handling
of them. We are aware, for instance, that after displaying The Performable Square as a “put out”
in 1964, Byars chose to unfold it in its entirety for the second presentation at Berkeley in 1978.
Gregg 37
The transformed presentation of the object is notable and this variation could certainly have been
implemented in the MoMA series. There is also a history of performers of these works available
to us, one that is filled with many (mostly) non-dancers such as Sachiko and Sister M.
Germaine.
62
This is perhaps the main reason why the choice for the second performer of The
Mile-Long Paper Walk at MoMA, artist and performer Jimmy Robert, was so unfortunate.
One month after Dorn performed, a closing performance event for the exhibition at PS1
was held throughout MoMA, featuring the re-enactment of four performances from the mid-to-
late 1960s. Robert choreographed his own performance and made a number of astute choices in
response to the capabilities of the object at hand. (Outside of it being the same paper object, the
main formal similarity between the two works was that Robert, like Dorn, performed the same
choreography three times.) From the contemporary costume (a sweatshirt that unzipped into a
vest with wing-like drapes) to the high-traffic location (the central atrium – a site viewable by
any guest of the museum as it is located prior to the ticket collecting entrance) to a style of
movement unfamiliar to the object (a mix of slow motion crawling and bodily mirroring the lines
of the paper object), Robert’s performance was fittingly unaligned with the history of The Mile-
Long Paper Walk.
The central concern with Robert as a performer is that (A) he is aligned with the history
of dance and (B) that his specific history of dance has been aligned with the Judson Dance Group
and Yvonne Rainer.
63
The alignment to the first enactment of the work is certainly not as direct
as with Dorn, but being that the work was re-enacted by two dancers with historical links to the
“original” performance was a weak curatorial decision. It must be made clear that the vast

62
Gourmel and Royer, “Once Upon a Time,” 43.
63
See: Naomi Beckwith, ed., Jimmy Robert: Vis-à-vis (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,
2012); and Kirsty Bell, “Jimmy Robert: Touch and appropriation; film dance and gesture,” Frieze, no. 115 (May
2008): 145.
Gregg 38
majority of Byars’s performances did not include dancers. The need to employ a dancer in this
case was unwarranted and an ahistorical distraction.
This argument may seem overly trivial, yet it is important to remember that Byars’s
works are not often exhibited and therefore have a restricted history to begin with (an obvious
fact with The Performable Square and The Mile-Long Paper Walk). To compromise the
exhibition with one or two ill-choreographed performances is to complicate our relationship to
both the past and future of the work. Byars’s objects are fragile, demanding the care of future
possessors to continue the life of the works as outlined in his acquisition notes. As an example, it
is compelling to imagine what would have happened if, instead of hiring Dorn for the first
performance, MoMA had chosen to hang the paper object “by means of its hollow rivets” in the
Museum’s garden, a site towards which Byars had previously expressed an affinity. The
performances by Dorn and Robert also featured a live-stream video accessible through the
Museum’s website.
64
Yet if the static “put out” in the MoMA garden also had a live-stream this
would greatly shift the understanding of the entire object and Byars’s oeuvre as a whole.
To reinforce the importance of the nuances in Byars’s works it is valuable to look again
at his “flash” pieces. These works set the foundation for what would become a life-long practice
of examining the notion of originality. In the “flash” works, labor consists of a simple action.
They are easy to execute and can therefore be performed by anyone. While there is no record of
Byars having others perform the “flash” works on his behalf this is likely due to the fact of him
being a young artist at the time with a lack of assets rather than to his lack of interest in having
others perform them. The point is that they did not require a particular set of skills such as those
of dance or another form of skilled bodily control (from this series comes the performable paper

64
While this is typically looked down upon for performance, I will deduce that Byars would have been
open to a live-stream video of his work in considering his later work The World Question Center (1969), a one-hour
television program that utilized identical technology to obtain synchronized international viewing.
Gregg 39
works) where again Byars elicits simple actions to the benefit of future inclusive engagements by
a variety of performers. This is perhaps best demonstrated in his use of Sister M. Germaine at the
Carnegie Museum.
The “flash” works and performable paper works are also distanced from the idea of
retrieving an “original” performance. This may also be interpreted as Byars’s realization of the
impossibility of retrieving any experience of originality. Generally with Byars’s work, the
conditions of the actions lack a precious relationship to the objects involved in the performance,
just as the objects themselves relish a parallel mode of indifference. Why bother with attempting
to re-create originality when it is neither interesting nor of interest? One dancer was unnecessary
and two dancers was a misfire.
To close this section, the documentation of the MoMA performances will be discussed. It
is admittedly an imperfect topic to place pressure upon but it must be addressed. As is standard
practice in present-day institutions, each of the six performances of The Mile-Long Paper Walk
were professionally documented in video and photographs. In addition, as stated previously, each
was also fed via live-steam video to the MoMA website. While it is interesting to consider the
possibility of the live-stream being the only documentation of the performance – re-enforcing the
momentary action to a larger audience – the live-stream, as an experience accessibly occurring in
time with its chosen live act, is instead presented to the audience as an experience of the
performance, not as documentation. The fact of experiencing action through live-stream video
has become a precarious situation to limit documentation in our current age. Given the
unavoidable fact of the accessibility of cameras built into cell phones we now enter a time when
attempting to prevent documentation of an event comes across as desperately controlling, an out-
Gregg 40
of-touch romanticization of the ephemeral. In this case, the documentation was responsibly
inconspicuous and served the basic needs of the Museum’s archives.
One final aside: The Mile-Long Paper Walk is a work that is not only deeply indebted to
MoMA as an institution but to the curatorial responsibility and efforts of Miller, who, as stated
before, did not exhibit Byars’s works during her lifetime but nonetheless maintained a
comprehensive archive of the artist. The PS1 exhibition is in many ways a reflection of this work
and should honor this history with great attention to the relationship that enabled it. Byars did not
conserve a studio or archive at any point in his life, an act most likely a result of his nomadic
lifestyle and which made him dependent upon the energies of curators, institutions and collectors
to propel his work into art history. Miller’s archive at MoMA is the most detailed and extensive
archive of Byars’s early career that exists today. The archive provides us with a detailed account
of the artist’s early experiences in New York, decade-long work made in Japan, and development
as a conceptual artist in maturation. And certainly the present text could not ensue at any
significant depth without the critical fact of Miller’s self-directed labor.
While the importance of these correspondence documents is evident, it should equally not
be forgotten that Byars anticipated the forms by which he would be remembered, understood,
and historicized. A prime example of this is his “air pieces” that were first cited, just one month
after the aforementioned paper works were anonymously accepted into MoMA’s permanent
collection.
65
Perhaps it was a response to the concreteness of this acquisition – it was, outside of
his works being purchased by individual collectors, the artist’s first interaction with permanence.

65
James Lee Byars, written letter to Dorothy C. Miller, 1966, “Collection: Byars,” Series Folder I.51,
Archives, MoMA.
Gregg 41
For the artist who wished “whatever the air wishes,”
66
these works provided a much-needed
answer to the tightrope walk between historical reification and ephemerality.
Air Pieces and PEACE
The air pieces are performances based around semi-permanent objects that are meant to
be “lost.” Each object, which serves as the physical documentation of the work, is disseminated
by Byars during the performance and then either maintained or discarded by its viewers; history,
here, is in the hands of the audience. Byars had a significant (but unknown) number of large,
circular pieces of white paper printed with the phrase “A White Paper Will Blow Through the
Streets” centered in black ink upon each. The pieces of paper were designed to be distributed in
the streets, assuming that the viewers or unassuming citizens receiving the papers would dispose
of them, walk with them, or keep them. Byars also mailed copies to his contacts – the number of
contacts is unknown but it is the first instance of the artist incorporating into his art his ceaseless
correspondence with colleagues, friends, and collectors; this correspondence became a type of
mail art. It was a growing, shifting, matrix-like performance that involved a large quantity of
everyday participants. The following excerpt of text to Miller describes Byars’s aspirations:

Can you see those great white circles looming about the sweet city, at sweet
Philips Plaza on Park, an ellipse the length of sweet 14th street or in your garden
(just open the envelope and let it go) or in the white park in the lower e. side or in
a glass park say 100’ round and open at the top or in the Guggenheim in the room
peak to give the item movement. Do you know anyone who would make such

66
James Lee Byars, written letter to Dorothy C. Miller from Kyoto, Japan, ca. 1960, “Collection: Byars,”
Series Folder I.2, Archives, MoMA.

Gregg 42
gardens???????????? Anyway please watch your streets! My first air pieces will
be given off around Mt Fuji by August. Will you be east?
67

The air pieces introduce a new component of unpredictability in the work: wind. The
success of the works may be, on one hand, measured in the distance that they spread from the
origin of their distribution and, on the other hand, in their general vanishing. (In one improbable
and otherwise unverified description of an air piece in a 1969 exhibition catalog, Byars would
claim that, “in 64 I offered 100,000 papers to the White Sands Desert to release.”
68
) Outside of
the audience witnessing the release or distribution of the air pieces they will otherwise not realize
that they are partaking in an art experience while viewing the papers rolling down the street. In a
near return to the fleeting experience of the “flash” works, the air pieces play to the unaware
viewer—a wholly different audience than Byars had issued for his performable paper works. In
one documented instance of such uncertainty from 1967, a MoMA staff member wrote Miller in
response to Byars’s notifications regarding the upcoming release of his paper objects in New
York, asking, “Is it definite? […] WILL THIS HAPPEN?”
69
The erratic nature of this gesture
affords Byars the desired spontaneity demonstrated in his previously studied MoMA acquisition
notes, but does not account for a complete reset in his practice. Around this time, Byars also
began making house calls that anticipated a very specific and highly controlled audience, an
approach that he would refer to in a later exhibition catalog as his “shows for only one person.”
70

Later that fall, Miller would receive a letter from Japan-based writer, collector, and
supporter of Byars, Lindley Williams Hubbell. The letter largely speaks for itself, exemplifying

67
James Lee Byars, written letter to Dorothy C. Miller, 1966, “Collection: Byars,” Series Folder I.51,
Archives, MoMA.
68
Byars, 100,000 Minutes, unpaginated.
69
Grace [last name unavailable], letter written to Dorothy C. Miller, 9 August 1967, “Collection: Byars,”
Series Folder I.6, Archives, MoMA.
70
Ibid.
Gregg 43
the myth-making impulse present in much of Byars’s performance work. As such, the following
excerpt will be presented at a considerable length:

I can’t resist writing to tell you about one of Jim Byars’ “works of art” because I
was the only person who saw it, and I hate to have it lost and forgotten. Last night
at midnight […] just as turned [sic] off my radio at 12 I heard someone knock on
my window. I went to the front door and opened it and there, in the dim light of
my garden, with a little light from my window lighting her, stood Taki-san (Jim’s
lovely Japanese fiancé) completely enveloped in some sort of robe, from her neck
to the ground, composed entirely of white feathers. On her head was a sort of
huge turban, also consisting entirely of white feathers. There she stood, in the dim
light, like a great white cloud. She handed me, without a word, a tiny piece of
paper. I took it, bowed, and she disappeared in the shadows and left. I went back
to my living room and looked at it – it was a little round piece of paper, about as
big as a dime, and on it, in almost microscopic letters, was the word PEACE.
That’s all.
71

There is much to note regarding the relationship of the air pieces and PEACE during this
point of Byars’s career. Both markedly utilize a similar object as an offering to the public: a
circle of white paper printed with a line of black text. The object of the performance, the same
that is used to both frame and execute the action of the performance, is also its documentation
and basis of audience engagement. (Coincidentally, while the circular paper note that Hubbell
accounts for in the performance no longer exists, another paper document—his letter to Miller—

71
Lindley Williams Hubbell, letter written to Dorothy C. Miller from Kyoto, 1966, “Collection: Byars,”
Series Folder I.6, Archives, MoMA.
Gregg 44
is what remains today as evidence of the action.) But, unlike previous works that play with these
themes, the audience is now solely responsible for the documentation—these works depend on
the audience to document the work by handing the object of the performance (or rather the
evidence of the performance) to the audience for its historical maintenance. The viewer is now
forcibly the archivist. In PEACE, this is obviously taken to a more direct level. Hubbell is, in
many ways, obligated to concretize his experience by the fact of being its sole viewer, a role that
he in conscious of, admitting to it in the opening of his letter.
A key difference between the air pieces and PEACE is the duration of the piece. The air
pieces hold a variable relationship to time. For PEACE, the duration is fixed, maintaining a clear,
if not theatrically clear, start and end. It seems as though the air pieces reflect the Kozo paper of
the performable paper works that were destined to fade, slowly but variably, over time (projected
to be “1000 years [of] life, 500 years [of] white”
72
). These works are united by the fact of their
eternal position of changing, mutating, and adapting to their conditions—like the Kozo paper
their origin and existence since will continue to shift, in historical record, over time. The fact of
their blowing through the streets can metaphorically refer to our inability to hold onto them,
much less account for the “truth” they wish to behold, as the tangible objects of the past.
Then, after 1967, Byars’s performance works would shift to a new set of concentrations.
By this point, Byars had severed communication to Japan and began teaching at the University of
California Santa Cruz in its Experimental Workshop, a Fluxus-based program that was
developed by Robert Watts and George Maciunas. There, he developed a series of projects with
the students that reflected many of the qualities outlined in Watts’s original proposal for the
Workshop, such as the “cross-fertilization of […] many disciplines [that] may be drawn into one

72
Dorothy C. Miller, transcribed acquisition notes by James Lee Byars for The Mile-Long Paper Walk,
1966, “Collection: Byars,” Series Folder I.5, Archives, MoMA.
Gregg 45
work,”
73
including that of “psychology, medicine, engineering, basic and applied science, [and]
advertising.”
74
As a result of this, he developed numerous collective performances, many of
which were large-scale productions aimed to exhibit Byars’s institutional and financial power
through his sheer numbers of performers and a sensationally-driven aesthetic impact. They are
noticeably grander in scale—invested, still, in the limits of ephemerality but considerably less
occupied with unpacking or even participating with the limitations of audience, duration and
documentation.
In 1969, on the occasion of his first live-broadcast television special that was presented to
international audiences, suitably titled The World Question Center, Byars posed the following
question to his distant viewers: If you ask for something that doesn’t exist, do you deserve it on
the intelligence of the request? As an artist working amidst the development of conceptually
based art practices of the 1960s, the idea of something was determined to be just as concrete or
real as any tangible object. Perhaps Byars would have been interested in asking: What material
documentation has contaminated our experience of the past—the experience of what could have
been an idea that is now concretized by wholly different means (e.g. a story, a memory, a myth,
something simultaneously present but intangible, something simultaneously unfixed but direct)?
Conclusion
Byars’s early performance works ran circles around the obstacles of performance-based
practices, foreseeing every step of the way what such limits could mean for his works, or for the
works of any artist working in this territory. When presented with the limits of his paintings as
immobile objects, he mobilized them. Once energized by this gesture, he furthered their ability to

73
Larry Miller and Sara Seagull, “Grounds for Experiment: Robert Watts and the Experimental
Workshop,” in Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958-1972, ed.
Geoffrey Hendricks (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 23.
74
Ibid., 25.
Gregg 46
be enacted by temporarily concealed them as rolled paper or folded paper. He took them outside
of their comfort zone to exaggerate their performative abilities—dry rivers, temple grounds, the
streets of New York and the MoMA stairwell all fit the bill. The documents were the artworks
and the announcements of their “flash” their residual credibility, if one could even justify such
documents as reliable. The point was not so much to see the works as it was to think about them
occurring. This is perhaps the most genuine experience that one could have of the “flash” works
and as such they are still very much occurring.
By the arrival of the performable paper works Byars’s investments shift, primarily
leaving space to question the role of the performer, potential for duration, and possibility of
“originality” that was previously unaccounted for. The Kozo paper used in Byar’s abstract ink
paintings, perpetually fading into physical and historical abyss, never to be truly solidified, now
takes the form of a three-dimensional object. However, it will never simply exist as such. The
performable object is, as Clark would define, a proposition for an “immanent act”
75
– its actions
determined by a similarly and newly mobilized engager: the viewer cum active participant. And
while performances would happen, the work most certainly has not happened. The notion of a
debut or premiere – of originality— in these works does not apply. They will mutate, flexibly,
welcoming any and all participants to enact their liveness, embracing an array of presentations,
acting each time as both the document of their past (as having been there) while disallowing the
facts of their history to be present, both in the interest of the present and in order to be present,
perpetually.
Finally, nearly a decade of production culminates in the air pieces and a private, elusive
performance, PEACE. Both notably distribute the means of their own documentation, a white

75
Lygia Clark, “Caminhando, [1963],” in Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988, ed. Cornelia
H. Butler et al. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 160.
Gregg 47
paper circle, to the viewer of each performance. By this point, the viewer has experienced an
exhaustive scope of roles: conceiver (of idea-based performance), executor (of participant-based
performance), and archivist (of document-based performance). The viewer is important to Byars,
always needed to complete the work, however it may be directed upon them. But the works that
distribute white circular papers are, in many ways, the performance of documentation. Which is
to say, it is the performance of documentation for the secondary audience that Auslander would
confirm the importance of. Byars played between both his immediate and secondary audiences
with ease, pleasing both by tapping into the limitations of their viewership.
For Byars, the existence of a thing—be it a thought, dream, dance or painting—must be
suitable to its liveness, to the way it performs or has performed. All conditions are imposed and
therefore unfixed, able to bend to the needs of said thing, whether it require an ongoing existence
or to have never existed at all. Byars’s contributions to the formation of performance art have,
until this point, gone largely unaccounted for. But this, however, is not suitable to the liveness of
his practice. A decade of finely tuned engagement with the act of performance led him to
numerous provocations with regard to ephemerality, duration, documentation, viewership,
originality, and participation that are still widely considered in performance at the present
moment. In revisiting Byars’s contributions to the field of performance, we can single-handedly
access a foundational source concerned with a range of critical performance-based concerns that
would plague years of actions and works to come. In this vital and deliberately problematic body
of work we can enact an artist—nomadic, inquisitive, straightforward and effortless—attentively
foreseeing the same issues that would reside in the history of performance, a history that would,
unfortunately, not include him. Luckily for Byars, as was anticipated in his performable paper
Gregg 48
objects, history as it stands today is not fixed, originality is fickle, and the “facts” of our past,
even when buried, can always be enacted into the present, again, continuously.

Gregg 49
Bibliography
Arriola, Magalí and Peter Eleey, editors. James Lee Byars: 1/2 an Autobiography, Sourcebook.
Cologne: Buchhandlung Walter König, 2014.

Auslander, Philip. “The Performativity of Performance Documentation.” In Perform, Repeat,
Record: Live Art in History, edited by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, 47-58.
Chicago: Intellect, 2012.

Beckwith, Naomi, editor. Jimmy Robert: Vis-à-vis. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago, 2012.

Bell, Kirsty. “Jimmy Robert: Touch and appropriation; film dance and gesture.” Frieze, no. 115
(May 2008): 144-5.

Butler, Cornelia H. “Lygia Clark: A Space Open to Time.” In Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of
Art, 1948-1988, edited by Cornelia H. Butler and Luis Pérez-Oramas, 12-29. New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 2014.

Byars, James Lee. 100,000 Minutes, or the Big Sample of Byars, or 1/2 and Autobiography, or
the First Paper of Philosophy. Antwerp: Galerie Anny De Decker, 1969.

Clark, Lygia. “Caminhando, [1963].” In Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988,
edited by Cornelia H. Butler and Luis Pérez-Oramas, 160-161. New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 2014.

Eco, Umberto. “The Poetics of the Open Work.” In Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, 20-
40. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.

Friedman, Ken. “Fluxus and Company.” In The Fluxus Reader, edited by Ken Friedman, 237-
256. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1998.

Gourmel, Yoann and Elodie Royer. “Once Upon a Time: Byars in Japan.” In I Cancel All My
Works at Death, edited by Triple Candie and Jens Hoffmann, 40-7. Detroit: Museum of
Contemporary Art Detroit, 2014.

Groys, Boris. “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artworks to Art Documentation.” In Perform,
Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, edited by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, 209-
18. Chicago: Intellect, 2012.

Hickey, Dave. “James Lee Byars: Just Make Me Up.” Flash Art International 177, Summer
(1994): 86-90.

Lambert-Beatty, Carrie. Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 2011.

Gregg 50
Lepecki, André. “Affective Geometry, Immanent Acts: Lygia Clark and Performance.” In Lygia
Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988, edited by Cornelia H. Butler and Luis Pérez-
Oramas, 278-289. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014.

McEvilley, Thomas. “James Lee Byars: A Study in Posterity.” In I’m Full of Byars, 98-112. New
York: Kerber, 2009.

Miller, Larry and Sara Seagull. “Grounds for Experiment: Robert Watts and the Experimental
Workshop.” In Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and
Rutgers University 1958-1972, edited by Geoffrey Hendricks, 20-8. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Miro, Marsha. “James Lee Byars in Detroit.” In I’m Full of Byars, 22. New York: Kerber, 2009.

Morris, Gay. “Props on a Stage.” Art in America 78, no. 10 (1990): 197-9.

Ottmann, Klaus. “Epiphanies of Beauty and Knowledge: The Life-World of James Lee Byars.”
In Life, Love, and Death: The Work of James Lee Byars, 15-52. Ostfildern, Germany:
Hatje Cantz, 2004.

Pasztory, Esther. “Identity and Difference: The Uses and Meanings of Ethnic Style.” In Thinking
with Things: Toward a New Vision of Art, 157-178. Austin: University of Texas, 2005.

Smith, Roberta. “James Lee Byars, 65, Creator Of Art The Lived in a Moment.” The New York
Times, May 30, 1997.

Widrich, Mechtild. “Can Photographs Make It So? Repeated Outbreaks of VALIE EXPORT’S
Genital Panic since 1969.” In Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, edited by
Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, 89-104. Chicago: Intellect, 2012.

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Creator Gregg, Samantha (author)

Core Title The plausible, ongoing, and disappearing acts of James Lee Byars: early performance works (1955-1967)

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 05/18/2015

Defense Date 04/15/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1960s,conceptual art,Documentation,fluxus,James Lee Byars,live art,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance art

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Advisor Jones, Amelia G. (committee chair), Hudson, Suzanne P. (committee member), Tain, John (committee member)

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