James Lee Byars

James Lee Byars

Klaus Ottmann, Martina Weinhart • Hatje Cantz

ISBN-10: 3775709398 · ISBN-13: 978‑3775709392 · 2000

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Completeness 48

Cover quality: good

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In the course of sixteen years, Joseph Beuys received more than a hundred letters from James Lee Byars, without ever writing back himself. Byars sent a wealth of elaborately designed letters to different people, letters which may well make up the greatest part of his work, but Joseph Beuys was the only colleague with whom Byars corresponded. And quite an unusual exchange of letters it is, enthralling readers by their extreme fragility and immense variety of materials, forms and ideas. His letters are not written with the purpose in mind of receiving an answer, rather, they constituted his day-to-day artistic routine.ì In contrast to works in the fine arts and literature, a letter as a work of art postulates an immediate addressee and yet his absence. In an effort to effect a contact transcending the transitory, the everyday and even the physical presence, Byars' letters revolutionized traditional structures of ownership and forms of existence in the arts. The complete set of letters reproduced in this publication contains reflections on Byars' own works and those of Beuys, about creative process and its counterpart, death.

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