I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said today and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.
That dinner plate-sized, Junior Mint-shaped Galactic Senate hoverpod-shaped James Lee Byars sculpture that the American Medical Association bought from Robert Mapplethorpe’s estate auction is NOT untitled, it is NOT undated, and it is NOT made of lacquered bronze.
greg.org has friends everywhere, and one of those places turns out to be in the archives of the Michael Werner Gallery, which has shown Byars’ work for decades. After I posted about the marvelous mystery of this Byars sculpture and its provenance, Jordan from the gallery kindly reached out with some info. And the work, which Werner acquired in 2013, when the AMA auctioned it off in Chicago.
It is titled, The Black Stone, and it is a lacquered, black stone. Werner dates it to 1958-59, a period when Byars, then 26 and in college, spent ten months in Japan. Byars stayed in Kurashiki, where he studied folk pottery, and made sumi-ink abstract paintings, which he showed several times. According to James Lee Byars: Days in Japan, an exhaustively researched account of the artist’s art-related activities, by Shinobu Sakagami, Byars showed sculptures made with “two or three round rocks” in Kyoto as early as 1960, and he shipped other stone sculptures back to the US.
This makes so much more sense. When I first saw The Black Stone and its date, I wondered if this untitled bronze was a cast of it, like how Vija Celmins shows pairs of objects and their perfectly painted bronze simulacra. Which made it even harder to think how and when Byars, perpetually broke, had the resources to fabricate a bronze copy. He did not. The auction catalogue just contains a basic error.
Jordan also explained how the sculpture ended up in Mapplethorpe’s collection, and it was, in retrospect, the most obvious way: it came from Sam Wagstaff. Wagstaff was a collector, curator, photography champion, heir, and Mapplethorpe’s lover, and his papers at the AAA are filled with correspondence from Byars.
Like his letters to MoMA’s Dorothy Miller, Byars’ letters to Wagstaff are filled with updates about shows—some in galleries, some in the streets, some in his head—and pitches and pleas for help to realize one or a dozen gold-leafed ideas. Letters are written on letterhead from documenta—where Byars showed—and CERN, where Byars maneuvered an artist residency, so that’s 1972 or after. An undated letter on Byar’s own stationery [“The Philosopher of the City of Boston and Miss Cake”] mentions a book project and, “a tiny chance I may go to Det[roit] soon. It would be strange to see you there. If not, come soon. At last, I’ve the black rock ready, too, so, so…” So it sounds like the black rock, “a magnificent gift for you,” has been previously discussed and anticipated. If it was strange to see Wagstaff in Detroit, maybe he was early in his stint as a curator for the DIA, so 1968-69.
The Black Stone links some of Byars’ earliest activities in Japan with his ascendance in the US and Europe. And it has not been squirreled away in some vault since then; Werner has put it on regular view. It was in a two-artist show with ceramist Shōji Hamada in East Hampton in 2021. In 2023 [above], The Black Stone was installed between sumi ink paintings of circles and another stone sculpture, The Jade Shoes (1993-94), in a two-artist show with Seung-Taek Lee in MWG Mayfair. That show was reconstituted in Venice last year during the Biennale.
Previously: James Lee Byars AMA