James Lee Byars Dog Cage

In a way, it’s the quintessential experience of James Lee Byars’ art: clicking through a letter to Sam Wagstaff, written three words at a time on an endless stack of envelopes grabbed? left over? from the Green Gallery, where he showed in 1967, piecing together a plea to stage a museum show of a room—just a small one, though—entirely covered in gold, “A state of complete simplicity/ costing not less than everything. Love B.”

Then the next page in the digitized archive is this:

an undated black and white press photo of a qing dynasty dog cage made of the most ornate cloisonné with jade rings along the bars, tiny hooks on the finials for silk draperies, and little wheels, like you're going to pull it along behind you, a 1964 acquisition by the philadelphia museum of art, which found its way, via james lee byars, into the sam wagstaff papers at the archives of american art, correspondence, box one, folder 9
a jpg of a pdf of a scan of a press photo by a.j. wyatt of the philadelphia museum of art’s most important acquisition of 1964, a qianlong era (1736-95) cloisonné, jade, and gilt bronze dog cage, preserved in the Sam Wagstaff Papers as UAN AAA-wagssamu00041-000035 by the Archives of American Art

followed by this:

the verso of a press photo from the philadelphia museum of art for a dog cage has a letter from james lee byars written over the handwritten and stamped notations from the museum, in a multitude of different handwriting sizes and directions, and what i can read is half in byars' abbreviations, so who even knows, but this feels like a situation where digitization should make something more accessible, but instead, i just feel dazed and paralyzed by the overlapping texts, where to even start, and why? from the sam wagstaff papers at the archives of american art
i have no idea: a jpg of a pdf of a scan of the back of the dog cage press photo, onto which james lee byars has written sam wagstaff a letter, or a note and a hundred annotations, or, i don’t even know where to start, you probably have to go straight to the Archives of American Art and examine UAN: AAA-wagssamu00041-000034 yourself in person. If you do figure it out, lmk

And now I don’t know whether to keep trying to decipher Byars’ five sizes and orientations of abbreviation-filled handwriting; to scour the world for my own archival photo of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Imperial cloisonné dog cage; or to just head straight to Philadelphia.

a color photo of an 18th century cloisonne, gold, and jade dog cage made during the qianlong emperor's reign, elaborately decorated with finials, little wheels, little hooks for hanging silk curtains, an obscenely beautiful and useless object, in the philadelphia museum of art
Dog Cage (Goulong), Qianlong Dynasty (1736-95), brass, gilt, cloisonné, jade, 45 1/2 in. high, from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which somehow has negative object info on it

So for now, I’m rereading a bunch of Byars recollections from the 2014 retrospective at MoMA PS1, and just blogging it out.

Previously, related? Marie Antoinette’s Dog House