4
Sep/14

JAMES LEE BYARS: PERFORMANCES

4
Sep/14
Performance of James Lee Byars’s The Mile-Long Paper Walk (1965-2014) at The Museum of Modern Art, August 17, 2014. Performed by Katie Dorn; choreographic construction by Lucinda Childs. © 2014 Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Julieta Cervantes

Katie Dorn performed James Lee Byars’s “The Mile-Long Paper Walk” at MoMA on August 17 (© 2014 Museum of Modern Art, New York; photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Sunday, September 7, free with museum admission, 12 noon – 5:00
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In conjunction with the closing of the MoMA PS1 retrospective “James Lee Byars: 1/2 an Autobiography” — which includes the glittering “World Flag,” the short film The Perfect Epitaph, and the pitch-black room “The Ghost of James Lee Byars,” among many other tantalizing and intriguing works — MoMA’s Midtown Manhattan location will be restaging five of Byars’s performances on September 7, honoring the long history the museum shared with the Detroit-born multidisciplinary artist who passed away in 1997 in Cairo at the age of sixty-five. “James Lee Byars: Performances” will take place between 12 noon and 5:00 pm in several locations. In the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, Jimmy Robert will re-create “The Mile-Long Paper Walk,” with choreographic instruction by original performer Lucinda Childs. On the fourth-floor landing, “Four in a Dress” will put four people in a dress; “Are we one or four?” Byars asked when he was in it. Nearby, in the fourth-floor Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Lobby Gallery, “Dress for Two” brings together a pair of people facing each other, joined in an unusual way. All afternoon long, you can check out “Ten in a Hat,” involving performers wearing interconnected chapeaux. And in the sixth-floor gallery, you can see the very brief piece “The Perfect Kiss,” which Byars called “a prayer a poem and a play.”