Nothing is Perfect

JAMES LEE Byars strolls the little garden of the Busch-Reisinger Museum like an aristocrat who is more accustomed to walking across acres of a grassy estate. He wears a black hat, a black silk scarf, a black coat, black pants, white buckskins, and has the gait of a dreamer entranced by a grander age. It is not so strange that a man with such an uncommonly impeccable appearance should have created something inside the Busch-Reisinger entitled "The Exhibition of Perfect."

In the lobby of the museum, James Lee Byars painstakingly centers on the front desk top a one-inch by one-inch public announcement of his exhibit; he measures an imaginary square to frame it and places the announcement lovingly in the middle. Then he searches the museum for a suitable vase for the precious pink rose (one of many which he distributed that morning) which lies next to the announcement; but he fails, slightly annoyed that a German Museum should lack such a common object. This is the delicate introduction to "The Exhibit of Perfect."

Inside the museum, where the exhibit is supposed to be, not a thing is changed; all the paintings are in their usual places. A visitor looking for this temporary exhibit would be hardpressed to find anything which could qualify as "The Exhibit of Perfect," and would soon find himself turning over in his mind the vaguely amusing questions he might put to the guard: "Excuse me sir, but I can't find the perfect here. Could you lead me to the perfect?" Finally, the visitor would leave feeling mildly puzzled or self-consciously gullible or simply vexed at having wasted his time on this silliness.

There is nothing in the "Exhibition of Perfect," so that some people will leave thinking that Byars has failed to exhibit the perfect and has only exhibited the vanity of such an attempt. But James Lee Byars himself gently insists that "I have exhibited it here." The curator of the museum, Mark Huckhauser, who discovered Byars and brought him here for the month of April, also believes in "The Exhibition of Perfect. He says Byars' work has a "feeling of purity," and that he would "challenge anyone to find fault with his exhibition." He describes the opening night of this exhibit not as an art exhibition but as a "celebration of an art exhibition," and a proof that "the success of an opening has nothing to do with the content of the art exhibit."

It is still debatable whether "the exhibit of perfect" has been a success or a failure. And indeed, it is also a testament to the idea that the success or failure of such an exhibit has nothing at all to do with the content being or not being there, that the suggestion of an art exhibit will suffice in place of a real one. Is it outrageous that an artist can, by simply announcing that he is exhibiting something, make others around him believe that this is what he is really doing? Some are bound to think so. Some guests who attended the black-tie opening were reportedly indignant at an exhibit of nothing.

HOWEVER outrageous such an exhibit may strike some, this exhibit of perfect is not Byars' only conceptual art work. He created "The Perfect Kiss," at Berkeley's University Art Museum, a show in which Byars "mounted a low, white platform in one corner, composed himself for a moment, then pursed his lips." On the first of May Byars will depart for Italy to design a 100-foot pink flag for the Venice Biennial Celebration. Byars says that he also runs the "World Question Center," and he adds that he is the only one left in it. The skeptic will naturally ask "Is this his imaginative, and perhaps vain name for his own inquisitive mind?" Byars will answer no. He insists that there is a real Question Center where he collects questions, and even a skeptic would be rash to doubt that such a man collects questions. If you ask a question, he steps as if taken aback, and says, "Oh, you have given me a question, how nice!" He "exalts in the interrogative," and delights in the very transaction of giving and receiving questions. He collects questions simply "to keep them and sometimes to give them away," but not to answer or ponder them.

He says enthusiastically, "I love a question."

If James Byars lives in a dreamworld, it is a complete and creative world. He is no philosopher, but he is no sham either, for he believes in his art and he convinces others to believe in it. Even if he treats questions and ideas as if they were mere objects, he delights in all of them as an artist delights in sights and sounds. He is an artist who receives and gives ideas and questions as if they were delicate dolls to be admired but not touched, lest they be broken, and, at the slightest suggestion that ideas are not palpable like objects, James Lee Byars stops, clasps his hand to his heart, and offers up a question from his collection: "Have you never felt an idea?"