The Perfect Audience, on view in Gallery C, brings together the delicate and monumental sides of the artist James Lee Byars with artist's books, mail art, performance documentation, and other ephemera drawn from the Berkeley Art Museum's Conceptual Art Study Center. The exhibition title is derived from a letter on pink tissue paper that Byars wrote to friends in 1978, in which he remarked, “I've started on a vast piece of pink marble with a tiny gold sentence ‘The Perfect Audience.' I walked into the marble field and immediately found a black polished piece with gold lightning veins in the midst of a wild mystic face-it's my greeter at the museum.” Ink on silver leaf, gold pencil on tissue paper, a heart-shaped letter, and a tiny lipstick print are shown in tandem with documentation of some of the artist's larger-scale works, including the marble pieces referenced in the quote above and actions performed for Documenta, the international exhibition of contemporary art that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. A newly restored 8mm film by Swiss filmmaker Michel de Rivaz, James Lee Byars in performance, Bern ZYTGLOGGE (1972), includes live footage of Byars atop a fifteenth-century Swiss clock tower in Bern, Switzerland, with an attentive audience on the ground below. The concept of “perfect” is a recurring theme in Byars's art. In 1978, he performed The Perfect Kiss (1975) in the museum's MATRIX Program. He referred to the piece as simultaneously “a prayer, a poem and a play.” Threads of this thought run through a number of objects in The Perfect Audience. A folder marked Accomplishments, dated 1961–64, contains only one item, a small lipstick print on paper. In an early correspondence with Dorothy Miller, then curator of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Byars sent six pieces of blank red tissue paper, with a small sheet in the center that contained the handwritten inscription “the perfect kiss is the tiniest kiss to the world.” Moving from the tiny to the global, The Five Continent Documenta 7 (1979) is an eight-foot-long tissue paper numeral 7, one of many that Byars sent out in advance of Documenta 7. With this action Byars encouraged Documenta organizers to include art from around the world, rather than limiting the exhibition's scope to works by European and American artists. In a performance at Documenta 5 in 1972, also represented in the exhibition, Byars stood at the apex of the Museum Fridericianum dressed in red silk, Calling German Names through a golden megaphone. James Lee Byars was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1932. He studied art, psychology, and philosophy at Wayne State University. He lived and worked in the United States, Europe, and Japan, and died in 1997 in Cairo, Egypt.
