THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

In 1969, Byars created ‘The Ghost of James Lee Byars’.  A work which is all atmosphere, it physically consists of a space from which light is excluded, apart from a faint glimmer around the entrance and exit doors.  In the same year, at the Eugenia Butler Gallery in Los Angeles, he also created ‘This is the Ghost of James Lee Byars Calling’, in which an entirely red room, lit only by a small hole in the ceiling, becomes a theatre where an aural image of the artist is summoned up through the reading of letters describing him.  In an earlier part of this same exhibition, titled ‘Shutting Up Genie’, he made the gallery owner invisisble by shutting her off from the exhibition space and forbidding her to enter the exhibition.

Rugoff/Invisible