In James Lee Byars’s The Monument to Cleopatra from 1988, the lustrous, gilt marble column invokes the presence of a sacred site or a ritualistic totem, lavishly adorned and gilded in the guise of ancient statuary. The sculpture’s materiality, singularity and geometry implement a formal simplicity that evokes the work of the Minimalist artists of the 1960s, including Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Robert Morris. Much like his German counterpart Joseph Beuys, Byars was often dubbed the quintessential ‘artist-as-shaman’, and indeed the present work is imbued with a transcendent quality that is prevalent throughout the artist’s practice. Employing the language of the mystic and the aura of the clairvoyant to upend his aesthetic values, Byars asserts the spiritual and philosophical query as the highest attainable objective of art.

The gold leaf covering the marble plinth denotes an all-encompassing power and ability to ‘communicate’, augmenting the ritualistic tenor of the work. As art historian and critic Alberto Salvadori comments, “[Byars’s work] gives shape to a symbol of ascension, taking metaphorical aim towards the sacred mountain - a gilded machine to honor the gods. The splendor of gold hints at the symbol of inner illumination, of intellectual knowledge and spiritual experience. A concept of divinity. That’s the deeper motivation in James Lee Byars’s use of gold… it is the ultimate symbol of greatness and infinite.” (Alberto Salvadori cited in: ‘James Lee Byars: The Golden Tower’, Studio Reduzzi, 2017, online). The incandescent gold monolith is a recurrent and iconic motif within Byars’s practice. It developed out of the artist’s seminal performance piece from 1969, World Question Center, which saw Byars telephone several of the world’s most renowned scientists, philosophers and artists, whilst broadcast live on Belgian television, to determine what questions they thought to be the most vital, essential and pressing to humankind. Byars was fascinated by the aesthetic potential of life’s most indeterminate, unanswered, fluid and existential questions. In works such as the present, the artist potently elicits such open-ended signifiers, through his deeply enigmatic, elusive and ethereal aesthetic.

After studying art and philosophy at Wayne State University, Byars moved to Kyoto, Japan, in 1958, where he was exposed to Japanese Noh theatre and Shinto rituals. An important legacy of Byars’s years in Japan is his appreciation of ceremony, formal rigor and the fleeting nature of beauty. Works from that time demonstrate Byars’s first experimentations with wood, stone, paper and gold, materials that would continue to fascinate the artist throughout his career. The Monument of Cleopatra is indeed evocative of Byars’s Japanese period and the artist’s interest in manifestations of the human form in sculpture. This golden sarcophagus, with its low gilded pedestal and glass case, encapsulates Byars’s life-long obsessions with eternity, death and beauty, and foreshadows the many “figures” and “death” sculptures and performances that would emerge in later years.

A monument to philosophical thought, The Monument to Cleopatra is laden with contradiction: it is at once physical and spiritual, tactile and ephemeral, minimal and baroque, ancient and modern. One of the most archetypal characteristics of Byars’s practice, this sense of paradox, speaks to the artist’s quest for an enlightened state of understanding through interrogative contemplation. The present work follows the example set by the artist’s most seminal work, The Golden Tower of 1976, which has been shown in various iterations since its inception, most recently at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Opening the door to myriad speculations and open-ended hermeneutics, The Monument to Cleopatra comes to represent, through its gold, shimmering luminosity, a notion of divinity that steadfastly stands as an overwhelming symbol of artistic aspiration.