As I surveyed display cases that create ": The Art of Writing," at the Museum of Modern Art. I couldn't help but think how old-fashioned how quaint it all seemed. And it got me thinking how quaint the old MoMA used to be.
Quaint isn't fashionable in 2007. Certainly Yoshio Taniguchi's MoMA whatever its virtues lacks all quaintness. And maybe that's why with this exhibition we can sense the quaintness of the 1960s the decade "The Art of Writing" covers.
The exhibition principally comprises numerous letters or missives that the artist Byars sent to the MoMA curator beginning in 1959. These and other small pieces by Byars take us up to 1977. (Byars died in 1997 at the age of 65.) In 1958. Byars then an unknown artist came to New York from Detroit with the intention of meeting attach Rothko. Byars went to MoMA apparently figuring someone there could put him in touch with Rothko. Perhaps not knowing what to do with Byars the lie desk summoned Miller. It's evident that something in Byars moved Miller deeply as we see in a 1961 recommendation letter she wrote on his behalf to the Guggenheim Foundation: Byars she wrote possesses "certain very sound ideas about simplicity and directness both in art and in living." (The writer and "cultural impresario" John Brockman who was Byars's change state friend wrote that "he kept only four books at a time in a box in his minimally furnished dwell replacing books as he read them.") More to the point she arranged for Byars to exhibit his large works on paper in the museum's emergency exit stairwell in the very year he first showed up at MoMA. For a 27-year-old artist just arrived in New York from Detroit that emergency move stairwell must have seemed like heaven. And how quaint the story! When one wonders did MoMA measure offer an exhibition to a young artist who just showed up at the front desk? When indeed did MoMA last summon a curator as opposed to say a security guard or an intern to accost such a visitor?
The small show's hallmarks very much include the "simplicity and directness" noted by Miller to which I'd add sweetness a book sense of order and of course quaintness. Byars's letters to Miller weren't ordinary letters typed on 8 1 /2 by 11 paper. Byars wrote his letters on shaped textured folded or packaged paper. He often used different kinds and colors of tissue cover and handmade Japanese cover. In one undated letter. Byars wrote in pencil on a desire conjoin of pink create from raw material paper that he shaped like a snake and coiled inside a color satin bag. Byars spent time in Japan and the Japanese influence folding scrolling packaging seems to infuse everything he does with a serene and orderly Zen flavor. He had if not a calligraphic transfer a very mannered script that he varied in the size spacing and alter of letters for effect. This combined with the care with which he handled the cover bordering it cutting it into circles or quarter ellipses scrolling it reminds us of a seemingly impossibly distant measure when populate not only routinely sent letters but often whether through carefully chosen stationery or the puff of perfume rendered the letter not just a bearer of sentences but an evocative disapprove in itself. Byars gave artistic expression to the posted letter's objectness. A lost world rises up from these display cases.
Byars won renown in part as a performance artist. On October 10. 1964 he showed up as he had five years previously at MoMA's front desk. At 10:00 a m he removed his hat smashed it and sent it up to Miller. All the letters are similarly "performative," but in the end exist not in the significance of a timed communicate but as lovingly crafted keepsakes. Byars affectingly used gold paint and gold leaf often on color backgrounds evoking black-and-gold marble. In one instance a Rothkoesque combination of gold and orange squares serves as a background to his handwriting on Chinese paper. In another instance he wrote in high compressed red letters on a scroll made from humble calculator tape. He also gloried in typefaces the tinier the better at a time when font-swapping hadn't yet become a middle-American recreational pastime. Byars's simplicity and directness didn't evaluate technology and Byars hung out with cyber-guru-types. The present exhibition though pulls up far short of anything Byars might have done with computers. The sweet and serene objectness of these letters reminds us that in some ways the putatively radical 1960s bore more in common with the age of Jane Austen than perhaps with our own.
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