James Lee Byars
100,000 Minutes
Antwerp, Belgium: A. de Decker, White Wide Space, 1969.
[200] pp., 26.8x20.8 cm., softcover
Edition of 250.
100,000 Minutes is the first artist book by James Lee Byars. It is also known as The Big Sample of Byars or The First Paper of Philosophy, or The Pink Book, or 1/2 An Autobiography. The latter title refers to the artist’s age at the time - he was thirty-six years old when writing it, and the life expectancy of an American male was seventy-two.
"If I ever become 72, I'll write the second part,” he wrote, but didn’t. He died in 1997 at the age of 65.
The title features a single hand scrawled line per spread; questions, statements, instructions, anecdotes, biographical information, etc. For example:
"Breakfast is my favorite meal"
"I want to live to be a hundred”
“I’m six feet tall”
“Judgment is impossible"
"Your reading My Big Sample is one of my works"
"I write best with ball pen"
"Publicity is the content of this exhibition”
"His head weighs twenty-five pounds"
“What is the difference between asking and telling?”
“Is is?"
"The overriding theme that increasingly dominated Byars’ work in the ’70s was philosophical doubt, informed by Pyrrhonic and Buddhist dialectic, and by the phenomenological rejection of all claims to certainty or ultimacy of knowledge. Byars’ sensitivity to the problem of knowledge, increasing over decades, led him to posit, as an art object or the basis for a series of art objects, the primacy of the question over the answer. The self-sufficient question stood in his work as a symbol of indeterminacy, openness to the universe, freedom from the enclosing and restricting anxiety of the answer. For Byars, adding a question mark to any statement infuses it with life and moves it into the realm of art or poetry. In his work the question mark functions as an analogue of the unfettered potentiality of the zero. Each discloses an empty space where any of life’s infinite forms is invited to arise.”
- Thomas McEvilley
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