James Lee Byars
Carnegie Museum of Art
A Lilliputian show in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s already miniature Forum Gallery, “Ordinary Madness” plucked James Lee Byars (who died in 1997 at the age of sixty-five) out of the general history of Fluxus and reframed his practice with some astonishing and wide-reaching results. On view were heretofore unexhibited letters, photographs, and films that documented Byars’s happening-like events and traced his involvement with the Carnegie between 1963 and 1966. There was also one choice “performable object”a thousand feet of folded Chinese paper activated in a work that Byars had staged at