James Lee Byars' Golden Death at Venetian Church

The Church of Santa Maria della Visitazione alle Zattere in Venice hosts James Lee Byars' work The Death of James Lee Byars, a large gold-leaf-covered parallelepiped containing a closed shrine of the same material. Created in 1994 for a Brussels gallery, the piece simulates the artist's own death; Byars died three years later in Egypt. The installation includes five crystals marking where the artist's body would lie, referencing Vitruvian humanitas and the gold of the philosopher's stone. Sixteen speakers transmit an immersive audio piece by Lebanese artist Zad Moultaka, murmuring phrases from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. The work echoes Byars' 1977 performance The Play of Death, his first on mortality, where doctors uttered the sound "th"—the first two letters of thanatos, the Greek word for death.