Psychosculpture

It couldn't be called a Happening, be cause no audience was there to watch. Nor could it be called a sculpture, be cause it involved four human beings, seated to form a square on a white-painted floor of a white room in Manhattan's Architectural League. Nevertheless, there was no denying that the scene had an eerie visual unity; joining the quartet was a strip of red silk acetate, 24 ft. long and 12 in. wide. It had been sewed into a square with a loop at each corner, and each loop fitted onto the head of a participant. Title of the work: Four in a Hat.

"It is an art," insisted its creator, Detroit-born James Lee Byars, "but it doesn't belong in a category. There is something of soft sculpture in it, but there is also something psychic in it. It's a participation." Perhaps a better word for it might be psychosculpture.

Whatever the category, Four in a Hat seems to have a way of producing wondering, self-exploratory conversations. "It is like being married," said one hat wearer. "No," replied another. "It is more like being tied with the same umbilical cord." "Do you feel you have to participate?" one hat wearer asked his neighbor last week. "Yes," she replied. "Otherwise I'll lose my hat." "Lose my hat!" repeated Byars with delight. "That's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard."

Byars sees no reason to limit his multiperson garments to just four wearers. For the opening of his show, he induced several hundred New Yorkers to stick their heads through holes in a "mile-long" strip of fabric and parade in tandem around the block. "You see," he exulted. "We are changing the landscape of New York!" Inside another garment, titled 100 in an Airplane, he hoped that participants would strip to the buff and sit on the floor beneath the 100-ft.-long piece of pink silk shaped like an airplane. "Over clothed bodies," he explained, "silk makes a far less interesting shape." Alas, when Byars first staged the event last week, he waited in the cockpit of the airplane, clad only in a Navajo hat, a red loincloth and black socks carefully held up by red silk garters. About 50 people came to join him, but all remained fully clothed. Manhattan may be ready for psychosculpture, but not, it seems, for psychosculpture in the raw.

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