 |
 |
|
|
 erhaps best known for his landmark series of striped columns installed in the courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris, Buren has become one of the biggest names in the modern art world. His use of regular, contrasting stripes in much of his work is now an internationally famous trademark. A great deal of his creations are designed for public spaces, and always stand with the principle of being site specific.
Born in 1938 outside Paris, Buren went on to study at the École National des Métiers d’Art. During the 1960s he formed a group with fellow artists Toroni, Parmentier and Mosset, which gained worldwide recognition for their reactionary minimalist approach to art making, and their dismissal of authorship and traditionalism. His work has always been provocative - for his first solo-show his gesture was to block the entrance to the gallery with paper, effectively closing it to visitors.
In the last decades he has been increasingly in demand and has exhibited across Europe and America and also in Asia. In 1986 he participated in the Venice Biennale as a representative of French artists and won the Golden Lion Award. Most recently he was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperial from Japan, in 2007. He continues to be internationally active and presently has several projects in progress for varied locations.
 |
Daniel Buren
Peinture sur papier
January 1964
Acrylic on paper
65,1 x 50,3 cm
Paris
Catalogue raisonné T II-1 |
|
Daniel Buren: I was born in 1938 in a suburb of Paris, France. I had my first contact with life during the war in Paris. My parents were good enough not to show the panic or difficulties of that period; so for my brother and I it was a time of play. It was an exciting time with alarms and all the family rushing into the underground. But I experienced all of these things with no sense of the danger or fear, thanks to my parents. They gave their children such quietude in the middle of such turmoil.
Art Interview: What did your parents do for a living and how did they survive during the war?
Daniel Buren: They were conference stenotypists, so they both worked during the war and continued afterwards.
Art Interview: How were you introduced to art?
Daniel Buren: I have always been interested in the idea of inventing. Even as a child I wrote, painted and drew all the time. When I was 15 I wanted to become a filmmaker. But I only consciously decided to go professionally into the art field when I was in my 20s, after I was contracted to make frescoes in a hotel in the Caribbean. I worked there for a year and I learn so much. I was entirely free to express myself and did my very first public work so young.
Art Interview: But you had studied art before you went to the Caribbean. Didn't your studies convince you to become an artist?
Daniel Buren: I went to the Academy in Paris called: École National des Métiers d’Art and did a 3-year painting diploma in the section of general decoration. Then I enlisted on another course, at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris but I never followed through with it. In fact, I was using the second course to avoid the military service. The situation in Paris at that time was not good for art. The academy was still based on the 19th century. The teachers were very traditional. They were teaching us how to draw very classically. I learnt nothing about what was going on in the art world at the time.
Art Interview: How did you end up in the Caribbean?
Daniel Buren: I traveled a lot after art school to see how other places were doing things. Actually I did two important trips when I was young.
One was when I was 17 I did a study trip in the south of France. I wanted to see if there was a connection between the landscape and the artists of that region. I met hundreds of artists, from the most famous like Picasso, Chagall and Masson, to the most unknown, who still remain so to this day. I learnt a lot from that trip.
 |
Daniel Buren
Mosaïque aux éléments composites
1965 (work in situ)
Grapetree Bay Hotel, St.Croix, Virgin Islands
© D.B. - ADAGP |
|
The second was when I spent 3 months in Mexico studying the muralists. In Mexico I saw works that were almost opposite to the prestige and ideologies that I learned and found in the famous so-called: School of Paris. There was an aggression toward western art there that was extremely striking and vivid. It shook me up when I realized that things weren’t as easy and clear as the western world wanted to show it. During my second trip, while I was in Mexico, I met some Americans who later on invited me to paint frescoes in their new space - a large resort hotel in the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. Their only request was that I stay there during the project. Invited by the same people, I went back to the same place 5 years later to do huge mosaics in 1965. Meanwhile my work had changed drastically and had passed from figurative to totally abstract.
Art Interview: After returning from your travels you began in 1966 and 1967 to work collectively with Olivier Mosset (b. 1944), Michel Parmentier (1938-2000) and Niele Toroni (b. 1937). The 4 of you fought against the Paris art establishment. Why did you develop in this direction?
Daniel Buren: Our direction was linked with the frustration of the French art system at the time. Some of the best encounters I had at art school were with students of my own age. One of them was Michel Parmentier to whom I became friends with up until his death.
 |
Daniel Buren
Hommes-Sandwichs,
May 1968 (work in situ)
Paris
© D.B. - ADAGP |
|
 |
 |
 |
Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni
January 1967
"18ème Salon de la Jeune Peinture, [Manifestation 1]",
Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris,
© D.B. - ADAGP.
Photo : Bernard Boyer |
|
After school we started to paint and present our works at exhibitions. We received some success in Paris but we both became the two black sheep of the new Paris art scene. We developed work that was radical in many ways. We were against the spirit of the Paris school and against most of the production visible around us. We created works that were obsessively repetitive and therefore against the idea of making something new every time. When we found two other artist who were working in a similar direction, we contacted them and decided that the 4 of us should solely work together as long as possible. Our association lasted a little less than a year but we changed a lot of things in Paris. What we did was strong.
It was nearly impossible to make a mark as an individual artist at that time so we decided if we worked together and said the same things we could make our voices heard. We agreed that as long as we worked together, no one would have a one-man show and that we would never have an interview unless we were all there to answer. To work like that you have to be completely convinced about your points. We talked amongst ourselves for 9 to 12 months, about what we believed in and how we would represent ourselves to the public before we took the step to work together. We decided not to make a group name. Instead we decided to keep our own names by alphabetical order. That allowed us to stay visible as individuals. Our group was also not closed to other interested individuals and at one point we were 3 people instead of 4. But eventually it became impossible to continue because it was so difficult to respect our own rules. Later on when we were no longer a group the critic Otto Hahn and other journalists tried to create a name for us. I fought against that very hard and still do.
Art Interview: What did the 4 of you work on?
Daniel Buren: We decided to work in public and always attack a specific problem. The first thing we focused on was the production of artwork. We went about showing that it had nothing to do with the secret space of an artist studio. At the Salon de la Jeune Peinture each of us actually worked at our own speed on a series inside the museum space. All day long we had a tape recorder saying loudly in English, Spanish and French, “Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni recommend that you to become intelligent.”
You could expect 400 to 700 people at an opening of such an exhibition in Paris back then. It was not comparable to an opening today with thousands of people for any exhibition, not speaking about a prestigious one! During a show you would have about 10 people a day visiting the museum. Knowing that, we decided the only interesting time to show was during the opening, because after that there would be virtually no public. So we captured the day of the opening. We installed ourselves and began working. We put a long sign on the wall that had our names in alphabetical order on it: Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni. Then, at the end of the day we added, “are not exhibiting here.” and we packed up and left. All that remained was this text and our names on the wall. Afterwards we sent out letters saying the Salon was a completely obsolete way of exhibiting art and that we will never show in it again.
Art Interview: Shortly after that you had your first solo exhibition at the Apollinaire Gallery in Milan, Italy.
Daniel Buren: My first solo show was a year after the end of our association.
Art Interview: Apollinaire Gallery represented Yves Klein and the French New Realists (Nouveau Réalisme).
Daniel Buren: Yes, it showed most of the French New Realists for the first time but also Fautrier and Fontana among others. In fact it was one of the most famous galleries in Italy after the war.
Art Interview: How did you jump from rebelling against the Paris art system to exhibiting in one of the most respected galleries in the world?
 |
Daniel Buren
Untitled
September 1968 (work in situ)
Glued green and white paper
"Prospect 1968",
Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf,
at the invitation of the gallery Apollinaire
© D.B. - ADAGP |
|
Daniel Buren: We rebelled against the system of the Salons and the art system as it was at that time, specially in France but we never refused the idea to claim our criticism inside that very system, at the contrary. I have always thought that you need to work both inside and outside the system to develop the best critical position. So even when exhibiting with galleries and museums I have always kept this balance. I was never especially aggressive toward galleries because they are privately owned. Within the gallery system you will find everything from crooks to the very best people. Institutions are different, they are more general and in most countries they’re funded by public money. They are absolutely not innocent and the use of public money can be put under scrutiny.
But to get back to your question, I met Guido Le Noci from Apollinaire Gallery when I was exhibiting in Lugano, Switzerland with Toroni at the end of 1967. He saw my work and really liked it. Later around March 1968 he contacted me and said he was invited to be part of a big exhibition in Düsseldorf with the best galleries in the world at that time. The show in question was Prospect 68 in the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, organized by Konrad Fischer, Hans Strelow etc. He gave me the list of the artists showing within his gallery, which was nearly all of the New Realists from France and he asked me if I wanted to take part. At that time and even now I really disliked the New Realists works. I didn’t want anything to do with them. I immediately said I wouldn’t be caught dead showing with those people. Guido was furious! He said, “You’re crazy! You’re an unknown artist and I’m offering you the chance of your life to show with most famous artists of France!” Then he hung up the phone.
 |
Daniel Buren
Il s’agit de voir des bandes verticales blanches et vertes
October 1968, (work in situ)
Green and white paper on door
Galerie Apollinaire, Milan,
© D.B. - ADAGP |
|
Three months later he called me back and told me that he was so intrigued with my refusal that he wanted to offer me an other proposal and another chance! He asked me if I would consider doing a solo exhibition during that show in Düsseldorf and later at the gallery! I said of course that that is a completely different situation and so I accepted immediately. My first exhibition with his gallery and my very first one-man show in the art world was in fact to ‘close’ the gallery. I covered the door with striped papers, making it impossible to enter into the gallery. I wanted to show the consequences of a specific work. I also asked him not to put my name or his in the catalogue for Prospect 68 in order to make it 100% anonymous.
It was during that time that I met nearly everyone I would work with later in my life. All of a sudden a lot of galleries where interested in working with me. I’m completely sure that if I had accepted Guido’s first invitation and shared walls with other artists like César, Arman or Martial Raysse, I would have had no position in the eyes of the public at that time. My work would have been lost in the middle of a group that I had no place being in and I would be giving a totally wrong idea about my own work. So my first refusal was not at all a question of a bad or arrogant position. On the contrary it was a pretty accurate view of my own work and more precisely how any work can be transformed by its surroundings. Those surroundings could include the physicality of the architecture, the historical and social context, as well as the connection between different works if all of those were not well controlled.
Art Interview: Did your first solo show begin your success?
This oral history transcript is the result of a digitally recorded interview with Daniel Buren on August 17, 2009. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany and Paris, France and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine. Lydia Ward wrote the introductory text.
|
|
|
|
