Buren, art as open space

It was in the sixties that Daniel Buren barred access to the Apollinaire Gallery by blocking the entrance. The Gallery’s owner, Le Noci, was made to promise never to open it again. At the time the artist’s concern was to “close down all art venues”. Actually, his gesture was meant as a protest and reaction against the separation of art and life, against places given over to celebrating the former set aside from the latter. His radical critique was against “sitting-room art” in whatever guise, even the kind posing as avant-garde. His painting was even then a mockery of painting. His coloured bands of the same width, repetitive and garish and ever so reminiscent of a popular seaside resort, were soon to become famous and widespread.

Of course, refusal and negation are easy when one is starting out, but then one must make positive propositions to continue. Since those provocative beginnings, Buren has turned his artwork into a way of perceiving locations. In other words, through his art Buren strives to change the way we look at a city and its monumental or commonplace sites, such as the Palais Royal in Paris in the case of the former, or the promenade in Muenster that leads to the centre of the city and that he had canopied with small colourful and cheerful flags in 1997 in the case of the latter. But his works also set out to change the way in which we interpret and live fictitious locations, such as his “cabanes” that reflect a fragmentary image of the viewer and challenge the viewer’s sense of the near and far by playing on the perspective and hence distance and dimensions of the enveloping stripes.
Buren warns us that whether we find ourselves in an open or closed space, it’s all too easy for us to fail to see, to be aware of or have a feeling for our surroundings, that is, to have a proper sense of place. Such obtuseness easily leads us to passively become part of the scene, instead of actively contributing to determine the setting through an act of conscious perception. It may sound easy but it indeed requires constant effort. It’s an effort the artist has been challenging his public to accomplish for some time now with the same, undiminished effrontery with which he confronted the gallery owner Le Noci many years ago.