Daniel Buren is treating Brussels to an exhibition at Bozar and a triptych in the local cultural centre in Strombeek. A perfect opportunity to weigh up the work of an artist whose oeuvre is much more varied than a superficial glance might suggest.
Born in 1938, Daniel Buren is perhaps one of the best-known, but at the same time most misunderstood, artists of our time. The general public knows him as the artist with the stripes, the man who constantly works with a pattern of alternating white and coloured vertical stripes, 8.7 centimetres wide. But those are simply a means by which he sets out to reduce the art of painting to its point zero and to sharpen the way we look at the world around us. In the process, he often raises questions about the conventions of art. On the roof of the Centre Pompidou, for example, he once exhibited a work for which the viewer had to look across the Paris skyline with binoculars to discover, flapping out of a couple of windows, curtains with his stripe motif. That and thousands of other works can now be seen at Bozar in a brand new film in the form of a “wall of images”.
You are known for your ephemeral, in-situ interventions, 80% of which no longer exist. So what on earth are you exhibiting in Bozar?
DANIEL BUREN: The exhibition is in two parts. One part consists of works of art that are exhibited in the more or less traditional sense of the word. The other part is made up of a film that offers you a clearer picture of my work. I have never yet had a retrospective, which would be impossible, anyway, given the nature of my work. If I present thirty works in the course of a talk, then most people discover twenty-eight new ones! That’s normal, after all, as my work is spread all over the world and lots of installations have disappeared. Realising that, I tried to make a film in which dozens of works would be shown at a time from a period of fifty years, from 1965 to now. That includes film excerpts, photographs, drawings, etc.
Lots of people do think they know your work because you always use that striped motif. So there is a common misconception that you repeat yourself all the time.
BUREN: Anyone who says that is blind. [Laughs] I think it’s because those people have never had an opportunity to see more than two of my works and they base themselves too much on what other people say. It becomes a cliché and people don’t take the trouble to see whether it squares with reality. It is too absurd for words to make out I’ve been doing the same thing all the time for fifty years.
In addition to the wall of images, you have also made your own selection of works by seventy artists, from Cézanne to Sol LeWitt. Where did that idea come from?
BUREN: The basic idea was to show work – on the basis of actual works of art and not of reproductions or texts – by artists who have influenced me or made a big impression on me in some way. It ranges from the beginning of the twentieth century to today. So it is a specific presentation and a highly subjective selection.
At the same time, in Strombeek, you are presenting a new in-situ installation for which you have added thirty extra columns that are a different colour on each side.
BUREN: It is one of the few interventions I have made without having visited the place in advance. I did, of course, study the plans and photographs and I developed my project on that basis. But if I had been here beforehand, I might well have made exactly the same work. I always work with things that are already present in the space. For the most part, pillars in a museum or a gallery are annoying. And I have actually added more! That way, I have been able to redesign the space and reveal the rhythm of the architecture. I find it exiting that it’s a space that people pass through in order to see a play, for example.
On one of the sides, your well-known stripes motif is present. How did you discover that?
BUREN: It is the result of a lengthy process in which I wanted to I reduce painting to its point zero. By chance, I then discovered those awning fabrics. I found that interesting, because it looked like what I wanted to do, only better. At one point, I also did it on paper and I papered the streets of Paris with it. That was a breaking point for me, whereby I raised questions about space. I’m still doing so.
A FRESCO
19/2 > 22/5, Bozar, www.bozar.be
A TIGER CANNOT CHANGE ITS STRIPES
26/2 > 13/5, CC Strombeek, www.ccstrombeek.be
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