{"id":559,"date":"2004-05-20T09:12:02","date_gmt":"2004-05-20T09:12:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/wordpress\/?p=559"},"modified":"2015-04-23T14:44:33","modified_gmt":"2015-04-23T14:44:33","slug":"the-ideal-museum-which-shall-never-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/?p=559","title":{"rendered":"The Ideal Museum, Which Shall Never Be"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Daniel Buren<\/span><\/p>\n

Marcel Duchamp once said that a great artist has something really important to say only once or twice in his life. The rest is filler, just something to pass the time, or \u2013 as Bruce Nauman once remarked \u2013 to keep oneself busy. In other words: rubbish. As a strategist, Duchamp realised that the power of such a work as his urinal would be difficult to equal, and that each new work would be measured against it. It is expected of artists that they continue to be creative and innovative. If they remain entrenched in the style or strategy with which they became well-known, before too long they are criticised for resting on their laurels or milking their artistic success formula. Daniel Buren is an artist about whom such things have been said for some years. Since reducing his artistic techniques in 1965 to the systematic use of a pattern of alternating white or coloured vertical strips, 8.7 cm in width, his work has been repeatedly found to be excessively monotonous and simple. It has been said of him that he simply does the same thing all the time. This criticism however misses the point of Buren\u2019s work. By reducing the painter\u2019s instrumentarium to a set of instructions, Buren demonstrates a desire to free art of the notion of the originality and uniqueness of the so-called \u2018masterpiece.\u2019 L\u2019outil visuel<\/em> is not used in order to ask questions on the nature of painting, but in order to analyse the discourse, institutions and conventions which give art its legitimacy. It is not reflexive \u2013 as it has been reduced to zero \u2013 but operative: it is active \u2018somewhere._ L\u2019outil visuel<\/em> has been interpreted as a proposal in outlined form \u2013 Buren himself refers to a proposition \u2013 of a \u2018version\u2019 suitable for use somewhere. The strip motif functions as a catalyst, as a stimulus which can be used to \u2018get a spot working.\u2019 Precisely because the strips are devoid of content and are always \u2018the same,\u2019 the context in which they appear starts to vary. Buren\u2019s works demonstrate that art is always<\/em> and everywhere<\/em> having its \u2018appearance\u2019 placed in position, that there is no mise-en-vue<\/em> without a mise-en-sc\u00e8ne<\/em>, and, most importantly, that this is always architectural in nature.<\/p>\n

Art, architecture and the museum
\nIn the text Fonction de l\u2019architecture<\/em> from 1975, Buren asserts that the history of modern art has concentrated all too long on the \u2018internal\u2019 architecture of works of art, or the perspectival space \u2018in\u2019 a work. No attention was paid to the fact that art does not exist or become visible by virtue of itself, but needs a place \u2013 an \u2018inside\u2019 \u2013 in order to be \u2018made\u2019 public. According to Buren, the history of a work\u2019s relationship with its environment has yet to be written:<\/p>\n

L’histoire qui reste \u00e0 faire s’affiche<\/em>
\nL’histoire qui reste \u00e0 faire, c’est la prise en consid\u00e9ration du lieu (l’architecture) dans lequel une oeuvre \u00e9choue (se fait) comme partie int\u00e9grale de l’oeuvre en question et de toutes les cons\u00e9quences qu’une telle appartenance implique.1<\/sup><\/em><\/p>\n

A work of art does not become public by virtue of itself, but is always \u2018made\u2019 public, somewhere. To that end, it is inevitably \u2018framed\u2019 in any of a number of ways \u2013 removed from the world and thus restrained, in both time and space. It never exists \u2018autonomously\u2019 and can never claim to do this. In order to escape from the reflexive idealism of much modern art, Buren attempts, in his work, to take into account the different levels upon which art is \u2018carried,\u2019 as every \u2018cultural\u2019 spot influences the works made public there, be it on a formal, architectural, sociological or political level. The whole thing revolves, according to him, around a dialectical \u2018intertwining\u2019 of the work and the spot:<\/p>\n

Tension-crise
\nIl s\u2019agit bien plus, il me semble, de montrer ce qui dans un lieu donn\u00e9 va impliquer l\u2019\u0153uvre imm\u00e9diatement et peut-\u00eatre, gr\u00e2ce \u00e0 l\u2019\u0153uvre impliquer ce lieu. De la tension ainsi cr\u00e9\u00e9e appara\u00eetra dialectiquement la crise entre la fonction du Mus\u00e9e (architecture) et celle de l\u2019Art (l\u2019objet visuel).<\/em><\/p>\n

In the above excerpts, Buren employs a bivalent notion of the concept architecture. On the one hand, he equates it with the idea of location or lieu<\/em>, on the other, with that of (the function of) the museum. Although this may seem confusing at first, this dual reading points to the fundamentally architectural character of (the function of) the museum: the museum defines an artificial place in the world, where works of art are made public, or, to put it another way, where they can appear to a public. Architecture is the instrument par excellence for determining this separate place and placing an enclosure around it. The context of the museum is, thus, both institutional and architectural: it serves simultaneously as a place and a building. The building materialises the borders of the public place that is the institution, while the institutional place finds its concrete incarnation in the building which defines it. \u2018On the spot,\u2019 architecture gives form and meaning to the public condition of the art which the museum embodies.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere<\/span><\/p>\n

If a work wants to \u2018intertwine\u2019 itself with the spot where it appears, it must, according to Buren, take into account the \u2018architecture\u2019 of that spot. This does not necessarily result in architectural work, nor in an adapted environment for the work in question. Buren is by no means delivering a plea for a symbiosis between the work and its spot \u2013 art and architecture can clearly not be equated. And the autonomy of both must be respected. The conflicts to which they are at times subject must not be resolved, but, rather, be tested. The meeting point of the work and its spot is, after all, \u2018elsewhere\u2019:<\/p>\n

Le point d\u2019intersection \u2013 ou point de rupture avec l\u2019art moderne \u2013 entre une oeuvre et son lieu (le lieu d\u2019o\u00f9 elle est vue), se trouve quelque part \u2018ailleurs\u2019, en dehors de l\u2019\u0153uvre et plus tout \u00e0 fait dans le lieu, point central continuellement d\u00e9centr\u00e9 et point en marge, affirmant du m\u00eame coup sa diff\u00e9rence.3<\/sup><\/em>
\nThe place where the work and its location meet is situated both outside the work and outside the location. It is a place characterised by difference<\/em>. Le point d\u2019intersection<\/em> must be conceived of both in terms of time and place. Le point d\u2019intersection<\/em> encompasses both the point<\/em> where work and location intersect and the moment when they are about to intersect. And it is precisely there that Buren situates the discursive practice of the exhibition. During the exhibition, the work and its spot are not one and the same; the difference between them is just barely articulated, since, for a work to become visible, it must differentiate itself from the spot where it appears; it must make a difference. For this reason, the context within which a work of art appears can never be ideal. Architecture which acts as though it were made for art is, by definition, proof of what Buren calls \u2018deceptive architectural discretion and neutrality.\u2019 The ideal museum can and shall never be. Regardless of the architectural form of the context \u2013 empty or full, naked or clothed, flexible or determinate \u2013 the work shall never have it as its home. In any rate, it dwells \u2018elsewhere.\u2019 The present, or applied, context is never inherent or automatic; it only contributes to this \u2018elsewhere\u2019 being articulated each time in a new manner. Each viewing apparatus \u2013 be it a postcard, book, exhibition space or museum \u2013 possesses its own special architecture, to which art can be in a proportional relationship. And it is the relationship to that \u2018specialness\u2019 which Buren\u2019s works time and again address, expose, unmask, criticise or interrogate. A work by Buren never yields willingly to the situation in which, or the context within which, it is put \u2018on view.\u2019 It comments on the visibility it enjoys there. Or, to use the motto of his first solo exhibition in the Centre Pompidou (2002): \u2018exposer dans un mus\u00e9e, c\u2019est aussi exposer le mus\u00e9e.<\/em> \u2019<\/p>\n

Centre Pompidou x 2<\/span><\/p>\n

With the title Le Mus\u00e9e qui n\u2019existait pas<\/em>, Buren was referring to the type of museum which did not exist before the so-called invention of the Centre Pompidou. With the completion of the Centre Pompidou in 1977, the concept of the museum of contemporary art was given a radical architectural translation. Through the stacking of the six open empty concrete blindings, both the phenomenon, museum, and the architectural discourse of flexibility attained their apotheosis. The building, which had to offer a spatial solution to the unpredictable developments of contemporary art, would immediately become the new symbol of the popular and iconoclastic museum. The \u2018museum which did not exist\u2019 however does not only refer to this new museum typology, but also to the activities connected to this typology. A museum of contemporary art is one which re-invents itself day after day, exhibition after exhibition. Tomorrow, current art will be different from what is was today. For this reason it requires a flexible context, both on the institutional and architectural levels. In two works from the exhibition, Les Couleurs: Sculptures<\/em> (1977) and Le Dispositif<\/em> (2002), Buren demonstrates to just what type of \u2018context\u2019 this ambition has led in the case of the Centre Pompidou: conditioned emptiness.<\/p>\n

For Les Couleurs: Sculptures<\/em>, created for the opening of the Mus\u00e9e National d\u2019Art Moderne in 1977 and installed here once again for the solo exhibition, Buren positioned three telescopes on the terraces of the Centre\u2019s fifth floor. He attached fifteen striped pennants to roofs and flagpoles of buildings within their field of vision. By the telescopes, a placard was placed with a photographic panorama of the city on which the locations of the pennants was indicated. The focus of the work Les Couleurs: Sculptures<\/em> is how the Centre Pompidou is constructed to enable it to be a public viewing and information apparatus. Although the fifteen pennants are located literally \u2018in the city,\u2019 they can only be experienced in their totality as a work of art via the apparatus of the museum. However, as the pennants are situated at such a distance from the museum that they are difficult to make out with the naked eye, thus necessitating the use of a \u2018supplementary\u2019 apparatus. In the Centre Pompidou, Buren encountered a museum context unequalled anywhere \u2013 on either the institutional or architectural level, a context tending toward a semantic vacuum. To exhibit a work in the Centre Pompidou, a \u2018second\u2019 context, on the scale of, or of the same size as the work, must be installed in the architectural envelope of the Centre. Buren refused to do this, opting to employ the entire envelope as exhibiting apparatus. The work did not lend itself to being put on view in the building itself, but, rather, utilised the building in its totality in order to present itself \u2018elsewhere\u2019: in the city.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Buren unmasked the tautological promise that within the flexible \u2018context\u2019 of the Centre Pompidou, \u2018everything is possible everywhere and always.\u2019 He worked in situ<\/em>, but made no use of the available flexibility. He did display the essence of flexibility itself: emptiness. His work placed neither the building nor the institution \u2018in the viewer,\u2019 but, rather, the structural emptiness of the Centre\u2019s plateaus and what appears with the emptiness: a panorama of the city. It demonstrated how, in the words of Jean Baudrillard, the Centre functions as \u2018une machine \u00e0 faire le vide.<\/em>\u2019 4<\/p>\n

At the time when the work was purchased by the Mus\u00e9e National d\u2019Art Moderne, Buren had it accompanied by a contract, incorporating a detailed manual and a series of playing rules. These include the stipulation that the pennants not be exhibited in the museum as artefacts or relics of the work; the same applies to photos, sketches or documents pertaining to the work. The contract also stipulates that the work can only \u2018exist\u2019 in a situation comparable to the original situation for which the work was conceived. Indeed, it inspires a degree of amazement that , in view of the transformations carried out in the Mus\u00e9e National d\u2019Art Moderne by Bozo & Aulenti in 1985 and the general renovation of 2000, Buren nevertheless allowed the work to be installed again on the roofs of Paris. Following the renovation of 2000, the contemporary art department was also furnished in conformity with the parcourse of white cubes introduced by Aulenti in 1985 in the modern art collection. In addition, the escalators and ramps are now only accessible to visitors with a valid ticket for the museum, whereas thousands of visitors used to take the escalator just to be able to enjoy the magnificent panoramic view of the city from atop the Centre.<\/p>\n

However, with the work Le Dispositif <\/em>(2002), which Buren realised in connection with the exhibition Le Mus\u00e9e qui n\u2019existait pas<\/em> also on the fifth floor, he formulated an intelligent response to developments between 1977 and the present day. The fifth floor is the only one which today is still kept structurally \u2018empty,\u2019 as it functions as a platform for changing exhibitions. Artists and exhibition designers have free reign to give this floor whatever content they like. Just as in 1977, Buren refused to install here an \u2018apparatus\u2019 or \u2018context\u2019 in order to present his work, or, respectively, a retrospective of his \u0153uvre, in an appropriate manner. He refused to fill in the emptiness of the scene with a mise-en-sc\u00e8ne<\/em> which \u2018fit\u2019 his work. He opted for a structure functioning simultaneously as both the work and its context, or as Buren put it: \u201cune oeuvre \u00e0 part enti\u00e8re, \u00e0 la fois contenant et contenu.\u201d 5
\n<\/sup>
\nBuren installed a grid structure comprising 61 cubes, each measuring approx. 3.5 by 3.5 m. This structure was not limited to the official space, but swelled to include the terraces, patio and passageways, resulting in approximately twice the space originally allotted to him for the exhibition. The corners of the cubes were open, creating a diagonal parcourse; the walls, floors or ceiling were finished with an endless series of new colours and materials (from mirrors, rice paper and glass to rasters and the obligatory pattern of strips). Some of the spaces were approached as independent entities, while others served as platforms for works from Buren\u2019s series Les Cabanes Eclat\u00e9es<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The end-result was a visually stimulating structure somewhere between a palace of mirrors and a coloured labyrinth. In the middle of all the mirroring and colourful surfaces, light effects and perspectives, the visitor wondered at first what was actually being exhibited here. Little or no \u2018work\u2019 could be detected in the grid structure; the whole thing functioned as a machine for spatial experience. However, once one forgot his irritation at so much spectacle one noticed that Le Dispositif<\/em> reversed the strategy of Les Couleurs: Sculptures<\/em> in an intriguing manner. While with Les Couleurs: Sculptures<\/em> Buren employed the emptiness of the Centre Pompidou, in Le Dispositif<\/em> he caused it totally to implode. Whereas an empty space draws one\u2019s attention to the space and one\u2019s own experience through the absence of works, in Le Dispositif<\/em> this effect was obtained through the spatial all-encompassingness of the work. No one who visited the sixth floor could escape Buren\u2019s structure. Even the visitors of the elegant restaurant were confronted with it. Buren refused to fill in the emptiness with a context in which in turn to present his work. He let the context and the work become one at the moment of presentation and occupied, to that end, all available space. In this way, the vacuum of the Centre Pompidou was filled right up to the ceiling.<\/p>\n

The exhibition of emptiness in Les Couleurs: Sculptures<\/em> gave place in Le Dispositif<\/em> to a tautological viewing of a \u2018work as a context as a work.\u2019 Together, the two works illustrated the two extremes of the ideology of flexibility: an isotropic space offers art only two possibilities: to leave it empty or fill it entirely \u2013 to do nothing, or to install a special context together with the work. Both works, however, reveal not only the false promise which lurks behind emptiness, but most importantly, where this promise originates.<\/p>\n

As the exhibition\u2019s title, Le Mus\u00e9e qui n\u2019existait pas<\/em>, indicates, Buren\u2019s original thought was the museum which needs just that vacuum in order to celebrate the cycle of its perpetual death and rebirth. Museums of contemporary art have an inherent wish to begin each day with a clean slate. They want, each time anew, to present the artist a virginal space in order to afford him the freedom he needs to install the ideal conditions for his work. Nevertheless, Buren unmasked the pledge that, in the emptiness dished-up for purposes of the exhibition, \u2018everything is possible everywhere always.\u2019 He demonstrated, in the spirit of his predecessor Baudrillard, that the opposite is true: \u201cNul n\u2019y peut rien.\u201d 6<\/sup>
\nWith Les Couleurs: Sculptures and Le Dispositif<\/em>, Buren demonstrates masterfully that the emptiness of the Centre Pompidou is not merely of the scale of one of its rooms, but of that of the institution in general. By employing the building in its totality as an apparatus \u2013 by leaving it empty or filling the resulting space to the ceiling \u2013 Buren reveals the museum as an institution which, in its urgent need to be current, finds it necessary to empty or clean itself on a regular basis.<\/p>\n

Although Les Couleurs: Sculptures and Le Dispositif<\/em> were both created in situ<\/em>, neither work could be viewed there \u2018in its entirety.\u2019 And in neither case was it possible to state precisely where the work was situated<\/em>: in the city or in the museum on the one hand, or in the total grid structure and\/or in the individual cubes on the other. Both works give form to Buren\u2019s thesis that the point of intersection of the work and its location is always located \u2018elsewhere.\u2019 The works did not fully adapt to the building in which they appeared \u2013 their \u2018true location\u2019 was that of the exhibition. If they were located anywhere, than it was the spatio-temporal universe of the exhibition. Both works were characterised by a disjointed placement. The pennants of Les Couleurs: Sculptures<\/em> flap in the skyline of the city, but are simultaneously situated \u2018in the collection\u2019 of the museum. They need the museum in order to be seen, but oblige the viewer located on one of the museum\u2019s ramps to turn his back on the physical context of the institution and turn his gaze elsewhere<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Master negotiator<\/span><\/p>\n

It is often said of Buren\u2019s \u0153uvre, which, together with that of such artists as Michael Asher or Hans Haacke is normally classified as institutional criticism, that it has in recent years undergone \u2018critical inflation.\u2019 However, from the start, Buren has had an ambiguous relationship to institutions. It is, in fact, his ambition to study how it is possible for work to be done within the institutional context in spite of the unacceptable conditions sometimes found there. Buren\u2019s critical strategy is not about rejecting the institutional condition in a lecturing manner, but, rather, to wallow in it, at once eagerly and carefully. It is impossible to escape the institutional context, and yet, it is a context which can never be considered automatic or inherent. If, through this critical identification with the institution, Buren sometimes finds himself walking on thin ice, it is a risk he is happy to take. Mot \u00e0 Mot, published in connection with the exhibition, itself provides all the necessary proof of this. With an exhaustive collection of works, documents and texts Buren demonstrates that art is about more than just the supplying of masterpieces, but above all involves negotiation. Duchamp would have been happy to affix his signature to it.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/span><\/p>\n

1. Daniel Buren, \u2018Notes sur le travail par rapport aux lieux o\u00f9 il s’inscrit, prises entre 1967 et 1975 et dont certaines sont sp\u00e9cialement r\u00e9capitul\u00e9es ici (1975)\u2019. In: Daniel Buren & Jean-Marc Poinsot (Eds.), Daniel Buren. Les Ecrits<\/em> (1965-1990). Tome I: 1965-1976, Bordeaux, CAPC Mus\u00e9e d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, 1991, pp. 427-428.
\n2. ibid., p. 429.
\n3. ibid., p. 431.
\n4. Jean Baudrillard, L’effet Beaubourg. Implosion et dissuasion<\/em>, Paris, 1977, \u00c9ditions Galil\u00e9e, p. 18.
\n5. Daniel Buren, exhibition leaflet Le Mus\u00e9e qui n\u2019existait pas<\/em>, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Mus\u00e9e National d\u2019Art Moderne, 2002.
\n6. Baudrillard, L’effet Beaubourg<\/em>. Implosion et dissuasion, p. 18.<\/p>\n

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On Daniel Buren Marcel Duchamp once said that a great artist has something really important to say only once or twice in his life. The rest is filler, just something to pass the time, or…<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[628,271],"tags":[526,525,125,12,278,524,775,527,124],"language":[19],"class_list":["post-559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-produces","category-publication","tag-architecture","tag-art","tag-daniel-buren","tag-in-situ","tag-marcel-duchamp","tag-one-year-in-the-wild","tag-publication","tag-urban-planning","tag-wouter-davidts","language-en_us"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5443,"href":"https:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions\/5443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=559"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laps-rietveld.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Flanguage&post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}