Daniel Buren: Engaging Specificities - Claire Doherty

It seems fitting that we revisit the work of Daniel Buren in anticipation of this summer's convergence of the Venice Biennale, Documenta and Sculpture Projects Münster. Celebrated for his contribution to all three exhibitions since Harold Szeemann's Documenta V in 1972, Buren acutely understands the apparatus by which invitations are extended, responses commissioned, identities constructed, distributed and consumed through such projects. From the standpoint of 2007, however, we might consider how the "unspeakable compromise of the portable work of art" of which Buren spoke in his 1971 essay "The function of the Studio", has given way to the unspeakable compromise of the commission, proposed by Buren ten years ago in his essay for the 1997 Sculpture Projects Münster catalogue.

Buren's exhortation "Can Art Get off Its Pedestal and Rise to Street Level?" predates the profusion of place-responsive commissioning which has come to dominate international large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art, urban regeneration programmes and off-side gallery programmes over the last decade. Drawing on his own negotiation of the museum's institutional frame, his 're-scripting' of public space and his ephemeral interventions in the urban environment, Buren sets out to challenge certain assumptions about the nature of art and its context. He implicates institutional politics and economies in the production and commissioning of every work of art both within and outside the museum; he asserts that the contribution an artist can make to the urban environment is to be valued but not prescribed; and that effective site-specificity necessitates a transformation of context rather than a polite "merging into the scenery".

Whilst Buren's works and writings have been widely discussed since the mid 1980s for their considerable contribution to, what is now rather perversely described as, the canon of Institutional Critique, such readings seem to miss the broader considerations of place and context clearly evident in his Münster essay.

To look anew at Buren's 1971 intervention into the Guggenheim's rotunda space (Peinture-Sculpture, 1971) through the lens of his recent return to the museum (Around the Corner, 2000 - 2005), for example, is to understand that the artist was not simply compelled to collapse the organising principle of the museum's International Exhibition, but rather intrigued by the multiple conditions under which the Guggenheim comes to exist as a physical, social and cultural space. The 2005 installation expanded the rupture of the 65 x 32 banner of Peinture-Sculpture to a series of mirrored panels and scaffolds which essentially placed Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral within an imagined cube, aligned with the grid of the city of Manhattan.

Buren's consistent return to the term "in situ" in the titles of his works and in the description of his works and in description of his working practice gives us an indication of his interest in the specificity of engagement. He clearly understands site as a cluster of transient meeting points of material culture and social conditions, just as geographer Doreen Massey has asserted that, "what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalised history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of relations". So whilst Buren's rigorous interventions were developed, as Andrea Fraser has suggested, "as a means not only to reflect on...institutional conditions but also to resist the very forms of appropriation on which they reflect", they can also be seen to operate as complex interrogations of place and space.

Buren has described the emancipation of the 8.7cm wide stripe from his early pre-printed canvases and posters to architectural and sculptural elements as the development of "a sign in motion". This visual tool or sign operates as a disjuncture, devoid of representative baggage but equally assured of its institutional value. So, for example, whilst the sign of the stripe is seen to repeat through the sculptural interventions of Les deux plateaux, completed in 1986 and 25 Porticoes: The Colour and its Reflections, produced some ten years later, these remain remarkably distinct articulations of site, despite their formal commonalities. Whilst the columns set across 3000m2 play with the formal certitudes of the 17th century Cour d'Honneur, setting off a series of dialogues with the architectural façade of the Palais Royal; the striped porticos of Tokyo Bay similarly set out a series of points of contact for the pedestrian, but here Buren seems more overtly concerned with the scripting of movement across a city, through public and private space, similarly reflected in his 1987 work, IV Tore, for Müster.

Buren's use of transparent coloured Plexiglas panels, or filters, and mirrors in more recent public works (such as. Sulle vigne: punti di vista, 2001, Toscane, Italy; Transparences Colorées, 1999, Munich, Germany) and museum exhibitions (such as Centre Pompidou, 2002, Toyota Museum, Japan, 2003, Guggenheim Museum, 2005 and Modern Art Oxford, 2006) suggests, as Pierre Huyghe notes in his conversation with Buren, that the artist is increasing interested in how the work might "open a space for distraction". If we understand distraction to be an action of disturbance which engenders feelings of displacement, we can identify the mechanism by which these shafts of coloured light, reflections and disruptions operate to draw us into Buren's environments and then resist commodification, reflect out gaze, direct our attention to the physical limits of the spaces in which we find ourselves and in doing so, astutely remake our sense of place through a dizzying process of disorientation. It is this unapologetic form of interruption which Buren exhorts in his Münster text and which, in light of the emergence of the commission as the dominant motivating force for the recent exhibition and promotion of contemporary art, becomes an urgent call to arms.