Untitled.
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Title |
Untitled. |
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Creator |
Buren, Daniel (French conceptual artist and photographer, born 1938) |
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Date |
1968 |
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Cultural Context |
French
European
Western European |
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Style/Period |
Conceptual |
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Subject |
Performance art
Signs (Notices)
Men
Suits (Clothing) |
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Description |
"This is an early example of Buren's use of stripe motifs in a public context. He has continued the practice to the present. For instance, in 1997 in Munster, Germany, his contribution to a festival of site-specific sculpture consisted of lines of red-and-white-striped triangular 'flags' strung across the main streets of the town above the heads of pedestrians. The flags thus appeared to function as civic decoration. Whether this had the political bite of the earlier work shown in this photograph is questionable." (Caption, p.162); "A curious photograph shows 'sandwichmen' walking through the streets of Paris. They are bearing signboards displaying the stripe motifs of the French artist Daniel Buren. The image suggests directionless protest. Modernist abstraction had reached an impasse in the mid-1960s and Buren was one of many artists who felt that the entire 'framing' or institutional conditions for avant-garde art needed to be redefined. Buren's seemingly innocuous 'abstractions' were therefore part of a strategy. Inserted in various environments, the stripes would assert that, for all its vaunted aesthetic autonomy, Modernist art is defined by context. Paintings, especially Modernist ones, normally rely on the museum, or gallery, for their 'visibility'. Out on the streets of Paris such objects become vulnerable, invisible even. Or so Buren, envisaging the 'end of painting', hoped. […] The sandwichmen's impotent militancy was doubly ironic. The year was 1968, now fabled as a time of political dissent across Europe and America. Over the next few years artistic tendencies such as Arte Povera, Land Art, Conceptualism, and Performance Art interrogated not just aesthetic but social and cultural preconceptions." (Excerpt, p.161) |
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Location Depicted |
Paris (France)
France |
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Work Type |
Performance art
Body art
Conceptual art |
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Source |
Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford History of Art. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000. (p.162, fig.82) |
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Rights |
© Daniel Buren, ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London, 2000. |
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Digital Publisher |
University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center |
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Format |
image/jpeg |
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Digital File Name |
VRC 826-37.jpg |
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Rating |
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