Activating Space

Enrico Pedrini

 

 

 

 

Daniel Buren’s beginnings in the art world are to be found inside
Conceptual Art, the movement favoring rather the idea than the realization of
the art object. This movement, which had been anticipated in France by Yves
Klein’s works and by the contemporary presence of Bernar Venet’s monosemic,
finds in the B.M.P.T. group of 1967, formed by Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and
Toroni, the reasons to set art free from its traditional aura of sole and
unique work. This group pursues a radical criticism of the traditional methods
of art by theorizing its new social and political function. Daniel Buren,
starting with its first exhibition in 1966, has practically reduced his way of
painting to a series of vertical stripes of 8.7 cmt large, alternatively white
or colored; a sort of uniform and neutral ‘zero grade’ suitable to infinite
repetitions. The artist can thus activate such system on an infinite variety of
media, which he inserts in public places (old walls, posters, squares, streets,
subway stations, etc.). The media he chooses (flags, banners, posters, and
wooden structures) are all elements pointing out the space’s
three-dimensionality. Such media give the artist a chance to unveil the
peculiar nature of space, anytime his work is inserted and presented inside
these places. During the first eighties Buren devoted himself more and more to
building such three-dimensional elements which he calls ‘cabanes’. These
structures, made out of canvas and stiff parts, have a“sculptural environment”
that, by their presence and volume, produce a new critical reading of the
context where they have been deliberately “immersed”, since they inform not
only their inner space but also redefine the external environment with which
they interact.


 


The audience is invited to observe and share – through the
openings created on the cabanes’ walls
– not only the ‘sculptural environment’, which the artist chose and
produced, but to concentrate on the surrounding context too. The project, which
Daniel Buren activates, is that of creating something that might favor a
dialectic exchange between two differing space-temporal realities, to such a
point that “one might necessarily involve the other one”. Buren’s exhibition at
Galleria Massimo Minini
style='color:black'> in Brescia, named “Les Parall�les” (parallel bars) is
seriously involved in developing this theme, since the two ‘cabanes’, similar
as to shapes and dimensions, are placed at the two ends of the rectangular and
very deep exhibit space of the gallery. The artist was put in front of a
preexistent site, which he imagined as formed of two parallel and contiguous
spaces.


 


This is the theme developed by the show. The ‘cabanes’, with a
square plan and all covered with a transparent material, have openings which
let people in, allowing them to observe the gallery’s walls, which are covered
with black and white squares on the entry side and white and red squares on the
opposite end. The cabanes’ dimensions, as well as the doors’ and panels’,
always correspond to multiples of Buren’s module, which is 8.7 cmt. The
multiplicator number is usually 9. A stage effect reconstruction rises then of
intense excitement and amazement, due to the shapes repetition, which duplicate
in space, though coming in touch among them through the doubling of the formal
elements, but not in color. The color element is the one making the difference,
in that thesis and antithesis of a process which always wants to be
dialectically active.


 


These works, in their making, always recall the presence of
political valences not only intervening in art, but especially in the dualism
of the social and political environment.