Daniel Buren, Échos <i>works in situ</i> by CENTRE POMPIDOU METZ

Photo-souvenir : Dans la grande Mosquée de Abu Dhabi (détail). Novembre 2010. Photo Daniel Buren © DB et ADAGP Paris.

Press contacts Centre Pompidou-Metz Louise Moreau +33 (0)3 87 15 39 63 louise.moreau@centrepompidou-metz.fr Claudine Colin Communication Valentine Dolla +33 (0)1 42 72 60 01 centrepompidoumetz@claudinecolin.com

DANIEL BUREN ÉCHOS WORKS IN SITU PRESS PACK

08.05 > 09.09.2011 www.centrepompidou-metz.fr

DANIEL BUREN, ÉCHOS, WORKS IN SITU

CONTENTS 1. Daniel Buren, ECHOS, works in situ press release.............................................................. 03 2. Presentation of the work and career of Daniel Buren...................................... 04 3. Publication AND DVD.................................................... 08 4. Visitor information..................................................... 09 5. Partners of the Centre Pompidou-Metz................. 11 6. VisuAls FOR THE press................................................. 13

DANIEL BUREN, ÉCHOS, WORKS IN SITU

1. PRESS RELEASE ÉCHOS, works in situ Daniel Buren 8 maY > 9 septembER 2011 Centre Pompidou-Metz, Galerie 3 Daniel Buren is currently one of the most important artists both in France and internationally. For more than 40 years, each of his exhibitions throughout the world has elicited attention.

imbriquées, work in situ, forms “sites within sites, places within places” 1. The viewer is invited to explore this transient architecture whose multiple viewpoints fragment the space.

The Centre Pompidou-Metz has, since 2009, formed a privileged relationship with Daniel Buren, first initiating projects for its pre-inauguration Constellation event: 5610 flammes colorées pour un arc-en-ciel, a site-specific work on Rue Serpenoise in Metz, and Couleurs superposées, Acte XIII, a performance he directed at the Metz Metropolitan Opera and Theatre in September 2009.

The other part, La Ville empruntée, multipliée et fragmentée: work in situ, provides a counterpoint to the view across the city. Daniel Buren uses the picture window and the landscape beyond it and, through a set of mirrors, fragments and multiplies them to infinity. He specifies that “using a mirror makes it more obvious that any work is but a mere fragment of a whole” 2. 1 Daniel Buren Entrevue, Conversations avec Anne Baldassari (1987) in Paris, Flammarion, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1987, p.24 reprinted in Les Écrits, T.3, Bordeaux, Musée d’art contemporain, 1991, p.238. 2 Daniel Buren, Épreuves d’écriture (1985), in cat. Les Immatériaux, Centre de Création industrielle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 28 March - 15 July 1985, reprinted in Les Écrits, op. cit., T.3, p.83.

A year after its opening, the Centre Pompidou-Metz has invited Daniel Buren to produce a project for Galerie 3, in a joint initiative with the Mudam Luxembourg, Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. Buren has created a site-specific piece for the Mudam’s Grand Hall, entitled Architecture, contre-architecture: transposition (9 October 2010 – 22 May 2011). This invitation will then be taken up at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, with two spectacular works which Buren has created specifically for Galerie 3. Daniel Buren’s works reveal, question and transform the properties of the spaces they occupy. Échos, works in situ takes over the most impressive gallery by the architects Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines. This 80-meter long gallery has been divided in half by a new wall, which is shown as an integral part of the proposed composition. In one part of the gallery, Les cabanes éclatées

DANIEL BUREN, ÉCHOS, WORKS IN SITU

2. Presentation of the work and career of Daniel Buren Beginnings

Critique of painting

Daniel Buren was born in 1938 in Boulogne-Billancourt. After training at the École des Métiers d’Art in Paris from 1957 to 1960, and a short spell at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, also in Paris, he embarked on numerous experiments involving painting, sculpture and film. From the first pictorial works of 1960, he rapidly adopted an economy of means which already emphasised the neutralising of painting’s illusionist content and indifference to the narrative subject, both central to his approach.

From December 1966 to September 1967, Buren worked with the painters Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni for a series of group events. Their joint practice was based upon systematic repetition of a single motif and the wish of each, in their own way, to paint “the last painting”. This shortlived association - which critics later, erroneously, dubbed BMPT - placed itself in radical opposition to the highly academic artistic environment that prevailed in Paris, dominated by the École de Paris. The four artists turned this environment upside-down with projects that gave rise to heated debate. This joint work took the form of a critical instrument which enabled Buren to examine not just the physical limits of painting, but also the political and cultural limits of the art world.

In September 1965, he came across a woven cotton cloth whose pattern would become the very basis of his vernacular: alternating white and coloured vertical stripes, each 8.7 cm wide. This choice of an industrially produced motif sat perfectly with his desire for objectivity by enabling him to work directly on a highly visible background/support and to accentuate the resolutely impersonal character of his work. In the first instance, Buren used this ordinary cloth as a medium. Initially he painted random organic forms which allowed part of the striped background/support to show through. He later reduced his intervention until only the two coloured stripes at each edge were covered with white acrylic paint then, from the end of 1967, the two outermost white stripes.

This degree zero of painting, far from signifying to him an end to art, instead became the point of departure for his approach.

DANIEL BUREN, ÉCHOS, WORKS IN SITU

The visual tool

From street to museum

Following this experiment, Buren found another use for his alternating stripes. Leaving behind work on repetition as such, he began to explore the potential of stripes as a sign. Thus he moved from the paintingobject to what he calls a “visual tool” including, from November 1967, having striped paper printed. This shift from painting to poster and then to wallpaper marks a fundamental break in his work, as the latter two forms enabled him to cover the most varied surfaces with a now infinite technique.

By 1967, the street was already one of Buren’s favourite sites, where he pasted his “affichages sauvages” posters. These clandestine activities, in the same way as leafleting, subway billboards or parades of sandwich-board men, were instrumental in winning Buren international recognition. His solo show at the Apollinaire Gallery in Milan in 1968, and his participation in the international “Prospect” events in 1968 and 1969, and subsequently in Düsseldorf, marked the real point of departure of his celebrity. Buren began to show his work in museums from the late 1960s, for 10 years always outside France and in exhibitions that linked him with conceptual art. While his taste for analysis and theoretical language very naturally identifies him with his American and European counterparts, Buren stands out for his firm belief in the need for a “concrete presence in the world,” as well as for an ongoing reflection on the use value of painting, and the need to raise these questions using elements of the visible world, as opposed to certain conceptual artists who claimed they could and would free themselves of it.

Buren thus freed himself from the imposed framework of the picture, but also the “white cube” and its walls. He forged the notion of in situ in visual arts, taken up by many others since, to characterise a practice that is intrinsically linked to the topological and cultural specificities of the place where the works are shown. He always analyses the place where he will install his stripes so as to bring to light certain of its specificities: the most significant as well as the least visible. Buren himself talks of an “instrument for seeing” as, by reducing the contents of the “picture” to a single and identifiable motif, he paradoxically expands the viewer’s visual field.

Still in the 1970s and 80s, this presence became an “omnipresence” using a diversity of support materials: walls, doors, hoardings, signposts or simply paper or cloth under glazed roofs, on stairways, trains, yachts, as flags on the roofs of Paris, waistcoats for museum staff, etc. From being continuous and repetitive, his work took on an infinite dimension, becoming more and more diverse and colourful. The institutional criticism it provoked became greater; at the same time, Buren transgressed the modernist prohibition of any decorative function.

DANIEL BUREN, ÉCHOS, WORKS IN SITU

From Street to Museum, cont’d

Public commission

In 1971, invited to take part in the 5th International Exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Buren branded the dominant Frank Lloyd Wright architecture by suspending a 200 sq. m. striped banner whose two outermost white stripes were covered with white acrylic paint on each right down the middle of the building’s central spiral. It was removed at the request of a handful of other artists. He occupied the same space afresh in 2005 with a monumental piece made of mirrors, part of his solo show, The Eye of the Storm.

The policy change that took hold in the 1980s allowed Buren to go on occupying public space in a less fugitive manner with durable works. The first and most famous is Les Deux Plateaux (1985-1986), commissioned by the French State for the courtyard of the Palais-Royal in Paris. The national debate that “Buren’s columns” provoked, and the awarding of the Golden Lion at the 1986 Venice Biennale for the best pavilion, ensured him true celebrity. Since then, Buren has continued to explore the intrinsic possibilities of public spaces in numerous commissions in France and beyond (Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Israel, China, Korea, United Kingdom, United States and Canada).

Pursuing his critique of exhibition sites and methods, Buren made headlines in 1972 during the notorious Documenta V in Kassel, organised by Harald Szeemann. Once again he stamped what has become his signature by covering the rails on which the other artists’ works were hung with striped paper. In doing so, he instituted a dialogue not only with the organiser of the exhibition himself but with his own work, shown in a separate space, alone on a wall as a work in the full sense of the term, while in the other sections he appeared as a backdrop or display case for other, alien works.

DANIEL BUREN, ÉCHOS, WORKS IN SITU

architecture The impression that the work is exploding, accentuated by the use of reflecting mirrors, encourages the viewer to move not just with their eyes but with their whole body.

Buren quickly focused on the ascendancy of architecture, particularly museum architecture, over art. He began to develop more three-dimensional work and a concept in which the work is no longer an object but a modulation of space, one example being the work removed from the Guggenheim in New York in January 1971.

Daniel Buren has created thousands of site-specific works around the world. While these works, most of which were destroyed after their exhibition, exist only in the place and time for which they were conceived, there remains an important body of permanent works in the collections of the most important international museums of modern and contemporary art. It is striking to note that such an economy of means should have engendered such a rich and complex oeuvre. Buren, still as prolific today, retains all his critical power and his ability to surprise.

The first Cabane Eclatée, created in 1975, was a real turning-point as it accentuated the interdependence between the work and the place that houses it by knowingly playing with construction and deconstruction. The cabins comprise an often four-sided structure in which geometric shapes are cut then projected onto the surrounding areas. Mises en demeures, Cabanes éclatées (Villeurbanne, 1999-2000) expanded the principle of the exploded cabin into a series of proposals playing on materials, forms and light, as did Cabanes aux céramiques et aux miroirs (Castellón, 2006). These are genuine architectural paradigms where the work becomes its own site, at the same time as the place of movement and strolling. More recent proposals appear as increasingly complex architectural devices, such as those conceived for Le Musée qui n’existait pas (Paris, 2002) or, most recently, Architecture contre-architecture (Luxembourg, 2010) and Allegro Vivace (Baden-Baden, 2011), all of which conduct a dialogue with the existing architecture. They deploy spaces within space, multiply materials (wood, vinyl, plastics, wire mesh, etc.) and explosions of colour. Since the early 1990s, colour is no longer applied only to the wall itself but is literally “installed in space” as filters or sheets of coloured glass or Plexiglas.

DANIEL BUREN, ÉCHOS, WORKS IN SITU

3. Publication AND DVD Publication

“Daniel Buren” DVD

Daniel Buren’s new project at the Centre Pompidou-Metz is a joint initiative of the Mudam Luxembourg, Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in and the Centre PompidouMetz. Daniel Buren has produced Architecture, contre-architecture: transposition, a site-specific work in the Mudam’s Grand Hall (9 October 2010-22 May 2011).

A double DVD chronicles the work of Daniel Buren and is a joint publication. It features a re-issue of the Daniel Buren DVD from the “Works & Process” collection, released in 2002 and now out of print, with a previously unreleased DVD of Couleurs superposées, Acte XIII, the performance which Daniel Buren directed at the Metz Metropolitan Opera and Theatre in September 2009 for Constellation, the Centre Pompidou-Metz pre-inauguration event.

To coincide with these two installations, the Mudam and the Centre Pompidou-Metz are jointly publishing a book with some sixty photographs of the two works in situ. This succession of images shows how light and perspective are the common denominator of both these projects.

This box set of two DVDs contains over 4 hours of viewing in 12 films including: – documentaries, such as Daniel Buren’s The Eye of the Storm exhibition (2005) at the Guggenheim in New York, and Allegro Vivace which is currently being shown in Baden-Baden (both directed by Gilles Coudert); – original, previously unseen footage including One Year of Ballets in Manhattan on Buren’s performance art in the streets of New York in 1977 and 1978; – audiovisual works by Daniel Buren. The second DVD shows, in full, Couleurs superposées, Acte XIII, the performance at the Metz Metropolitan Opera and Theatre in 2009 as part of Constellation. All the films in this new release are subtitled in English. Released May 2011 RRP: €25 On sale at the Flammarion bookshop at the Centre Pompidou-Metz Directed by Gilles Coudert, “Works & Process” is a collection of monographic DVDs on contemporary artists. Each “monograph” follows an encyclopaedic format to give insight into an artist’s work and process through various documentary features, films and archive footage, in addition to an original work.

DANIEL BUREN, ÉCHOS, WORKS IN SITU

4. VISITOR INFORMATION OPENING HOURS Exhibition open to the public from 8 May to 9 September 2011

Monday................. 11am-6pm Tuesday................ closed Wednesday........... 11am-6pm Thursday.............. 11am-8pm Friday................... 11am-8pm Saturday............... 10am-8pm Sunday.................. 10am-6pm Last ticket sales 45 minutes before closing time

ADMISSIONS General admission: € 7 A ticket gives admission to all the exhibitions showing on the day of your visit. Free admission (on presentation of an official document) for: — under 26s, — teachers with a Pass Education, — disabled visitors and a companion, — job-seekers who are registered . in France (proof of status must be . less than 6 months old), — beneficiaries of income support (proof . of status must be less than 6 months old), — beneficiaries of a basic State pension, — registered tour guides, — holders of an Icom, Icomos or Aica card, — journalists with a press card, — artists affiliated to the Maison des Artistes.

Audioguides: € 3 Multimedia audioguides can be rented . at the ticket desk. Languages: French, English, German. Adapted for hearing-impaired visitors (AFIL). For more information . go to www.centrepompidou-metz.fr

GROUPS Guided tour with . a Centre Pompidou-Metz guide Price: € 170 Languages: French, English, German The price includes admission, a 90-minute guided tour and group booking fees. Groups are strictly limited to 20 people. Group visit without a guide Price: € 7 per person + € 20 booking fee Groups are strictly limited to 20 people. Tour with an external guide Price: € 7 per person + € 20 booking fee which guarantees priority admission. Groups are strictly limited to 20 people.

The priority line is for: — holders of a Centre Pompidou-Metz Pass — disabled visitors and a companion — persons with reservations or pre-paid admission — holders of an Icom, Icomos or Aica card, — journalists with a press card.

WHERE TO BUY TICKETS ? At the Centre Pompidou-Metz Tickets can be purchased from the ticket desk or the ticket machines. Online — at our website: . www.centrepompidou-metz.fr — from our partners: Digitick, Fnac, . France Billet and TicketNet.

DANIEL BUREN, ÉCHOS, WORKS IN SITU

5. Partners of the Centre Pompidou-Metz The Centre Pompidou-Metz is the first offshoot of a French cultural institution, the Centre Pompidou, developed in collaboration with a regional authority, the Communauté d’Agglomération Metz Métropole (the combined district council for the Greater Metz area). Greater Metz was the contracting authority for the project and provided the majority of funding, in association with the City of Metz (agent) and the Centre Pompidou. Construction of the Centre Pompidou-Metz also received funding from the Conseil Général de la Moselle, the Conseil Régional de Lorraine, the French State and the European Union (European Regional Development Fund – ERDF). The Centre Pompidou-Metz is an “Établissement Public de Coopération Culturelle” whose foundermembers are the French State, the Centre Pompidou, the Lorraine Region, Communauté d’Agglomération de Metz Métropole and the City of Metz. The Centre Pompidou-Metz wishes to thank all its partners for their essential contribution to the staging of its exhibitions.

Mécène fondateur

In collaboration with Vranken Pommery Monopole

DANIEL BUREN, ÉCHOS, WORKS IN SITU

6. VISUaLS for the PRESS A CD of visuals for “Daniel Buren, ECHOS, works in situ” is included on the inside cover. Prior permission to reproduce these visuals must be granted by ADAGP subject to the terms and conditions set out below. All royalties must be paid to ADAGP. Press publications which have an agreement with ADAGP should refer to the terms of this agreement. For all other press publications: royalties are waived for the first two reproductions illustrating an article on a current event up to a maximum of one quarter-page; in excess of this number or format, reproduction rights must be paid; any reproduction on a front cover or front page must have the prior permission of the ADAGP Press Division; all reproductions must be credited as follows: Daniel Buren, “Photo Souvenir”: Échos, works in situ, Centre Pompidou-Metz, May 2011 © Adagp, Paris 2011, Daniel Buren / Photo Rémi Villagi For online publications: royalties are waived for the first two reproductions illustrating an article on a current event; in excess of this number, reproduction rights must be paid; all reproductions must be credited as follows: Daniel Buren, “Photo Souvenir”: Échos, works in situ, Centre Pompidou-Metz, May 2011 © Adagp, Paris 2011, Daniel Buren / Photo Rémi Villagi

ADAGP Patricia Louot & Géraldine de Spéville Société des Auteurs dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques 11, rue Berryer - 75008 Paris, France Tel. : +33 (0)1 43 59 09 79 - Fax. : +33 (0)1 45 63 44 89 www.adagp.fr

DANIEL BUREN, ÉCHOS, WORKS IN SITU

7. NOTES

DANIEL BUREN ÉCHOS WORKS IN SITU PRESS PACK

08.05 > 09.09.2011 www.centrepompidou-metz.fr