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.
07