Drownout France

Daniel Buren, the stripe guy, in Paris

Daniel Buren, the stripe guy, in Paris

The Palais Royal. 27 Juin.

A major new show for the summer has opened at the Centre Georges Pompidou, which is the main museum of modern art in Paris.

They've given the top floor to Daniel Buren, a guy I always liked every since Rosalind Krauss told me about him in 20th Century Art.
What I liked so much about him was this thing he had for stripes, which you can see in both pictures on the right. In one famous "stunt", he went all around New York and replaced the awnings on buildings with his black-and-white striped pattern.

On the video screen outside the exposition they showed some even more interesting stuff. Protesters carrying large placards as they marched back and forth in front of major art and political sites, but the placards were just big rectangular fields of the stripes. It has all the elements of the great art of the 70s: channeling political energy without necessarily adopting a conventional political attitude, taking art out of bounds into the street or the night, hypostatizing the artistic element--the striped field--into the minimal expression of the visual character of what is artistic (the stripes aren't accidental, wherever they turn up you know they were put there on purpose).

A floor from the new show. 30 Juin.

So France hired him to liven up a space in one of those big empty palace quads, at the Palais Royal just behind the Louvre. He put in a cipher of columns, of different heights, striped, with matching window awnings of the same stripes. The result is an absolutely lively and fun-house type place that's great for taking pictures. Parisians, through the medium of Le Monde, consider it a modern classic on an order with I.M. Pei's pyramid at the Louvre. And indeed it shares many of the ideas of classical antiquity transformed and delivered to modern people.

As for the show at Pompidou, it's all new work. Very architectural: he divided up the huge roof-level floor of the museum into 20-25 square rooms, then did crazy things to them. Put mirrors all around, or painted them in his stripes or in new interesting fields of color, or projected light-fields of color, etc. Again, a fun place and nice for taking photos. Here's a neat video we took while there.

Posted by amol at July 2, 2002 10:10 AM