‘Aux Beaux Carrés : travaux in situ’
Daniel Buren at Le Bon Marché
Bienvenue and welcome back to Musée Musings, your idiosyncratic guide to Paris and art. Today we’re at Le Bon Marché, where this year’s annual art event, scheduled to coincide with the store’s White Sale, is up for two more weeks. In the past, I’ve told you that for me, experiencing art is better than eating patisseries. You can look at art for as long as you wish without worrying about the waves of nausea that often accompany overindulgence in sweets. Similarly, looking at art beats buying a frock (or a cashmere sweater as I did) because there’s never any buyer’s remorse.
The annual art event at Le Bon Marché is in its ninth year. Ai Wei Wei kicked off the series in 2016. Since then, I have enjoyed (and written about) the work of 7 of the 9 artists - Chiharu Shiota, Joana Vasconcelos, Prune Nourry, Mehmet Ali Uysal and Subodh Gupta. (Figs 1-3) How I missed the other two, I simply do not know.
Figure 1. Prune Nourry at Bon Marché, 2021
Figure 2. Mehmet Ali Uysal at Bon Marché, 2022
Figure 3. Subodh Gupta, Bon Marché, 2023
These often show stopping, sometimes jaw dropping store-wide exhibitions invade the store’s windows, central retail space and temporary exhibition space. They are exactly what we need to brighten our winter in this City of (too little) Light.
This year, the store has been taken over by ‘the stripe guy,’ the octogenarian Paris native, Daniel Buren. If you spend any time in Paris or anytime looking at photos of Paris, you will know one of Buren’s most famous works. Now referred to as Les Colonnes de Buren, its official name is Les Deux Plateaux. It’s the art installation Buren created in 1986 for the Cour d’Honneur (inner courtyard) of the Palais Royal. (Figs 4,5)
Figure 4. Colonnes de Buren, Cour d’Honneur, Palais Royal
Figure 5. Ginevra at Colonnes de Buren, Cour d’Honneur, Palais Royal
The Colonnes de Buren is a grid of 260 black and white striped marble cylinders of different heights. The black marble is from Carrara, Italy where Michelangelo shopped for his marble. The white marble is from the south of France. You can wander around the cylinders and even scramble up onto them, as children and influencers do all the time. At various places, you can even peek down into the service level below.
Buren begins his site-specific projects by analyzing the constraints of the site. He then formulates a response. In a courtyard of columns, Buren’s “…cylinders provide a sort of visual echo to the architecture (16th century columns) surrounding the courtyard (to) create a three-dimensional space without obscuring the existing architecture.”
As with any art work, temporary or permanent, slated for a public space in Paris, (from Christo’s Wraps to Jeff Koon’s Bouquet of Tulips, (Figs 6, 7) from Gustave Eiffel’s Tower to I.M. Pei’s Pyramid) there was controversy surrounding this installation. Which is crazy considering that when Buren was given the commission, the space was a parking lot! And the installation had a purpose - to cover exposed ventilation shafts. But this being Paris, the proposed project “became a battlefield between local and national authorities, between left- wing and right-wing politicians. There was debate in the Council of State and in the French Parliament. There was a lawsuit…”
Figure 6. Arc de Triomphe wrapped, Christo & Jeanne Claude
Figure 7. Bouquet of Tulips, Petit Palais, Jeff Koons
The project was the brainchild of one of my heroes -Jack Lang, who, as Minister of Culture in the 1980s, was responsible for so many enhanced public spaces and so many annual public cultural events - among them Fete de la Musique and Journées du Patrimoine. Buren’s project was attacked for its cost and its unsuitability to a historic landmark. Lang just ignored the controversy and forged ahead. Although as it happens, the columns were expensive to install and have been expensive to maintain.
By the time Buren created Les Colonnes de Buren, he had been working with stripes for 20 years. This is how that started. In 1965, Buren visited the Marché Saint-Pierre, a textile market in Paris. He was drawn to the rolls of striped canvas. They reminded him of the awnings outside Parisian cafés. (Fig 8) Not knowing exactly what he would do with it, he bought meters and meters of it. He eventually gave them a name. He calls them his ‘visual tool.’
Figure 8. Café Hugo, my local café, Place des Vosges
Buren uses stripes to draw attention to whatever site he is commissioned to embellish. And because the stripes are so ubiquitous, our attention is drawn to their context, to their physical surroundings. Maybe too, to the social and political dimensions of these contexts. (MoMA, NYC)
Buren is a cowboy, a renegade, a guy who used to practice the kind of stealth art we associate with contemporary street artists, like Banksy. For example, for his first signifiant solo gallery show (Milan,1968), he blocked the only entrance to the gallery, a glass door, with a striped support. The next year, Buren wanted to take part in an exhibition in Bern, Switzerland. He hadn’t been invited. Artists who had been invited offered to give him some of their space. But Buren preferred to go it solo. So, without being given permission, he covered city billboards with his striped material. He was arrested and then expelled from Switzerland.
A couple years later, in 1971, he was invited to participate in a group exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. This time it was fellow artists who objected to his work. The theme of the group exhibition was how to show works of art in Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, notorious for its difficult spaces. Buren hung a huge blue and white striped banner (20 x 10 meters) in the huge central space of the museum. (Fig 9) Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and a few other artists “protested that the banner blocked views across the rotunda, compromising their works. Buren, in turn, said Flavin's fluorescent lights colored his banner.” Tit for tat except that it was Buren’s banner that came down the night before the exhibition opened. It was a fiasco which led to the resignation of one of the Museum’s curators.
Figure 9. Daniel Buren at the Guggenheim, New York, 1971
More than 30 years later, in 2005, Buren was invited back to the Guggenheim. This time for a solo show. (Figs 10-11) And this time, Buren was every bit as uncompromising as he created site-specific pieces for the entire museum. But this time, his battle was only with Wright for prominence.
Figure 10. Daniel Buren takes over the Guggenheim, 2005
Figure 11. Daniel Buren takes over the Guggenheim, 2005
Daniel Buren told Connaissance d’Art, “My work can be placed and can exist almost anywhere … (it is) not an object that people …transport and present here and there. Each time it is something special linked to the place in question. I don't accept everything and anything…” He accepts the commissions that interest him.
Before I tell you about Burin’s Bon Marché installation, I want to share some images of Buren’s intervention at another iconic building owned by the LVMH group. (Figs 12, 13) In 2016, Buren was invited to bring his magic to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Frank Gehry designed museum in the Bois de Bologne. Called “Observatory of Light” Burin’s installation, which remained in situ for one year, was placed directly over the building’s emblematic glass ‘sails’.
Figure 12. ‘Observatory of Light,’ Fondation Louis Vuitton, Daniel Buren, 2016- 2017
Figure 13, Me at ‘Observatory of Light,’ Fondation Louis Vuitton, Daniel Buren, 2016- 2017
This is how the Fondation’s website describes it, “the twelve ‘sails’, formed of 3,600 pieces of glass are covered by a staggering array of colored filters that are in turn punctuated, at equal distances from one another, by alternating white and blank stripes perpendicular to the ground. The thirteen selected colors make colored forms appear and disappear, ever-changing with the time of day and the season. Through a play of colors, projections, reflections, transparencies and contrasts, both inside and outside, Daniel Buren shows this building in a new light.”
Now let’s look at the Buren installation at Le Bon Marché. According to the store’s website, Buren’s signature concept (which we already know) is: How to reveal a space. It’s what Buren has been exploring his entire career. It is at the heart of his creative process. He doesn’t work in a studio or a workshop. He works on site, in situ. His goal is to transform, with his seemingly simple squares and stripes, the space in which those squares and stripes are placed. He strives to offer “a new look, new points of view, a renewed perspective and a resizing of space through the use of volumes, colors, play of contrasts and lights.”
In the central space, Buren’s ‘visual tool,’ (aka stripes), “dialogues with the architectural elements of the department store… the crossed escalators. (Fig 14)
Figure 14. Daniel Buren at Le Bon Marché, 2024
Daniel Buren’s ‘visual tool’ also shows up on the exterior columns along the rue de Sèvres. (Fig 15) As a critic writing for Connaissance d’Art notes, Daniel Buren’s famous “visual tool,” his signature pattern of alternating vertical stripes, reveals all the specificities of a place - analyzing, questioning and highlighting it by revealing its particularities…” Buren himself puts it this way: “The ‘visual tool' makes it possible both to signal the emergence of work in a place and finally to interact with the place itself, its functions, its uses, its qualities.”
Figure 15. Daniel Buren at Le Bon Marché, 2024
Also in the central space, “Daniel Buren made the bold bet of playing with an emblematic element of the Bon Marché Rive Gauche: the glass roof located in the heart of the department store. (Figs 16-18) In front of the central escalator, the glass ceiling tiles give birth to two immense works composed of more than 1,500 polycarbonate squares and white adhesives on one hand, pink on the other, which unfold in space and diffracts light, like an incredible three-dimensional checkerboard.”
Figure 16. Daniel Buren at Le Bon Marché, 2024
Figure 17. Daniel Buren at Le Bon Marché, 2024
Figure 18. Daniel Buren at Le Bon Marché, 2024
On the second floor, in the temporary exhibition space, Buren put two of his ‘Cabanes explodees,’ ‘Exploded Cabins,’ which he has been making since 1975. One is yellow, the other is blue. Visitors walk into them and wander around in them. (Figs 19–23) The experience is immersive thanks to a combination of colors, materials and light-reflecting mirrors. Like giant kaleidoscopes, the spaces offer multiple perspectives. Buren said this, “In these cabins made of transparent and translucent panels, the public will be able to wander through passages. The doors of the cabins will be “exploded” out of their initial positions and will be stuck on the reflective walls.”
Figure 19. Cabanes explodees, Daniel Buren at Le Bon Marché, 2024
Figure 20. Cabanes explodees, Daniel Buren at Le Bon Marché, 2024
Figure 21. Cabanes explodees, Daniel Buren at Le Bon Marché, 2024
Figure 22. Cabanes explodees, Daniel Buren at Le Bon Marché, 2024
Figure 23. Cabanes explodees, Daniel Buren at Le Bon Marché, 2024
As you will see, when you go, and I hope you do - you will give more attention to the central space’s magnificent ceiling than you ever have, you will be surprised how putting stripes on the elevators changes everything. And, if you love Kusama’s Infinity Rooms but not the long wait to experience them or the short time you can linger inside them, then you really must get yourself to Le Bon Marché. Buren’s immersive spaces aren’t the same as Kusama’s, of course, but they’re marvelous and a little unnerving. And since this is a store and not a museum, there’s no entry fee.
As always I am grateful for your comments, Gros Bisous, Dr. ‘B.’
New comments on Back in the High Life Again:
Very glad to know you made it back to Paris safely and comfortably! I enjoyed reading about Daniel Buren. We saw Les Colonnes de Buren when we were in Paris last Nov. but didn’t know very much about it. I love his graphic, geometric style and enjoyed seeing how he designed the displays at Le Bon Marché. Keep enjoying your time back in Paris, Sydney, Portland, Oregon
Glad you are back in Paris safe and sound. Air travel can be “interesting” these days., Deedee, Baltimore
Figured you were on your way back to Paris ! ha ha ! glad to know you are there and back in the swing of things, JG in Bay Area
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