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Eduardo Bello

Prof. Patrick Greaney

SPAN 5320-002

4 December 2018

Daniel Buren’s Répertoire

Répertoire (1998), from French painter and in situ artist Daniel Buren, is one example

of the artist’s attempts to broaden the extension of his practice, in this case, to the field of

artist books. Although his involvement with a genre so conscious of the material and

conceptual condition of its medium is not tangential, he has contributed to it rather as a

“practitioner who makes books as an ongoing component of his general work” (Drucker 80),

than as an artist whose major focus is the book form itself. Buren’s aesthetic undertakings

often focus on the relationship between the artwork and the space. This has directed his

practice through different stages of reflection around the conditions that determine art

exhibition. Diverse in mediums and procedures, his praxis has spanned over nearly five

decades with a recognizable visual and formal vocabulary.

In an early stage of his career, Buren aimed to question and challenge the artistic

market practices with temporary, sometimes clandestine, interventions (Benezit). His initial

enterprise began with the discovery of what he calls his “visual tool”, a pattern of bicolor

vertical stripes 8.7 cm wide. He used this colored and patterned fabric as the visual field for

his painting in his first artworks during the second half of the sixties. This allowed him to

establish a subtle dialectic between the pictorial act itself and the canvas as a conceptual and

physical space (Lelong 34). Later, he started to deploy the same mechanism outside of

traditional exhibition spaces. These site and time specific interventions aimed to point out
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the specificity of the works’ placement. For instance, in Affichages Sauvages (1969), he set

up the patterned canvas on billboards and advertisements around Paris. The iterative nature

of the visual tool displaced the focus of the piece from the graphic content of the artwork to

the site of its display, questioning the neutrality of the exhibition locus and the expectation

of novelty from the viewers.

Buren gradually started to work in galleries, cultural buildings, museum exhibitions

and biennales, abandoning his original rejection of institutional spaces and networks. As a

consequence, his pieces were no longer clandestine and started being commanded by

institutional agents who accepted their ephemeral character (Benezit). A noteworthy piece of

this shift is Peinture/Sculpture (1971), a temporary intervention on the hallmark stairwell of

the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. This large-scale in situ piece consisted

on the suspension of a canvas 20 meters high by 20 meters wide printed with alternating

stripes. The commercial success and critical acclaim that followed the early stages of Buren’s

art placed his recognizable visual tools and formal procedures in a privileged position on the

field of cultural production. This is exemplified by the fact that two of his more important

pieces of the mid-eighties were commissioned by preeminent agents of the French cultural

field. One of them, a colonnade in the courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris named Two

Plateaus (1986), was expressly commanded by the French Ministry of Culture as a

permanent intervention in a public space. The other, The Pavilion Cut, Cut Up, Carved,

Engraved, was conceived by Buren for the French pavilion at the 42th Venice Biennale of

1986, and awarded him the Golden Lion for best national participation.

Due to the forsaking of some of the constitutive principles of his initial aesthetic

proposals, such as the ephemeral nature of the pieces, Buren’s late work became an

instrument of investment, reproduction and collection. The abandonment of the conceptual

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character of his trademark gestures has exerted an important influence in the nature of his

recent art (Benezit), which nevertheless remains easily recognizable because of its formal

repertoire. Some of the newest entries in Buren’s catalogue include: Photo-souvenirs au

carré (2010), a series of scarves for the French firm Hermès; Observatory of Light (2016), a

colorful intervention on the glass windows of Frank Gehry’s Louis Vuitton Foundation

building; and From the Rotonda to the Fountain, 5 colors for Mexico (2018), the first

permanent installation of the artist in Mexico, specially commissioned to stand in the middle

of a luxury shopping mall in the country’s capital.

Since Buren’s pieces could only exist in a specific place for a determined period of

time, he documented them by taking photographs, called photo-souvenirs. The artist’s first

involvement with the book medium can be traced to the compendium of photo-souvenirs of

his pieces. These have been used to produce artists books, mostly during the seventies and

eighties. Legend I/II (1973), alternates pictures of the artist’s interventions on advertisements

in subway stations in Paris with full-page reproductions of the unmistakable striped pattern.

Ponctuations. Statue/sculpture (1980) holds an account of Buren’s work intervening on the

plinths of public monuments in the French city of Lyon and is followed by a short pamphlet

with texts from the artist that discuss the theoretical framework of these pieces. Essai

hétéroclite (1981) is about a project on the uniforms of museum guards and D’une impression

à l’autre (1984) follows a format similar to that of Legend I/II, collecting photo-souvenirs of

different of Buren’s works in different surroundings. Being created as a reproduction of a

preexisting work rather than an original form of art, Buren’s first incursions into the book

format fall short from some of the constitutive principles of the artist book genre. However,

they do share a certain awareness of the medium that would prevent them to be labeled just

as catalogues from previous art pieces.

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Répertoire (1998) differs from Buren’s previous volumes by focusing in the book

form’s specific conventions to make a work of art in and of itself. Created by the artist as

part of a series of artists books envisioned by the directors of the Center for Contemporary

Art Kitakyushu in Japan, Répertoire follows the parameters of the traditional codex form,

which are binding, even-sized pages and fixed sequence (Drucker 74). The book’s spiral

binding allows an easy turning of the pages and a full view of each page’s composition. This

provides the piece with both the cinematic and double-spread stasis potential of the codex.

Sized 21.5 x 16 cm, an octavo, it is housed in a simple black case with red lettering that

echoes the book’s cover. Nevertheless, since some of these external traits are found in other

volumes of the CCA Kitakyushu book series, it is hard to tell how much leeway the artist had

regarding the design and material of the book and how much was shaped by the editorial

identity or the series or by other agents involved in the publishing process.

The book is divided into nine sections, tabbed by cuts on the fore edge of the pages,

similar to those of a planner or a directory. In each section, Buren deploys a variation of his

standard conceptual operation of transferring the viewer’s attention from the content of the

piece to the framework that determines the conditions of exhibition (Buchloch 48). In this

case, the mediating device brought into question are the conventions of the book artifact and

the flatness of its pages as a mere support for literary or pictorial illusion. The artist

emphasizes the potential of the codex as art form by exploiting its inherent material

conditions and by taking into account the customary physical engagement of the

spectator/reader with the object.

This overarching structure, together with the fixed sequential convention of the

codex, provides the book with what Joanna Drucker calls a “non-narrative visual sequence”,

where the relationship between images, forms and colors is forged page to page through
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juxtaposition and movement (275). Composed around a numerical pattern around the number

three, Répertoire’s nine segments comprise six different two-page spreads each. Their

placement in the book-sequence reveals a conscientiously proportionate structure. The

middle section serves as the keynote around which the two proportional halves of the volume

are symmetrically mirrored. Each of them consists of a scheme that alternates cut outs

(découpes) and transparences (transparences).

A persistent feature in all sections are two adjacent stripes on each side of the gutter.

When the book is spread, these inner margins suggest, as the blanks between print space

normally do, a vertical intersecting stripe. Buren punctuates this element of the visual

convention of the page and uses it to build a variation of the stripped pattern that characterizes

his pictorial interventions. Drawing upon the compositional and chromatic aspects given by

the template, Buren executes different operations on the areas dictated by the ground’s design

in a similar fashion to that of his early paintings on stripped canvas. These chromatic

alterations exploit the page not only as a flat visual surface, but also as a multidimensional

element of the book artifact. The following descriptions of the book sections don’t follow the

sequential order in which they appear. They are grouped according to the technique they use:

cut out, transparence or reflection.

In the first section, “découpes nº 1: carrés découpés”, Buren cut squares of the same

size in different placements of each page. With each page turn, the square cuts reframe

different combinations of the stripes’ colors, allowing the pictorial content of the pages to be

read against each other in a dimensional relation and not only as a sequence of flat isolated

planes. By doing so, it reactivates the activity of turning the page to reveal the book’s

possibilities as an artifact whose material properties carry out elements of flat, three-

dimensional and cinematic expressivity. This same operation is iterated with some variations
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in the third, seventh and ninth segments, the découpes 2, 3 and 4. In “découpes 2 : du

rectangle au carré”, an initial rectangular cut is superimposed to smaller aligned cuts that

decompose the rectangle in colors and sizes. Both “découpes 3: triangles découpés” and

“découpes 4: polychromie” feature sliced pages with different edge alignments. The slits are

oblique in the former and straight horizontal in the latter, allowing new configurations of

color and shapes via the spatial imposition of areas of blockage.

All the even sections of the book experiment with the opacity and translucence of the

pages. The layering of pages with different degrees of transparency, forms and colors attains

an effect that relies both on the accumulation in height and depth and on the disposition of

openings and blockages between the pages. The second section, “transparence nº1 :

polychromie I”, uses a translucent paper to deconstruct the white and colored stripes of

Buren’s signature pattern on separate pages. These alternate their opacities between the inner

white margins and the colored stripes. “Transparence nº 2 : obliques, horizontales, verticales

noires” and “transparence nº 3 : obliques, horizontales, verticales colorées” use transparent

pages with black and colored lines in different arrangements over the space normally covered

by the colored stripes. In these segments, the spatial suspension of the pages against each

other allows different combinations of color density. In “transparence nº4 : du fragment à

l’ensemble”, white separate rectangles aligned in different transparent pages arrange a

vertical stripe in the recto side of the first two-page spread. By turning the pages, the stripe

decomposes and is rearranged on the opposite side.

Finally, Miroir : la couleur et son reflet utilizes reflection as a mean of experimenting

with the page’s potential of conveying three-dimensional depth. Every verso side in this

segment is covered by silver coated paper to reflect the stripped pattern on the adjacent page.

The other sections used cuts and transparencies to treat the page as a material component of
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the book rather than as a conceptual flat space of visual communication. On the contrary,

“miroir…” carries the full potential of the page as a surface that supports an illusion, bringing

into question the nature of the image and its relation to the page. Unlike the reproduction of

a picture in a page, the completion of a virtual stripped pattern on the page is only attained

by positing the two-page spread in a specific oblique way. Since this requires an even more

active intervention of the spectator that is manipulating the book, the act of turning the page

itself, in all of its visual, temporal and spatial dimension, becomes the specific site and

moment of the artist’s intervention.

Even though Répertoire is not one of Buren’s most well-known works, it is an

outstanding piece where his formal preoccupations intersect. As a coda, it would also be

important to think about the position of this piece within some other parameters that come

into play when we try to understand a work of art as an artist book. If artistic publishing

practices can be conceptualized as an alternative to the usual circuits of the dominant artist

market (Gilbert 16), then the election of book medium could be understood as an aesthetic

statement similar to that of Buren’s early interventions. However, since Répertoire appeared

in a late moment of Buren’s career and was commanded by an art institution, this is arguably

an example of the embedding of a protagonist of another field in the artistic book scene

(Gilbert 13). Répertoire certainly qualifies as an artist book due to Buren’s engagement with

exploiting the codex possibilities as a medium in immanent formal terms. Nonetheless, it

would also be helpful to approach the release of this particular book taking into account all

the other factors that shape the process of the publishing practice.
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Bibliography

Artists’ Books. A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, edited by Joan Lyons, Visual Studies
Workshop Press, 1991.

Buchloch, Benjamin. “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary

Art”, Artforum, vol. 21, no. 1, 1982, pp. 43-56.

Buren, Daniel. Répertoire. Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, 1998.

Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists’ Books. Granary Books, 1995.

“Daniel Buren”. Benezit Dictionary of Artists, 31 Oct. 2011.

Glaves-Smith, John and Ian Chilvers. “Daniel Buren”, A Dictionary of Modern and
Contemporary Art. 3rd ed., Oxford UP, 2015.

Lelong, Guy. Daniel Buren. Translated by David Radzinowicz, Flammarion, 2002.

Pacquement, Alfred. “Daniel Buren”, Grove Art Online, 2003.

Publishing as Artistic Practice, ed. Annette Gilbert. Sternberg Press, 2016.