In Conversation with Daniel Buren

Photo-souvenir: Badaling, China, September 2005 © Daniel Buren

Daniel Buren
Intervention II
Modern Art Oxford
4 November 2006 – 28 January 2007

Daniel Buren’s photograph of Chinese tree decorations acts as a double tactic for the advertisement of his current exhibition, Intervention II, at Modern Art Oxford.

Part of his Photo-souvenir series from Badaling, China (2005), the image outlines his interest in the iconic. Due to the cultural nature of this connotation, we are made aware of a disjuncture between the site the photograph indexes and the site in which it is relocated; namely as an advert pertaining to his exhibition in Oxford. I approached Buren about what I perceived to be a religious haunt in his work, as well as discussing with the artist the importance of a site-specific viewing context.

One repeats a prayer, or creates a permutation of it.

Within the Upper Gallery at Modern Art Oxford, repeated across six aligned rows of suspended frames, Buren has installed coloured perspex panes via a logic of alphabetical correspondence:

A - blue
B - orange
C - pink
D - red
E - yellow

Daylight halls through the panes via the windows at the front of the gallery, to create perpetual shifts of line, colour and plane, dependent entirely on the physical position of the viewer within the space.


Photo-souvenir: From three windows, 5 colours for 252 places
work in situ, 2006
Photo Stephen White (with thanks to Calumet rental NW1)
© Daniel Buren and Modern Art Oxford

For Buren, the coloured panes have no translatable value beyond the way they are used as props that play with the light coming into the gallery via the windows.

For me, however, his choice of mass-produced Perspex sheets place the transcendent coloured light in contra-dialogue with the engineered life and the after-life of the material itself.

I asked Buren what will happen to the Perspex after the show ends. He talked about the specific choices he had made with regard to the size and the luminosity of the custom-made batch he had ordered, for what he firmly sees as ‘architectural interventions’ within the galleries at Modern Art Oxford. He spoke of the irrelevance and impracticability of keeping hold of the material to re-use in another show for example.

For me, the logistical nature of Buren’s comments re-write his choreography of materials within the show with a performative edge, with an emphasis very much placed on the site-specific cognitive realisation of the piece on the part of the viewer. The notion of the custom-made exhibition, therefore, is as important in necessitating a physical reception for the work as it is in permutating the politics of Buren’s iconic performance as ‘The Stripe Man’.