Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to ...

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Conceptual Art 1962- 1969 137Haacke after 1966. In fact an institutional critique became the central focus of allthree artists' assaults on the false neutrality of vision that provides the underlyingrationale for those institutions.In 1965, Buren-like his American peers-took off from a critical investigationof Minimalism. His early understanding of the work of Flavin, Ryman,and Stella rapidly enabled him to develop positions from within a strictlypainterly analysis that soon led to a reversal of painterly/sculptural concepts ofvisuality altogether. Buren was engaged on the one hand with a critical review ofthe legacy of advanced modernist (and postwar American) painting and on theother in an analysis of Duchamp's legacy, which he viewed critically as the utterlyunacceptable negation of painting. This particular version of reading Duchampand the readymade as acts of petit-bourgeois anarchist radicality-while notnecessarily complete and accurate-allowed Buren to construct a successfulcritique of both: modernist painting and Duchamp's readymade as its radicalhistorical Other. In his writings and his interventions from 1967 onwards,through his critique of the specular order of painting and of the institutionalDaniel Buren. Installation at theGuggenheim International Exhibition.1971.
Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni.Manijestation Number Four, September1967, F$h Biennale de Paris, Mushd'art moderne de la Ville de Paris...,,..,"roro., yym -.l.,,,.l, 'I.,- I.11.) ' ' 'I"-a.. . . ...I..- .....-- - *....framework determining it, Buren singularly succeeded in displacing both theparadigms of painting and that of the readymade (even twenty years later thiscritique makes the naive continuation of object production in the Duchampianvein of the readymade model appear utterly irrelevant).From the perspective of the present, it seems easier to see that Buren'sassault on Duchamp, especially in his crucial 1969 essay Limites Critiques, wasprimarily directed at the conventions of Duchamp reception operative and predominantthroughout the late 1950s and early '60s, rather than at the actualimplications of Duchamp's model itself. Buren's central thesis was that the fallacyof Duchamp's readymade was to obscure the very institutional and discursiveframing conditions that allowed the readymade to generate its shifts in theassignment of meaning and the experience of the object in the first place. Yet,one could just as well argue, as Marcel Broodthaers would in fact suggest in hiscatalogue of the exhibition The Eagle from the Oligocene to Today in Diisseldorf in1972, that the contextual definition and syntagmatic construction of the work ofart had obviously been initiated by Duchamp's readymade model first of all.In his systeinatic analysis of the constituting elements of the discourse ofpainting, Buren came to investigate all the parameters of artistic production andreception (an analysis that, incidentally, was similar to the one performed byLawrence Weiner in arriving at his own "matrix" formula). Departing fromMinimalism's (especially Ryman's and Flavin's) literalist dismemberment of painting,Buren at first transformed the pictorial into yet another model of opacityand objecthood. (This was accomplished by physically weaving figure and
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Page 17 and 18: VARIOUS ' I x * Edward Rurcha. Four
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Page 29 and 30: Robert Morris. Four Mirrored Cubes.
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