Bernar Venet - Art Plural Gallery

The Paradox of Coherence
Art Selection
Curriculum Vitae
Acknowledgements
The definition of the work of art as no more than its technical specifications was a direct attack on the idea of art
as spiritual transcendence. Venet’s contemporaries in New York were the conceptual artists, but his formation was
quite different from theirs. Whereas they based their explorations on the disjunction between word and image on
the analytic investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the verifiability principle of A.J. Ayer - texts that were available
in English - Venet was inspired by the theories of French semiologist Jacques Bertin, at a time when semiotics
was barely known in the United States because the texts had not been translated yet.
Venet had already been drawing and painting diagrams when Jacques Bertin published his Sémiologie graphique
in 1967, but in Bertin’s theories of linguistics, which defined the three types of visual communication he found a
solid basis for continuing his use of graphic linear formulas as imagery that could not be interpreted any other way,
despite the fact that their context was displaced from textbooks to paintings and later sculpture. In France, Bertin
ran a laboratory where researchers came with drawings for the technical publications. His colleagues noticed that
almost nobody looked at them and even fewer people understood them. This was precisely Venet’s aim: to create
a roadblock to interpretation.
In Paris, structuralism was the analytic method of the day. However, among the first to use the term structuralism
in relation to art was the American sculptor and critic Jack Burnham who wrote The Structure of Art in 1971. The
title refers to the structure based on linguistic models within a work of art that reveals how content is signified.
Burnham singled out Venet as one of the most important practitioners of the structural model in art and reproduced
his photographic enlargement of a page of The Logic of Decision and Action that Venet exhibited in 1969.
Venet’s selection of the text was not arbitrary: he was searching for a way to base art on logical and rational decisions
that would be the basis for a system 7 . For Burnham, Venet’s conceptual work had a double-headed implication.
On the one hand, Burnham wrote, “He is presenting a text which to some extent reveals the constancy of the
structure of art-making. At the same time through the dialectical, and thus historical, progression of knowledge as
an integral aspect of the human condition, he is subverting the historical-mythic structure behind all avant-garde
art.” This was of course exactly Venet’s intention.
1969 was a busy year for Venet, now an active participant in the New York art world. John Perreault often noted
his activities as part of the downtown avant-garde in his columns in The Village Voice. On May 1, he announced
the Free Art Street Works, a group exhibition in which Venet participated. Among the participating artists were Vito
Acconci, Scott Burton, Arakawa, and James Lee Byars. In his June 5 column, Perreault reviewed the Para-Visual
Language II exhibition at the Dwan Gallery and Lucy Lippard’s Art Workers Coalition Benefit at the Paula Cooper
Gallery where Venet contributed works along with Lawrence Weiner, Sol LeWitt, Bill Bollinger, Robert Smithson,
Mel Bochner, Michael Kirby, Joseph Kosuth, Adrian Piper, On Kawara, Robert Morris, and Bruce Nauman. On
December 18, 1969 Perreault wrote: “I have been receiving The Wall Street Journal every morning courtesy of
7 Jack Burnham, The Structure of Art. George Braziller, New York, USA, 1971.
Paintings, 1976-1978, acrylic on canvas
Exhibition: Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), Valencia, Spain, 2010
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