Daniel Buren

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 24 Number 2, 2006

Transcript

Daniel Buren (born 1938) works and lives in France and is one of the most important conceptual artists of the post war period. He started his career as a painter and began his famous installations with wall painted stripes and striped materials in 1965. The stripes are always 8.7cm apart and this method has been a consistency in Buren’s work. Voile/Toile Toile/Voile is Buren’s site-specific piece, a Regatta, which was staged at the Wordsworth Trust on Lake Grasmere in July 2005. Buren’s trademark stripes are featured on the sails of a fleet of nine small sailing boats. The boats are raced by children and undertake a series of sailing manoeuvres. This event has previously been staged all over the world in a variety of environments and scales ranging from Lake Geneva to the Red Sea.

Kathy Kubicki: We're sitting at Lake Grasmere and I'm with Daniel Buren and we’ve just watched the Regatta on the 30th Anniversary of the first time your piece was shown. Whereabouts was the first showing?

Daniel Buren: In the Vanzeen, Berlin and there's this huge lake where all the outdoor activity in Berlin was happening.

KK: That was thirty years ago.

DB: Exactly thirty years ago, yes.

KK: And since that time you've also shown this piece in eight other venues including this one?

DB: Yeah, I don't remember the numbers exactly but it's certainly around 8 or 9 in different places, on lakes and rivers and even in the sea, in Israel in Tel Aviv.

KK: So each time you show the piece does it become a different experience?

DB: First of all it's quite a didactic piece. We kept the same rules, where the first step is done on the water and the second step is inside the space, which can be a museum or a gallery. It has to be a couple of steps to complete the piece. The installation inside follows the arrival of the Regatta but it's always different, depending of the space. The Regatta itself follows the rules of a regatta, and is always different because of the people who play.

KK: So in that sense it's a performance, and then you take the sails into the gallery and install them?

DB: Yes, so the reading of both makes the piece complete.

KK: Do you feel that it might happen again?

DB: You know this piece doesn't belong to me any more. It's a work that was bought by some collectors and when they wanted this piece I said immediately: ‘This is not possible’. Because I knew then it would end on a wall somewhere and it was not at all the spirit of the piece. And they said ‘okay, we will do even better. We will try to organize or to do thing with Regatta’ and that's exactly what they did.

KK: It becomes very playful and also very collaborative and eventful.

DB: Yeah, that was the idea from the beginning. As long as we can use the same material and as long as these boats exist, because they are already very old boats for kids, we will use them. I am even surprised that these boats are still in use everywhere in the world to train young kids to play with sail. I think it's become very difficult because the boats are not made any more, so we have to collect the boats, or I don't know what.

KK: Yes, the boats are very authentic, wooden, the old style.

DB: Yeah, so if it disappears one day I think then the piece will be a little meaningless.

KK: So in that sense it has a natural life span.

DB: Absolutely.

KK: And, can you say a little bit about the colours and the sails and how you went about designing them?

DB: When I decided to do this piece I worked with a little nautical group in Berlin and they had nine boats. From the nine boats I made two colours, groups of two colours and one with one colour, which is unique because it was the only one. And we used the colours that were available at that time red, green, blue, yellow and one brown.

KK: And apparently the brown one has never won the Regatta.

DB: It's what I heard. I think it's true.

KK: Quite interesting as an outsider. How do you feel about this environment?

DB: Of course this landscape is so special and I don't think you cannot but be taken by the charm of this area. I think the lake, specially Grasmere, which is a rather small lake with these small mountain around, is very much in scale with these little boats. So, to compare with the other places this one seems to be the most ‘in scale’.

KK: Up in the library, which is now been turned into a gallery, it's a fantastic space with the beams. How did that feel for you when you saw your work installed in this rather beautiful old space?

DB: I like to work as much as possible with very different scales and places to give other possibilities. Even if you just speak about the small architecture of the old farm and the beams and the colour of the beams it gives a mark to the piece as well, as the piece certainly changes the environment. It is operating well, more than in a more neutral space where you get inside and you can be anywhere in the world. So, even small, they have this characteristic and the few houses I’ve visited here have the same scale, which reminds me of Japanese houses.

KK: Okay, that's interesting.

DB: It's funny because you see Japanese people absolutely everywhere here and I'm almost sure they feel at home.

KK: And soon the sails will be returning from the lake and will be going up to the gallery space. Do you have an idea about where you will place the sails?

DB: Well we decided yesterday. You can do it in hundred different ways depending on spaces, but I choose one where you can see the nine different colours and they will be arranged in order of arrival.

KK: I suppose it's one of those pieces that you never really know exactly what it's going to look like until it’s finished?

DB: If you have a different arrangement of the colour it's never exactly the same, and when I don't know the space before I cannot really imagine what we will do.

KK: Yeah, and you've also got that relationship between the inside and the outside and also the relationship between the wall piece and the sail.

DB: That's what I said before about the two different readings, which together open the question of what is, for example, a painting? Are they paintings on the sail or just painting inside the museum. I think they are certainly paintings or works of art in the museum. I am not sure if it's a work of art outside. So outside it's a sail, which is made to take the wind and to move the boat; there are two extreme. This was done in '75 and I wanted to push this idea of the importance of the location to something you want to show. It's why both are interesting together, but with only one, it's a little incomplete.

KK: Can you say a little bit about the materials of the wall piece and how you chose the blue for the wall piece?

DB: I did not really choose. I just wanted to have a colour, so I picked up the blue

KK: It looks absolutely stunning.

DB: Yeah. It's a real deep blue.

KK: Could I ask you a few things abut the Guggenheim show? There's just been a very interesting installation of your work, which is partly a new piece and partly some retrospective of some of your old pieces.

DB: It was only one room with a work done forty years ago, so it's not really a retrospective. The other three big pieces were done just for the exhibition.

KK: Originally in 1971 your piece was taken down.

DB: That was another story but thirty-five years ago I was part of the Sixth International Guggenheim and before the opening they took out my work; it was censored and never existed.

KK: It's fantastic that you finally got to make what you wanted!

DB: Well, that's something else, because I could never have done such a piece thirty-five years ago. But my view of the museum and the way to use it did not change. I did a new work but my reflection about the Guggenheim, as a museum, was absolutely the same. I think it's an absolutely beautiful space with great architecture but I think it's totally impossible for most productions of art. It's very difficult to work there. The only thing possible is to play with the museum, which I did in fact in 1970. That certainly was one of the reasons some American artists were a little upset, seeing somebody else, not American, and even worse French, using such a space. So they excluded me, that's all.

KK: I find that outrageous.

DB: It is outrageous I was quite shocked when the thing happened, it was completely stupid; I think Flavin and Judd, suffered for the rest of their lives with this story.

KK: Because they should have been encompassing such a work.

DB: Absolutely. Absolutely. And they always said: ‘oh, we did nothing. It was the museum’. But that was wrong. The museum was stupid, but they were pushing the museum to do that. Thirty-five years later I showed the same strong idea with a piece that was specific for this exhibition. I took away work from the ramps so it was full of architecture, not empty but working for itself.

KK: I think it worked very well with the architecture. I looked at the space differently and my eyes were drawn up to the light.

DB: One of the most beautiful things about this architecture is the light it gave. Usually the light is completely broken they masked the other light coming from each floor on the ramp, but I re-opened all that. Changing the light, for anyone who knows the place, gives the feeling that my piece gives more light. But it's not true. Just before was a big show and the museum was almost dark. Black walls, and brown walls so everything was extremely dark and then there were some vitrines where you could see masks or whatever. But the light from the skylights was almost erased.

KK: I think we should definitely have you in Tate Modern.

DB: I've never been invited but I have a show next year in the museum in Oxford.

KK: You're having a renaissance.

DB: Right.

KK: I don't think you've ever not been here because your work, for students and anybody learning about the mid-twentieth century art and the idea of installation, has been very important

DB: That’s good, if I can show what I can do.

KK: Thank you very much indeed. I really enjoyed it.

DB: Thanks a lot.