Daniel Buren, May 68: Round and About an Incident*

* Hal Foster first signalled the topic of this essay in his The Return of the Real. The "photo-souvenir" that here serves us as a document was reprinted in The return of the Real and furthermore it was Foster who took notice of it's situation as a "riddle" in the post-war avant-garde context of practices determined to ""abolish" [the rules of art] altogether". Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century, An October Book, The MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1996, pp. 19 and 25. Also pp. 19, 24 and 238-239.

"A specialist clockmaker, on the other hand, wants to get paid for his clockmaking efforts, but refuses to be paid for his work as an amateur filmmaker, which he calls his "hobby"; but the images show that the movements he makes in the two activities, the clockmaking sequence and the editing sequence, are so remarkably similar that you can mistake one for the other. But no, says the clockmaker, there's a great difference of love and warmth in these movements, I don't want to be paid for my filmmaking."1

Part one: a striped revolution

In April 1968, French artist Daniel Buren had 200 green-and-white striped posters laid on customary billboards across the streets of Paris without formal permission. Mostly on a 2nd or 3rd layer, superimposing existing advertisements, these "Affichages sauvages", as Buren once called them 2 , took place alongside a series of other 'marginal happenings' 'assailing' the French capital determined to feed in on each other's existence against the dense background of the city. The intention was to test the motif's readability from within the predetermined circumstances of a kind of 'green-and-white season' whereby an array of contrasting actions would spread its import in different manners across the urban fabric. It included a mailing of anonymous papers of the same kind-any sender's details had been excluded-3 and two "hommes-sandwiches"4 carrying double-sided green-and-white striped placards around town in a set route. Also coexistent with these oblique interventions in situ was the display of a large panel-of 18 by 5 meters, in the same material, pattern and colours-at the conversely institutional Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris.

The Paris endeavour was, in itself, part of a systematic 'stripped-painting' itinerary initiated in 1965 and pronounced to undergo an examination of the medium in the light of different, often opposed, strategies of display, circulation and/or dissemination of the same vertically striped motif.5 Inasmuch as Buren's prime intention had been, from the start, the tempering of an intended 'thematic authoritarianism' 6 with a continuous modulation of matter and strategy such as to suggest an examination of the conditions of perception of the medium, the 'Paris 1968 season' meant carrying further the inquiry by circulating the motif in various manners across Paris and by placing its out-of-doors 'insolence' against its framework at the Musée. Each of these projects would mean a particular puncturing of the enduring theme of vertical stripes whose final objective was to lay open perhaps not so much what's expressed on a particular painting's surface, but more what's behind and around it and the structure of the canvas itself. Illustratively, since Buren's 'painting processes' had always allowed for a kind of seeing-through the structures of canvases and frames, whether or not those canvases and frames were actually a canvas and a frame or, on the contrary, a billboard poster bearing 'just' a residual connection to painting. Furthermore conceptually, since varying projects would expand differently on the same propositional platform of contextual self-awareness, to know: any placement of the striped pattern transported at the same time its recurrent decrees and a deeply contrasting sense of perplexing placement that expanded the attrition between art object and location.

As with the large banner intended for the 1971 Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition, which would be officially retired timely before the opening in a farcical act of censorship from the museum's executives after a minority of participating artists had complained that Buren's piece somehow interfered with theirs. Suspended from the vault into the central core's vacuum just a few meters above the ground, it displayed identical blue-and-white vertically woven striped patterns recto-verso as both body and surface, thus conceding the interlace as canvas and painting and its weight supported by the building's structure as a stretching frame.7 As far as Paris April 1968 is concerned, mobile yet impervious placards carried around town by "hommes-sandwiches" opposing the immobile evanescence of the billboard posters, likewise the anonymity and precariousness in numbers of the mailing of papers conflicted with the institutional enveloping of the large panel at the Musée. The placards, because 'in transit', would resist environmental conditions, i.e., graffiti, the inevitable tearing off or overlaying of affichages, as much as the 'torpid' posters would be subjected to these contingencies. Similarly, the mailing would not only have to travel to meet its addressees, it would also be subjected to the temperament of its recipients; contrarily to the panel at the Musée, whose singularity, stationary nature and earned dignity through institutional settlement would invariably foster other sentiments.

Altogether a methodology that concurred to the constancy of the theme at the level of a 'zero-degree-of-painting'.8 Or, under a different type of observation, to its determining as an opaque painting,9 whose durability, marked presence and adaptability allowed for a phenomenology of the neutral as it is infected by the circumstantial. Notably, since the motif's persistence would be both retained and impelled forward by the revolving of sizes, materials, supports, 'habitats' and numbers (circumstances) around its presence.10 The stripes would at the same time subsist in full measure and exist differently in every work. For with this dialectic of thematic permanence and strategic variation, as far as environmental incorporation, which always meant an utter engagement with the site's dynamism as to do more than just install in situ, Buren wanted to operate performers and stage (the 200 posters and the everyday life of the streets of Paris, for instance) to raise tension, subsuming neither into the other. The idea was to draw the work from within the site's specificity in order to actualise an anxious connection between the two and therefore expose a permeating condition of malady. It has been, ever since, at least superficially, although a familiar problem of exhaustion might be detected along the way.11

To more specific, with the 200 posters alone, a problematic distance between art and society might have been swiftly revoked so as to elucidate the 'false' proximity conveyed by the incorporation of each art object into the realms of merchandise and the culture industry. Inasmuch as the posters were vertically in the streets, amongst adverts, but would be commonly apprehended as neither paintings nor advertising. Most likely, they would be captured as foreign and extraneous obstructers to the day to day course of advertisement consumption.12 Thus momentarily breaking one of many inherent tautologies of the spectacular that entwine art and commodity as expressions of, one the utter contemplation of transcendental freedom, the other the possibility of its corporeal arrest. Or rather, ascribes an exchange value to the prone art object through a permeating machination of spectacular attributes-and spectacle means here precisely mediation and thus deferment-, only to retroactively define a margin between art in general and advertising accordingly still with a modernist parable of the autonomous value of aesthetic experience.13 Not that artist and inevitably work of art unwillingly surrender to the Herculean strengths of the market place-besides, what does resisting the market place mean? The daydream of artistic heroism and rampart should be demystified as well.14 Curiously enough, Buren is one who subsequently has embraced the market place pragmatically, as an inevitable submission of art to consumption that should therefore be reserved a priori, before the 'resisting' object is captured in a mercantile coup that surrenders it spectacular. And although his work remains still, in Buren's own words, "somewhat unmarketable", mainly as a result of peculiar conditions of acquisition which by norm dictate a troublesome relation with collectors' wishes.15 As Guy Debord relentlessly observed as early as 1967:

The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.16

At length, it would be by submitting the assumed neutrality of his prototypical painting to the wear and tear of environmental conditions that a certain face of the 'autonomous' machinery of bourgeois art would be exposed. As manufacturers of a product that, albeit whatsoever intrinsic measure of merit one might distil from it, mostly attains a value through the 'extrinsic' gloss of commodification.17 Furthermore, since the word "commodification" denotes the purging of most matter external to the interests of the ruling class, ultimately sustaining the bourgeoisie's superintendence of what Louis Althusser has called "the ideological State apparatuses" and truly constituting itself as an ideological utensil.18 Buren's class of neutrality thus differed from a constructivist practice that had so fiercely attempted a collapse of the conventions of bourgeois art in the aftermath of October 1917. Perhaps definitely embodied in Rodchenko's "Pure Colours: Red, Yellow, Blue" and his subsequent discursive stance announcing the triptych's capacity as an unequivocal ending to representation.19 Diverging as well from the minimalist protocol of the 1960s, in the manner in which it experimented with an inversion of its paradigm, setting its quest outward from minimalist heritage and the impasses painting (art in general) had arrived at. Accordingly, a critique of conventions, which had had its function in the heyday of constructivist revolutionary practice, was transposed into a twofold critique of conventions and institutions possibly reacting first against what Buren saw as an atavistic condition in the French arts that needed challenging.20 A practice which, notwithstanding its probable outset, amongst others, as a reaction to the Parisian art scene's inertia by way of American significance, would soon after pour out onto an investigation constituent in the broader context of post-war neo-avant-gardism and a late capitalist occupancy. The thread was intricate. An ever expanding capitalism embracing nearby every kind of art product by domesticating its conduct through the filtering supplied by an apparatus of commodification that urged avant-gardist insurgence-in other words, the "society of the spectacle" criticised by the situationists.21 Neo-avant-gardist irresolution and misnomers and a feeling of malady on one side of the visual arts. But foremost, societal lethargy awaiting counteraction.22

Revolutionary Russia had advanced a different territory for avant-gardist experiment, since its social-political fabric had been turned upside-down in the Bolshevik seizure of the State apparatus and its inmost desire to defeat the Tsarist tradition of 'ancien régime' divisional society.23 As a result, "Pure Colours'" 'charge' would be, essentially, to deem every spectral attribute emerging from the traditional categories of painting-form, colour and expression-obsolete, in the light of a revolutionary society whose progression demanded a new art integral to a classless structure already reformative of institutions-a critique of conventions startlingly manifest in Rodchenko's acts and words. Buren's 'stripes', on the contrary, engaged in a realignment of 'old' art-the opaqueness of the grid and even the recollection of the square, paramount across disparate high modernist tendencies and, otherwise, minimalism as well as proto-conceptualism-that could precisely demystify conducts and expose ingrained conditions. If Buren wanted to disavow expression, pictorial sensuousness, even meaning at the other end of the neutrality and impersonality of his stripes, his tópos was ultimately idealistic in what regards art in general and hardly dystopian. His own teleology of the disappearance of art thus takes in only half the truth and by no means proclaims anti-art as the answer.24 In fact, because Buren's oeuvre has been expansive and ultimately analytical; as a result, engaging its own telos in the possibility of a metamorphosis of aesthetic practices from the ashes of what it sets out to burn. To employ Buren's own words in this hypothesis:

In fact the work, as it is seen to be without composition and as it presents no accident to divert the eye, becomes itself the accident in relation to the place where it is presented.25

It is therefore this 'spirit of contingency', repeatedly embodied in the critical installation of the impersonal stripes, that drags the entire construct of artwork and placement into the possibility of surgery; much like a real accident sets off doctoring and eventually jurisprudential investigation.

The stripes would also step away from the class of neutrality particular to minimalist ethos (here schematically circumscribed), since minimalism seemed to engage an industrial, serial and even progressivist substance and a contrasting quality of the ethereal that transcended that same modernity its agents had set their quests upon. A typical example: Dan Flavin's appropriation of the serial leverage of industrialisation in his recurrently 'plastic' installations of banal tubular lights along the walls of galleries or museums. At the same time that they unearthed an utterly minimalist sanctity of ephemeral, industrial, even banal impressions, in the application of common (mundane) light fixtures to each site's specificity, they also conveyed the quintessential qualities of a not so mundane upright architecture of light, in a synthesis with architecture that consummated in phantasmal immersion. The transmutation of light fixtures from office or factory spaces into galleries or museums and their sliding from an ordinary (ceiling tightened) horizontal position into wall mounted displays suffices as an indicator of this blaze of immersion into the supra-mundane. A few minimal prerogatives: to mortify every fragment of "anthropomorphic projection"26 and compositional articulation, in a path towards the "consistency and stability"27 of a coalescence of the industrial and the aesthetic, in the manufacture of "specific objects" (Donald Judd). At the same time an ordinary quality and a transcendental presence, as with Flavin, which the minimalists consistently found hard to concede.28 Industrial materials, pre-fabrication and seriality, on the one hand, stability, neutrality and impersonality, on the other, were thus actively composing both the minimalist lexicon and Buren's framework. The difference lays precisely in the space affected by each. If minimalism is, as discussed, densely synthetic, incorporating the confines of industrial acrimony into an object of entirety, be it the installations of Flavin or the sculptures of Robert Morris, Buren's 'paintings' are analytical to the extent of a middle terrain occupancy, which is civic. And this territory arches minimalism and other legacies into the direction of a careful dissection of what the minimalists, for instance, had laboriously synthesised. Opening up the minimal object, Tony Smith's cubic sculpture Die (1962), Frank Stella's rectangular canvases or Robert Morris' Slab (1963), by undressing its constituents in a donation to vulnerability.29 It could be argued that Land Art's basic nature is also a certain vulnerability, and that at length this vulnerability opens up the minimal object which lays at its core, but this is an opening to the forces of nature and ultimately an idealist and redeeming one, which again passes by social subtext without touching its kernel.

Part two: the incident

As a segment in this group of 'actions', the 200 'canvases' were meant to take painting unconditionally outside institutional spaces and confront it, along with a potential audience, with a threshold situation of recognition. They signified an almost inevitable step forward, out in the open air, on a continuous analytical process insistently at the doorstep of institutions. Eventually carrying out, amongst other postulates, those of complicating the boundaries of painting in its serialised use outside institutional spaces and also of exposing its limits in an act of diversion that had brought a body of stylistic and substantial boundaries to a point where 'painting as such' was no longer straightaway identifiable. In this sense, we do think that a critique of institutions revolving around the readability of painting in various different situations compels a critical perception of the medium. To the extent that every painterly expression is thus continuously being drawn into a dialectic whereby it helps determining and is determined back by the institutional arena. Buren's strategy would thus push forward a pragmatics of painting taking into account its political life under the auspices of the unavoidable museum, gallery and so on. Ultimately, the posters' exercise of precariousness would address and eventually materialise the conventional problem of a 'painting situation' which no longer is, 'just' because it had been re-enacted in the streets as a series of paper-signs in which a residual pictorial quality (his persistent any-colour-and-white stripes) had however been kept. In this sense, exposing institutional settings (namely the nominative, colonial and at last normative properties of museum and gallery) at the same time it exposed painting's conventional realms-particularly if the posters were repositioned against the large panel's horizons at the Musée.30

The 'incident' took place, at least once, in a situation documented by an actual photograph,31 when one of Buren's posters was partially placed over a hand-written note announcing a students' meeting a Vincennes near the zenith of escalating friction between student action-groups and the keepers of the established order.32 This miniature moment, which for once interrupted the concurrent routines of two successions of autonomous events that respectively belong to the conventionalised realms of art and life, signals a series of hidden imperfections which pertain to the 'old' context of relationships between art and society. That these imperfections should come across, carried out in the categorical nature of the factual episode, in the context of a profound crisis of the so-called avant-garde, is just an initial thought. What is hereafter proposed sustains from the de facto evidence of the photograph as an objet trouvé.

At this point, we want to diverge slightly from the preceding outline without however discarding whatsoever art-historical value the perambulations in the first part of this paper might have attained. Furthermore, we want to return to a crucial point where an indecision about what the 200 posters customarily were has helped in defining a hypothetical route.

If instead of asking about the incident, we, for now, circumscribe the nature of the 200 posters by reiterating what ordinarily they are not, we might reach a platform at which place we can approach the nature of their connection with adverts and publicity. Moreover, we can then replenish the gap between a Buren and a student memorandum or a Hoover advert without, for the time being, having to reconstitute the episode's factuality with forensic excavations. And since the photo-souvenir's testimony is already in our hands and what is concerned here is the perusal of its significance.

What we want to propose is that the posters were, in a streets of Paris April 1968 context, neither adverts nor publicity nor paintings. They were ill-defined signs and this denotation might be the missing link that connects the 'defective' poster with its scene by eluding the category of rectilinear communication.

To be more specific, the axis of Buren's intervention lays precisely in its paradoxical spatial-temporal dimension: at once too near and too far off from the realm it utilised as a stage.

Metonym […]
A word used in a transferred sense.

[…]

Metonymy […]
A figure of speech which consists in substituting for the name of a thing the name of an attitude of it or of something closely related.33

A retrospective consideration, theoretically cascading Buren's intentions at the time and the project's contemporary significance, is therefore needed. Considering the 200 posters alone acting in the streets of Paris as a particular type of metonymic construct whereby the effect stands in to exemplify the causes (metonymy of the effect), the aesthetic province they, as it were, personified thus succumbs to the type of causality common billboard adverts undergo. The vertical collapsing of poster and advert; a silent dance of overlaying and obstructing each other; their quiescent offering to the tearing off and graffiti of the passer-by; duration permitting, their discolouring; weather permitting, their drenching; their situations as out-of-doors signs; etc.; as consummation. This 'effectual' contiguity unveils a compound syntax underneath its collapse of the functional categories of art and life. First of all, as discussed before, proximity actually means distance, in a manifold manner. Art in the streets subjected to a contingent life outside the ideal spaces of museum or gallery would irrevocably mean ill-definition at the same time it meant a kind of automatic, albeit dispersed and unclear, incorporation into the rituals of everyday life. Evanescence in turn signalling an equalised closeness between the objet d'art and its depletion as an everyday sign at the expenses of its anterior ontology. The banality of its condition in the streets and its submission to the predicaments of that ontology of the everyday are, in this sense, conditions of loss and recovery which Buren's project per se exposed but could not have resolved. What we want to claim is that, by handing out the effect, the 200 papers literally and critically disavowed the transcendentalism and the reified personas of the autonomous object of modernist art and its neo-avant-gardist counterpart (if such a distinction is still methodologically possible)34 at the same time they reaffirmed the utter necessity for a cadre proper to the arts. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has read the conceptual art of the 1960s as precisely that heterogeneous movement which tried to assert the critical limits of art in the shape of, amongst others, an 'aesthetic of bureaucracy' in the form of a subjection to the "rigorous and relentless order of the vernacular of administration".35 In the 200 posters' case, their limits and a 'self-consciousness' of their limitations, even their 'self-inflicted' partial diminishing as paintings bearing such quality, bring to light a parable of the constraint of aesthetics; entangled in a dialectic of critical autonomy facing its integration into social praxis. The posters' submissive ceding to the harshness of a life amongst ephemeral advertisements again foregrounds a critique of the perpetual serenity of the objet d'art inside the museum's casing. And yet, that same harshness would recall the image of a disappearing object under the dictatorship of a wandering of signs and the mendicancy of a life without guardianship.

On the other hand, proximity projected a critique of commodification, in the sense of self-depiction as the exemplifying gadget. Again the posters' out-of-doors transitoriness and ill definition would act, on this occasion, as a reversed metaphor for the condition of lost significance (use value) and gained nobility (marketplace calibre). To the extent that the art-object's life symmetrical counterpart under the automatism of commodification is, as far as the analogy goes, the posters' phenomenology in the streets. Transitoriness and ill definition, as well as the possibility of a new life, were brought into the venture by the motif's transference from inside the protective covering of museum into the streets. Therewith, this facilitating displacement obstructed the a priori perception of the posters as art-signs, lending their syntactic structure to wild semantic wanderings. Consequently, by way of this paradoxical inclusion of the posters amongst everyday trade-signs, their condition of further appropriateness by the marketplace was momentary lost. The mirror image of an indispensability for apropos art-outlets and the metaphor of museum, gallery and so on as shopping centres and their executives as storekeepers coming round. The twilight of this disclosure is the museum and, by extension the gallery, as sine qua non agencies behind the capital-value attained by the art-object.36

Thirdly, notwithstanding how important the absence of figurativeness is in the accomplishment of the aforementioned, the stripes' out-of-doors abstractness played yet another role as precisely an anomie of abstraction. It needs only reverting to what the 'function of the grid' as a standard of "hermetic resistance"37 amongst aesthetic practices meant, to recognise how Buren's framework, the 200 posters in particular, foreground an exposure of 'abstractive hermeticism' as an anomic form. Since the stripes per se, the zero-degree of painting Buren utilised as a tool, resisted signification, and were insufficient as a given sign, unless ornamented by a contextual integration of their phrasing onto a larger syntax. Contextual integration meaning the materials put to use, the sizes, the quantities, the modes of installation and/or dissemination, the strategies of divulgence, the colours, the backgrounds, the places, but mostly the historical aggregate behind and the retrospective import ahead. Again, albeit the anomic structure of the work of art regardless of its placing, this force of resistance to what the "viewer demands"38 is expected in the context of a grounding of aesthetic perception ascribed to the gallery or museum. If this mechanism of action-reaction is ultimately a conventional one, impelled by the forces of institutional foundation, then the stepping down of anomie away from the museum's casing inverted the order of the factors and proposed a hermetic resistance to hermeticism as indication. It's all too known, how we expect an object that confronts, even transcends, our demand for exegesis the minute we enter the spaces of gallery and museum. This kaleidoscopic dance of yearning for whatsoever transcendentalism at the same time the key to what transcends us is anticipated inside a closet, being in itself a form of 'in advance exegesis' and an utterly conventionalised realm of erotic rapture. Given a priori and thus conventional, a constituent of reification. The inversion of space typologies from museum and gallery into the street thus avoided this type of convention whereby a difficult, unyielding object is expected, further disclosing its own, in a manner of speaking, 'earthen anomie' as a critique of reified hermeticism.39 Furthermore, because anomic in essence, the stripes lent themselves to the scissoring and patch-working Buren wanted them to undergo-neutrality and stability as signs of adaptability. And again as a mechanism of exposure of certain conditions at the expenses of their own purport as art objects.

Venturing an eccentric hypothesis, removed from the context of Buren's own and others' elucidation of his work, we would like to advance the 200 posters as an elliptical poetics of loss and recovery; engaging abstraction, anomie and at last the hermetic emanations of the work of art in such a conjecture.

Part three: forensics

How are we to read the 'incident' then?40 Are we to expand on a hypothetical agreement between ethics and aesthetics, somehow broken midway in the duration of the pasting process, and therefore rely on context and interpret the 'obscuring'41 paper as an inadvertent pleasantry? Or are we to speculate around the ideas of capital negligence, disdain or even intention?

Disdain or intention seems largely implausible. First of all, and most sufficiently, because Buren was himself the perpetrator of a 'revolutionary' act amongst the arts-let alone a pro-situationist-being hard to believe he could conflict on purpose with a parallel 'revolution' he must have sympathised with deeply. Secondly, if needed, because the 200 posters were propelled, not only as 'paintings' in the streets, but also as 'paintings' in the streets amongst adverts and furthermore, as 'paintings' in the streets obstructing the day to day effervescence of advertisement consumption-a platform that would be collided by Buren and students alike. Buren's own words 42 and a collection of photo-souvenirs that documents the Paris 1968 season spread around in various publications suffice to attest to this fact;43 and furthermore, Buren's naming of the posters as "affichages sauvages" reinforces the idea.44 Thirdly, because although the tension between students and established order that would culminate with May's outburst of protests and violence had risen throughout April,45 it was still then more or less circumscribed to the university satellite of Nanterre, west to the outskirts of Paris.46 But foremost because Buren himself would actively participate in the events of May 68, along with others engaged in the manufacturing of "affiches" against de Gaulle and the CRS.47

It rather seems that Buren assigned the pasting job, or at least part of it, to 'accomplices' or most likely a hired hand and in the process the student note was caught and entangled in the overlapping of adverts and was consequently blocked inadvertently.48 Provided this: the 'defective' poster was indeed pasted over the student note under a certain condition of deficient knowledge, fatigue and/or negligence by an entity other than Buren; the 'incident' can only remind us of a certain condition of labour in the arts whereby the 'proletariat' is still the proletariat.

At the same time that a 'revolutionary' spirit poured from the 200 posters' demeanour in the streets, indicating a state of disease to do with bourgeois-capitalist society and at length proposing its revolutionising, a divisional aspect that reinforces bourgeois-capitalism can be suggested from the hypothesis that a hired hand completed the pasting job. It's not so much whether or not this 'entity' performed satisfactory, what is relevant is that a certain loss could have been made possible by a specific form of insular labour whereby intellect and brachial work are isolated realms of activity distant from each other. The edifice of division of labour, which is defined by and actively perpetuates the conditions of manufacture of a product in a factory, is as well determined and fixates the conditions of distribution of knowledge within the hierarchical line of production.49 The maker of a plastic piece needs only to know how to model and, as long as the modelling takes place adequately, his/her job, which means the application of a partial knowledge, is secured within the limits of productiveness safeguarded by the perpetual demand of the market. The supervisor, on the other hand, needs to understand the modelling process and the assemblage mechanism, but foremost how to ensure that both 'parts of knowledge' are respectively kept within certain confines, so that the order of division of labour is maintained and production proceeds 'in the interests of all'. What the maker of the plastic piece is interdicted from is the transcendence of his/her part-knowledge in an attempt to originate a different assemblage-there is another realm of specialisation for that, which is altogether separated from the production-assembly lines-and also the manufacture of deficient parts. Both forms of 'transgression' within the lower stratums of the hierarchy of production, i.e. creative impulse and laxity, generate entropy and are therefore to avoid at all cost.50 The worker can thus only be consistently inventive or lax in deep conflict with the production-assembly line, ultimately with the stratums above, and eventually his/her place as a dependable part incorporated into the larger machine.51 Surely, within the limits of the 'moulding of a plastic piece role' in the production-assembly line, the "maker" is empowered to employ a degree of inventiveness in the way s/he controls the modelling sequence with the aim of increasing performance. And yet, this micro-elasticity, which every worker is entitled to, is structurally determined, not only to harmonise with the production-assembly line, but also to improve productivity. The swivel chair, which is prevalent along production-assembly lines, in supermarket checkouts and inside offices, typifies this micro-elasticity always to the interests of production. First of all, a chair on wheels that swivels according to an 'ergonomics of gyration and reach' is in fact a chair that allows for an optimisation of multitasking in the space-time of moving from one side of the desk, or production-assembly line, to the other-effectively vaulting over the standing up and seating obstacle. Secondly, it insinuates a quality of amusement into the monotony of work, without ever really putting productiveness at risk, helping to do away with the 'time wasted' with breaks, which is altogether an unavoidable drawback, but to be shortened and/or made 'more' productive.52

Division of labour in the arts, on the other hand, can be delineated from within two opposite spheres of employment: the duplicate of "division of labour" and its litigation. The "duplicate", as it's obvious, is a hyperbolic version of the anterior whereby the contradictions inherent to the dismemberment of intellectual enterprise from manual or brachial work are emphasised to the point of hysteria. It needs only to recall the pose of one Jeff Koons, to realise how a certain mythical space of derisory autonomy inherited from dada first and then pop art,53 has consented this embroidery of kitsch objects and baroque accumulations that replicate the world under the semblance of its parody. In all, because this type of strategy is not only cynical about kitsch and baroque cultures, safeguarded by the viewpoint of leverage, it's also an usurpation of kitsch and baroque forms, intersecting their progression with the marketplace of scandalous art, and foremost a relocation of bourgeois-capitalist 54 division of labour. After all, Koons and clones have their objects manufactured by skilful artisans, but at once refuse workmanship's partaking in the creative process and an acknowledgement of its role. Buren's 200 posters', on the contrary, because they proposed a dissension with the accepted rules of bourgeois-capitalist aesthetics, ultimately surrendering their own everlastingness to exemplify a disease associated with bourgeois-capitalism, could not be simply contained inside this duplicative category of division of labour. The issue with the 'defective' poster, it seems, is again a matter of compound structure. Regardless of whether or not the entity we assume pasted the posters did so with a degree of endorsed freedom and/or laxity or rather in conflict with the artist's instructions-by will or carelessness-, a conflict between ethics and aesthetics, punctual it may be, reaches the shores of artistic conception. In contradiction with the devouring automatism of the production-assembly line, automation in the case of the 200 posters transported a paradoxical sense of the grotesqueness of that same tautology of industrialisation. How can we not see the 200 posters, as a serial product pasted across Paris in a uniform manner, as precisely the conveyer of yet another parable of industrialised insolvency? It is therefore impending on the ideas advanced in the second part of this paper that the key to the 199 papers and the 'defective' remainder may be found.

The crucial meaning of the 200 papers-by large the Paris 1968 undertakings and a portion of 'Buren'-lays in this case in their propensity to expose themselves as an anatomy of bourgeois-capitalist art, bourgeois-capitalism at large and the contradictions and impossible connections between an art undressed from mythical symptoms and its meaning. The 'defective' poster hence completes their function, in the sense of its emplacement as the displaying of a loss in the pasting process, possibly through the inescapable syndrome of a division of labour in the arts to which Buren, the artist, most likely had to submit. An indication in the form of yet another figure of speech, an 'effectual metonymy' by which an act of destitution of the arts in relation to society is exemplified. It needs only to recognise how the (one) poster conflicted with a parallel revolution along mutual conduits, to asseverate the hypothesised act of labour that led to its 'defective' pasting as a piece of creative work and therefore ascertain the whole process as yet the sign of another rendezvous. Even if the (one) poster did calmly conflict with an entire uprising and ultimately conveys the rather bloated idea of its mere existence deterring a whole revolution's unfolding, it so gently exemplifies, through its micro-presence, i.e., 1 versus 199, the possible misadventure that a supposed deficiency on the transposition from concept to completion potentially entails. Or so the hypothesising of a cataclysm that would consequently block a string of happenings leading to May 68 reconvenes.

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Barron, Stephanie / Tuchman, Maurice ed., The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910-1930: New Perspectives, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1980

Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, Vintage Books, London, 1993 (first published as Mythologies by Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1957)

Batchelor, David, "Daniel Buren Interviewed by David Batchelor", in Artscribe International 66, November/December 1987

Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., "Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions", in October 55, Winter 1991

Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., "Open Letters, Industrial Poems", in Benjamin Buchloh ed., Broodthaers: Writings, Interviews, Photographs, October, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987

Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., "The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde", in October 37, Summer 1986

Buren, Daniel, "Absence Presence: autour d'un détour", in Opus International 24/25, May 1971

Buren, Daniel, "Beware" (originally published July/August 1969, amended January 1970), in Studio International 920, March 1970

Buren, Daniel / Fuchs, R. H. ed., Discordance/Cohérence, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1976

Buren, Daniel, Legend I, Warehouse Publications, London, 1973

Buren, Daniel, Les Couleurs: sculptures Les Formes: peintures, The Press of The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1981

Buren, Daniel, "Notes on Work in Connection with the Places Where It Is Installed, Taken Between 1967 and 1975, Some of which are Specially Summarized Here for the September/October 1975 Edition of Studio International", in Studio International Vol. 190, September/October 1975

Buren, Daniel, Photo-Souvenirs 1965-1988, Villeurbanne: Art Edition, 1988

Buren, Daniel, "Round and About a Detour", in Studio International 934, June 1971
Buren, Daniel, "The Function of the Studio", in October 10, Fall 1979

Cabanne, Pierre, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Da Capo Press, 1987

Clark, T. J. / Nicholson-Smith, Donald, "Why Art Can't Kill the Situationist International", in October 79, Winter 1997

Claura, Michel, "Comment", in Studio International 920, March 1970

Claura, Michel, "Une Erreur Compréhensible", in Opus International 24/25, May 1971

Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, New York, 1994

Deleuze, Gilles, "Postscript on the Societies of Control", in October 59, Winter 1992 (originally published in L'Autre journal 1, May 1990)

Deleuze, Gilles, "Three Questions on Six Times Two", in Negotiations: 1972-1990, translated by Martin Joughin, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995 (originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma 271, November 1976)

Denizot, René, "Conclusion", in Opus International 24/25, May 1971

Diane Waldman, "Statement by Diane Waldman", in Studio International 934, June 1971

Foster, Hal, The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century, An October Book, The MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1996

Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, 1971

Greenberg, Clement, "Avant-garde attitudes: new art in the sixties", in Studio International 921, April 1970

Judd, Donald, "A long discussion not about master-pieces but about why there are so few of them: part II", in Art in America, October 1984

Judd, Donald, Complete Writings 1959-1975, The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia, New York University Press, 1975

Kaiper, Bruce, "It Pollutes: A Reply To Daniel Buren", in Artsmagazine Vol. 44, No. 8, Summer 1970

Lucie-Smith, Edward, "An interview with Clement Greenberg", in Studio International 896, January 1968

Lyotard, Jean-François, "Preliminary Notes on the Pragmatic of Works: Daniel Buren", in October 10, Fall 1979

McCauley, Martin, The Russian Revolution & the Soviet State 1917-1921: Documents, The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1980

McDonough, Thomas F., "Rereading Debord, Rereading the Situationists", in October 79, Winter 1997

McDonough, Thomas F., "Situationist Space", in October 67, Winter 1994
Quattrocchi, Angelo / Nairn, Tom, The beginning of the End: France, May 1968, Verso, London, New York, 1998 (first published 1968)

Reed, John, Ten Days That Shook The World, Martin Lawrence Ltd., 1932 (first published in England, 1926)

Rodchenko, Alexander, "Working with Mayakowsky", in From Painting to Design: Russian Constructivist Art of the Twenties, Cologne: Galerie Gmurzyska, 1981

Sans, Jérôme, Daniel Buren: Au Sujet de… Entretien avec Jérôme Sans, Flammarion, 1998

Smith, Roberta, "On Daniel Buren", in Artforum, September 1973

Spigland, Ethan, "Daniel Buren" (interview with and translation from the French by Ethan Spigland), in Journal of Contemporary Arts 1, spring 1988

Viénet, René, Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May '68, Autonomedia, New York, Rebel Press, London, 1992 (first published in France by Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1968)

White, Robin, "Daniel Buren: Interview by Robin White at Crown Point Press", in View 9, Oakland, California, 1979

NOTES

1 Gilles Deleuze, "Three Questions on Six Times Two", originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma 271, November 1976, in Negotiations: 1972-1990, translated by Martin Joughin, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995, p. 39.

2 For examples of Buren's modus operandi, see, for instance: Daniel Buren, Photo-Souvenirs 1965-1988, Villeurbanne: Art Edition, 1988.

3 The mailing, of papers in the same green and white striped pattern, although contemporary with the 200 posters, had actually started a fraction earlier, in December 1967.

4 Ibid.

5 Although Buren would later redefine the nature of his work aside from painting (see: Robin White, "Daniel Buren" (interview by Robin White at Crown Point Press), in View 9, Oakland, California, 1979, p. 9), the word "painting" was still nominating his practice, if not his work's entire implications, throughout the 1960s, until mid 70s. Likewise, if painting per se, at a zero-degree, was the issue in 1965, it rapidly evolved towards analysing the perception of a zero-degree painting, from around 1967 on. See, for instance: Jérôme San, Daniel Buren: Au Sujet de… Entretien avec Jérôme Sans, Flammarion, 1998, pp. 23-27.

6 By "thematic authoritarianism" we actually mean two different aspects. First, the stripes' disciplinary significance in every piece of work by Buren. Secondly, their presence as matter, reason and identity across his entire oeuvre. In fact, one could say that the need for a single identifiable motif is, in Buren's case, mostly justifiable by the spatial-temporality of his enterprise-the subject matter's weight and not the artist's. For if across the space of the colossal gallery that was to be the Paris of April 1968 the green-and-white stripes acted as a collator of works, in travelling from 'season' to 'season' the permanence of the motif would have acted as memorial imprint-taking the 1968's traveller back to something s/he had retained from a 1967 promenade and so forth. Or otherwise, why couldn't there be a different, still effective 'theme', applied from project to project or from time to time? On the contrary, for the oeuvre to transcend the locality of a sequence of 'situational' attempts-or 'conceptual paintings', as some would have it-, the pattern, including attributes like the 8.7cm wide stripes, for instance, had to remain unchanged. This would unequivocally mean, at length, the relative transcendence of places, situations and interventions, but also the baffling trademarking of the early projects with what the more recent, officially endorsed and celebrated version has to offer. Or rather differently, it could also be said that this authorial mark is precisely the condition sine qua non behind any burenian relevance. For if, as explained, the oeuvre wasn't identifiable as an oeuvre, the pertinence of 'Buren' across time and space would have been lost. And this, taken to its logical conclusion, means precisely the emergency of the author as, if nothing else, an attractor without which the identification of the oeuvre remains uncertain.

7 More in detail, Buren's "Sixth Guggenheim" project consisted of two canvases: a 2nd one, 1.5 meters high by 10 meters wide, hung across 88th Street and the aforementioned 1st, suspended from the museum's ceiling into the central shaft. Because this 1st canvas was suspended from the summit of the museum's superstructure without the service of a material support, it actually obliged the otherwise indomitable architecture to lend itself to the 'misfortune' of serving as its stretching frame. The two woven white stripes on the extremities of each side of the canvases were also covered with white paint, so as to emphasise the manufactured fabric per se becoming the painting and at the same time distinguish its ready-made quality from the concept of ready-made by reaffirming the canvases' painterly presence (this observation is actually indebted to Benjamin Buchloh, in his "Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions", in October 55, Winter 1991, pp. 137-139). The 'Guggenheim canvases' would be withdrawn from the exhibition just before the opening following a censorious request from a minority of participating artists (Judd and Flavin, perhaps the most vehement) claiming that Buren's 1st piece somehow interfered with theirs. As the canvas took the buildings internal structure to its advantage by avoiding the spiralling galleries at which place the majority of the remaining artists had unavoidably installed their works, a pivotal minority of these decided to impute to Buren's an impotence his piece had suddenly revealed in their works. To know, none of the artists who complained had read the Guggenheim as a spectacular structure that subordinates art to architecture and is ultimately hostile to any work-where Buren's antagonising strategy would precisely accomplish against the abasing environment, by arching the museum's internal vortex around to its presence. Moreover, none of those whose work carried a sense of inviolable neutrality had understood the exhibiting space, and particularly the low rampart spiralling galleries, as a tour the force that would donate their minimalist neutrals to the architectonic dictatorship. Other conditions to do with the politics of the event, the climate surrounding the exhibition and its intended meaning helped determine the Buren's withdrawal. For a more consistent account of the troublesome Sixth Guggenheim, see: Alexander Alberro, "The Turn of the Screw: Daniel Buren, Dan Flavin, and the Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition", in October 80, spring 1997, pp. 57-84. Also: Daniel Buren, "Notes on Work in Connection with the Places Where It Is Installed, Taken Between 1967 and 1975, Some of which are Specially Summarized Here for the September/October 1975 Edition of Studio International", in Studio International Vol. 190, September/October 1975, pp. 124-125. Also: Daniel Buren, "Round and About a Detour", and Diane Waldman, "Statement by Diane Waldman", in Studio International 934, June 1971, pp. 246-248.

8 The notion of a 'zero-degree-of-painting' is indebted to Buren himself, who often utilised it to explain the matter of his practice when started: "In the beginning it was much more of a discourse concerning the end of painting at the zero degree: painting stripped down to its greatest neutrality, revealing how it is made, where it is made, etc." Ethan Spigland, "Daniel Buren" (interview with and translation from the French by Ethan Spigland), in Journal of Contemporary Arts 1, spring 1988, p. 7.

9 A terminology that suggests departure instead of the arrival implicit in the expression "zero-degree". "Opacity" allows for an important distinction between the idea of a formal advancement of painting towards a paradoxical 'zero-purity', by undressing it from everything extrinsic-that is, figurative and expressionistic-, and a bare painting that serves to expose the conditions of its own perception from the standpoint of inherited dismemberment and reductionism. Thus, Buren's 'opaqueness' (Benjamin H. D. Buchloh), or neutrality, although defined by him as a 'stripping down', pertains less to an ascetic ascent of painting in a self-referential movement towards purification and more with a terrain descent of that 1950s and 60s ubiquitous painterly and sculptural grid into the realms of contingency and contradiction-away from ideal situations. Likewise, the often suggested banality of his 'paintings' is less a point at which we should alt with a facial cast of disappointment and more a point from which we can start to search an oeuvre's significance in a comparative study of its phenomenology. The assertion "Having seen a few Burens there is no question of what one looks like, nor is there any need to ever see another" (Roberta Smith, "On Daniel Buren", in Artforum, September 1973, p. 67), is thus severely inscribed in the modernist cadre of a formal advancement of painting. It Consequently incorporates Buren in a kind of post-abstract expressionism, yet Greenbergian tendency to explore "how a painting is made" (Douglas Crimp, "Daniel Buren's New York Work", New York, February 1976, in Discordance/Cohérence, R. H. Fuchs edition, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1976, p. 78) and therefore misses the disclosing mechanics of the enterprise. Buren was not concerned with painting as such pointing to itself; he was, from as early as 1967, agitated by the conditions of its perception to a certain extent regardless of the what it was superficially. In fact, his enterprise meant both an attempt to reveal and to demystify everything the expression "advanced art" signified at the time: from minimalism, which he had read and set his quest upon, to the 'squarely painterly' and the neo-Duchampian. In a rather apocalyptic manner (Hal Foster), it was the whole edifice of art as such, the functions of artists' studio, museum and exhibition, to paraphrase the tittles of three combative texts Buren would write in the early 1970s, he wanted to expose as obsolete. In Buren's own words: "The art of yesterday and today is not only marked by the studio as an essential, often unique, place of production; it proceeds from it. All my work proceeds from its extinction." Daniel Buren, "The Function of the Studio", in October 10, Fall 1979, p. 58. Or: "That is why I reject art in general. Because it, in fact, leads you to think through somebody else. Maybe you could say that I do the same. But at least what I try to show is something else-which is yourself". In Robin White, Daniel Buren, pp. 20-21.

10 Whether or not the stripes revolved around "physical supports" and "modes of placement and dissemination" might seem an irrelevant differentiation at this point. However, this distinction does become paramount when we figure the stripes revolving around their 'tellurian phenomenology' as a sign of earthly bounds and therefore a socially engaged avant-garde praxis, and the 'phenomenology' revolving around the trademarked stripes as just a "mythical semblance" of that engagement replicating its own legend. We're actually referring more to a common perception of oeuvre and artist regardless of whatsoever redeeming reparations might have been attempted. Inasmuch as the more radical the attack on categories like authorship from the standpoint of clear-cut anonymity, the more that radicality attracts a label and therefore a recoup of all authorial monstrosities. What Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has outlined as an "insistence on artistic anonymity and the demolition of authorship [that] produces instant brand names and identifiable products". Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Conceptual Art 1962 - 1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions, p. 140. If there is no reason to reproach the sincerity of Buren's attempts, shifts and continuous rethinking and reworking of his perpetual investigation through to nowadays, at least a strong apprehension with the irreversible inflection in meaning his oeuvre has taken since around mid 1970s should be upheld. Otherwise, clear-cut anonymity might have been sustained on the punctual level of a here and there civic rendezvous with 'Buren', in all detached from condensing connotations; but then again wouldn't the oeuvre be missed and therefore painting and ultimately art? From yet another angle, this dialectic of presence and absence, of an art released from itself at the expenses of its meaning as an art form, an art freed from constraints, which no longer is, brings forth another presupposition: the need for conventions, which Duchamp's first readymade had made evident from a rather opposite angle, or the "death of art" in the abolition of its Barthesian mythical structure.

11 For example, a scattering of the motif, by mid 1970s already institutionalised as an artist's label, cherished throughout the 1980s and 90s, which, in our opinion, trivialises what Buren's investigations had accomplished before. Obviously, his path is not as linear as our decree, and although the effect we describe is by no means negligible, there are surely projects circa 1980 whose specific and contextual forces still more or less hold together, as there are others around 1970 that would now seem of less amplitude. With the 200 posters, the two-dimensional presence of painting is undressed of anything 'extrinsic' and revealed in the streets. It could be said that this naked and unsheltered two-dimensionality is the constitutive factor of the better Buren, as it transports and communicates a mimesis of, if not a genealogical connection with, the physiognomy of revolution in the form of notices, murals, and so on. Two-dimensionality as revolution, three-dimensionality as the memorial of that same or other revolutions, or, customarily, war? The mass procured by sculpture, and for that matter some installation or even painting, canvassed and framed, conversely conveying a sentiment of memorial pomp, whereas a 'revolutionary' act of such nature in the arts would be better embodying the semblance of the two-dimensional 'contract' on the streets.

12 Without surprise, it has happened that Buren's works on the streets have been nicknamed and/or associated with various unexpected entities. "Some uniformed residents of SoHo [New York] had a vague idea that a formalist version of graffiti art, an unlettered poster, was being disseminated." Roberta Smith, On Daniel Buren, p. 67. ""A thoughtful and delicate work" according to the Arts page of the Guardian. "An oversized Juventus flag held down by four submerged two-and-a-half ton concrete blocks," according to the local installation crew." David Batchelor, "Daniel Buren Interviewed by David Batchelor", in Artscribe International 66, November/December 1987, p. 51.

13 Modernism signifies, here and throughout the paper, a pattern of artistic practices more or less abstractly defined against the notion of the avant-garde, modernism as a bourgeois-capitalist construct, avant-garde as its antithesis. This demarcation is highly problematic, but then again its presence is paramount methodologically. To differentiate, we would include the likes of one Frank Stella or one Donald Judd in the first category and the likes of one Robert Rauschenberg in the second, we would also define one Jasper Johns tending to the first while it resembles the second.

14 If it is true that nowadays nothing escapes the 'tyranny of the marketplace', then the mythical gravity of the avant-garde, i.e. "fine art as [an autarchic] sign of critical thought" (Alexander Alberro, The Turn of the Screw: Daniel Buren, Dan Flavin, and the Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition, p. 71) is forced into deep torrents it cannot contradict by force. It's precisely that so-called 'a priori' critical autocracy of the avant-garde then that has to be engaged in a resolute dismissal of its own mythical status at the same time critical autonomy as a value is retained mythically.

15 Most of his work is, for example, purchasable but, its nature obliging, not exchangeable. See: David Batchelor, Daniel Buren Interviewed by David Batchelor, p. 53.

16 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Detroit: Black & Red, 1970, n. p., Section 13 (initially published Paris, 1967), as cited in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Conceptual Art 1962 - 1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions, p. 129-130.

17 A symptomatic example retained from a recent newspaper advert:

"The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
Departs 11, 20 & 23 October, 10 & 17 November
4 days from £279

The new Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, looks set to be one of the most important buildings of the 20th century, its titanium-clad shell unfurling like a sequence of waves.

Inside it boasts a 165-foot atrium and a world-class modern collection with the likes of Picasso, Pollock and Andy Warhol represented.

Included in the price:
o return scheduled flights with Go from Stanstead including taxes
o 3 nights' bed and breakfast at the 4-star Ercilla hotel in the city centre
o airport transfers in Bilbao
o guided tour including entrance to Guggenheim
o visit to Cornillas
o tour manager throughout

Extract from "The Guardian Travel Shop", in Weekend (supplement of) The Guardian, Saturday 26th of August 2000, p. 49 (layout proportions partially maintained).

18 What Althusser, following Antonio Gramsci's ideas, defined as "a certain number of institutions from 'civil society': the Church, the Schools, the trade unions, etc." that must be distinguished from "the (repressive) State apparatus": "the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc." Obviously, as Althusser points out, "(repressive) State Apparatus" and "ideological State apparatuses" are clearly run on the side of each other in the "seizure" and "conservation" of what is called "State power" by the ruling class or ruling alliance of classes. See: Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (notes towards an investigation)", in Essays on Ideology, Verso, London, New York, 1993, pp. 14-17. Also: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, 1971, pp. 12, 259, 260-263. In addition, the seductive discourse of a classless society made possible by an inexorably effectual late-capitalist embrace of all classes and the harmonising disappearance of social distinction is just that, seductive, and by no means outdates the Marxism of Louis Althusser in its exposure of a real condition. Furthermore, terms like social amplitude and/or modulation, which we imagine replacing that of social distinction, shouldn't succeed in superficially collapsing contradictions within the social fabric, from ideological discord to the division of labour. If it is true that the bourgeois-capitalist binary has come a long way and a metamorphosis of its vital parts from the Foucaultian stage-coach of "disciplinary societies" into 'his' supersonic aeroplane of the "societies of control" has taken place, it is no less true that division of labour and social layering and occupation are as present as ever. The password "proletariat" should have been replaced by the better fitting "perpetually in debt and on credit working classes"-from the Trinity of the factory to the Trinity of the corporation and the bank. Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch's empires, for instance, should be contemplated as corporate states that modulate endlessly until they are taken over by a regenerating coup de capital that perpetuates their capacities. Louis Althusser understood the distance travelled perceptively, when he analysed the transference of a magnitude of powers at one time held by the Church as an "ideological State apparatus" into another, the school, which perpetuates its services. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, pp. 22-36. Gilles Deleuze latter inferred the tendency of "perpetual training […] to replace the school" as precisely the sign of yet another metamorphosis of bourgeois-capitalism, in his extraordinary summary: "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (originally published in L'Autre journal 1, May 1990), in October 59, Winter 1992, pp. 3-7.

19 Alexander Rodchenko, Pure Colours: Red, Yellow, Blue, 1921. "I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: this is the end of painting. These are the primary colors. Every plane is a discrete plane and there will be no more representation". Alexander Rodchenko, "Working with Mayakowsky", in From Painting to Design: Russian Constructivist Art of the Twenties, Cologne: Galerie Gmurzyska, 1981, quoted in Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century, p. 17.

20 Buren has recently advanced this idea, in conversation with Jérôme Sans, retrospectively placing a French tradition that had only but been indifferent to American avant-garde against the novelty of the Americans Rauchenberg, Stella and even Pollock. However, his axioms would diverge as well from American tendencies, in a manner that would show itself perhaps most evident on the occasion of the "Sixth Guggenheim", as previously discussed. See: Jérôme Sans, Daniel Buren: Au Sujet de… Entretien avec Jérôme Sans, pp. 30-32. In like manner, It could be argued that Buren's 'revolution' was probably stretching beyond the shoulder of art, also as a reaction to a condition in French society in general and the Fifth Republic and Gaullism in particular. For he has since reaffirmed himself by that time already an adherent to the Situationist International's rationale. Possibly in view of, amongst others, the "one TV set, one fridge and one car in the garage of every middle class' home" syndrome, which pervaded industrialised West and would soon after exist amongst the 'maladies' May-June 68 movements in France set out to counter.

21 An apparatus of production of the spectacular all in all advancing to take over every form of direct experience, which the situationists forecasted with oracular prescience, notwithstanding the difficult nature of such postulate and the consequent critique of situationist axioms that should unquestionably be undertaken. Antagonists and partisans alike often render situationism mythically; it's the other, historically defined, productive but contingent situationism, dynamic in its own time, that has to be raised to the surface, not the easy to sweep passed the backdoor legend of either everlasting productiveness or obsolescence. Also, despite the fact that situationist strives against the spectacle sheltered an extremely problematic relationship with the arts, practically and theoretically. By statement: against the liberty and insusceptibility of aesthetic practices. By exercise: repeatedly colliding with and finding it hard to incorporate post-war art that can easily be seen, from a situationist point of view, "As [part of] the indispensable packaging for things produced as they are now produced, as a general gloss on the rationality of the system,…". Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, New York, 1994, p. 16 (emphasis from English edition). The Situationist International's history does account for a troublesome relationship with the arts, as it should always have been, on the account of what post-war avant-garde often stood for. However, it is not true that the S.I. antagonised with the concept of art altogether, it's truer that it abolished the programmatic exploration of the "artistic" from its fifth conference (1961), for reasons to do with the pull of its method. "We will be the shop stewards of cultural producers, in the broadest sense of the term." Raoul Vaneigem, quoted in "La cinquième conférence de l'I.S. à Göteborg", International situationniste 7, April 1962, p. 27, as quoted in Thomas F. McDonough, "Rereading Debord, Rereading the Situationists", in October 79, Winter 1997, pp. 10-11. Exemplary of a split movement by which the art object immerses in the circuitry of dividend at the same time it retains the appearance of a radical object transcending that same circuitry is the contemporary face of the museum. Spectacular, networked, all-inclusive, accommodating, kind and franchised at the expenses of a pragmatics of itself and the art object's stature, it reinforces the inexorable feeling of a history whereby everything concurred to the grand finale of the present state of civilisation. Agreeably, this recent corporate expansion progresses disguised under an old name, beneath the semblance of an autonomous, even in essence public service, if not detached from, at least somehow transcending capitalist imperatives-the public museum turns private, as much as the private museum is regarded public. It in fact serves the ideology of the ruling class as much as it pretends to do otherwise-who visits the museum? And what is the museum visited for? Or how is a cubist Picasso approached and arrived at to the rear of this permeating gloss, when cubism once reflected an unassailable contradiction between modernity and life? This teleology of capitalism is evermore present in the subsuming of divergent, even antithetical practices under the theme/timelessness roofs of the museum's spiralling appetite for the collectible. Spatial-temporal segmentation, reheated-pseudo-revolution, reheated-pseudo-semantics of insurrection, the pseudo-anarchy of the 'anything goes', the generic and the apolitical and genial biographies or just the alternating spectacle of stardom. If the old museum, attached to the colonialist pomp of nationality, was a major component of the "societies of discipline", the new is a business spreading its wings in the era of corporate transnationality of the "societies of control". No surprise then that the Guggenheim is stretching its tentacles and the new Tate Modern will help give rise to another one and yet another one, in a more than probable strategic landing of its and Britannia's stature abroad.

22 It's well reported, the conditions behind May/June 68's events. The radical left embodied by the students no longer reviewing themselves in the Parti Communiste Française, after the PCF's concomitance with Stalinism and its profound silence about Algeria. The wear down of de Gaulle's figure and the Fifth Republic's in the aftermath of the Algerian strive for independence. The far right still mourned the 'colony' France 'had given up'. The far left lingered with an old sense of discontent with the regime re-ignited by the Algerian exposure. The French nation at large was confounded by it. Trepidation with the arisen tendency towards capitalist fed hedonism in society, specially from within particular fringes that included students and intellectuals, was developing-a generation conflict between the bourgeois parenthood that had grown up with the war and their proto-revolutionary student progeny is often referred to in this context. Vietnam. Social differences that, despite a developing economy under the auspices of a bourgeois-capitalist program of modernisation implemented by de Gaulle, were hardly declining-the general strikes of June would have been impelled by such. A new intellectual left, amongst others, modelled by the S.I., an actualisation of Marx and a review of Stalinism, at once set to recede from capitalist totality and the 'old' communist prerogative. In June, the general strikes would follow; thus, for many, 'May 68' would come to be 'May/June 68'.

23 The 1917's Revolution in Russia and its outgrowth constitute a too elaborate historical object to be even divided in sections that could be outlined in the context of this paper. All allusions to October 1917 therefore proceed from a composite point of view, which is based as much on history as it is on the idea of a 'spirit' that can be apprehended from within its complexity. The same can be said about our approach to 'Rodchenko', as a comparative 'revolutionary ideal': his "Pure Colours" can be read as "a new art for a new society", but also as a critique of conventions from a more internal to art point of view. A fair introduction to October's revolution, with the advantage of its documental contents and a selected bibliography that can lead to other readings is, Martin McCauley, The Russian Revolution & the Soviet State 1917-1921: Documents, The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1980.

24 Primarily, because his quest had been set onward the history of painting and not the Duchampian ready-made-as post-war anti-art, righteously or not, did. Moreover, because his stripes were proposed as an analytical object that eventually forwarded a pedagogy instead of a synthetic one that tried to counter artistic conventions symmetrically, engaging the concept of ready-made in the bewildering pastime of matter versus anti-matter. Where Buren's oeuvre was critical, most post-war anti-art was, by definition, substitutive, at length replacing the orthodoxy of tradition with an orthodoxy of the spectacular. Long gone were the days of dada.

25 Daniel Buren, "Beware" (originally published July/August 1969, amended January 1970), in Studio International 920, March 1970, p. 103.

26 Alexander Alberro, The Turn of the Screw: Daniel Buren, Dan Flavin, and the Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition, p. 76.

27 Ibid.

28 Dan Flavin, for instance, when referring to his own proposals, paradoxically misses this supra-mundane quality his work certainly attains, at the same time he emphasises a property of permanence secured by the industrial nature of his materials. "I sense no stylistic or structural development of any significance within my proposal-only shifts in partitive emphasis-modifying and addable without intrinsic change…. It is as though my system synonymises its past, present and future states without incurring a loss of relevance." Dan Flavin, "some remarks… excerpts from a spleenish journal", Artforum 5, December 1966, p.27, as cited in Alexander Alberro, The Turn of the Screw: Daniel Buren, Dan Flavin, and the Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition, p. 77.

29 We're not swiftly discharging minimalism as just that synthetic order of ABC art, which others have dismissed, as such analysed and critically recovered by the likes of Hal Foster (The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, p. 35). We dismiss it by large, though we're here schematically trying to acknowledge a set of qualities attained by minimalist practices across and differentiate it from Buren's own minimal framework. Because Buren drew on minimalism, but would also forward a critique of minimalist aims and claims and, as it were, conquer other regions onward minimalist legacies. A 'minimalism', Buren's, which for once brought the apparently antithetical 'modernist painterly' and 'minimalist sculptural' into an equidistant arena of disclosure that questioned both in relation to one another. It's true that one of the splendours of the minimalist spirit was to oppose the Greenbergian motto of 'art through formal progression'; it's truer however that in doing so minimalism precipitated a reactionary synthesis of matter and quintessence that consistently side-stepped a veritable engagement with history and society. What does stability, based on industrial materials, mean, if not the careful configuration of a balance between infra and supra-mundane forms that ultimately directs minimalism away from a realm of contradictions the mere reality of industrialisation contains?

30 Surely, the matter would always have been complicated from the start by an unbalanced relationship between the audience Buren was firstly addressing and the meaning the 200 papers were inherently carrying out. The full impact on the medium's stability Buren had possibly expected would only but take place following the epiphenomenal stance of second-level of reception-one in which the spontaneity of a first interaction with the outside world has to be rebuilt from the standpoint of whatsoever sustaining ideology. In fact, only after the 'archive' has taken over, in the form of a book of photographs, the embracing of the museum or an anthological exhibition in a gallery, may the 200 papers be unequivocally experienced in a context where we generally understand it is painting we are actually addressing. And it is precisely conventions and institutions that concern us when we hypothesise Buren's intervention as a kind of 'reversed exposé'. Since the 200 posters had been clandestinely laid across the streets of Paris in the first instance, but inevitably had to enter institutional realms they had supposedly been contesting at a later stage, before the placing of a 'whole potential' brought about by an enterprise of such nature could be exercised. Besides, as a tormentor of aesthetic heritages (high modernist, neo-avant-gardist, the convolution of both) Buren's intervention would prosper precisely at the expenses of its out-of-doors 'failure'; since it is by exemplifying an impossible condition that it grossly commits the objet d'art, in its many shapes, to the predicaments of a failed utopia. Namely, that this objet d'art serves at the same time as the ordinary and the (one) exceptional object that reflects the contingencies of its present time and transcends them in a charming inflection towards an aesthetic land of promise-reification. Buren's would do just the same, but in a refractory manner, impregnated with a consciousness of its own limits and aware that tomorrow's precarious existence as a sign amongst signs would act precisely as its future 'accomplishment', from the standpoint of art-historical retrospection. If transcendentalism remained integrally within the 'functional' scope of the art object, Buren's admittedly included, it shouldn't happen at the expense of a critique of reification, but precisely by readjusting aesthetic values from the standpoint of their pulsation into the mundane. After all, Buren was reading from the situationist chart, aware of the peculiarity of his proposals around that time. As argued, It was precisely the situationists who believed "the role of culture in the new spectacular society [the post-war meridian, that is] was to collapse the social contradictions of capitalism by transforming all genuine experience into commodities". Alexander Alberro, The Turn of the Screw: Daniel Buren, Dan Flavin, and the Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition, p. 79. Alberro's passage concerns the influence situationist theory would have had on Buren on the occasion of his troublesome and short-lived participation in the Sixth Guggenheim.

31 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century, p. 19

32 By April, Nanterre was steaming. The students' "Movement of 22 March" had originated as an anti-establishment response separated from the UNEF (Union Nationale des Étudiants Français), against the campus' disciplinary regulations and was, by then, leading the way, supported by others, towards a revolutionising of the entire university. For a succinct account of 'May 68', see: Maurice Agulhon, The French Republic 1879-1992, Blackwell, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995 (first published as La République by Hatchette, Paris 1990).

33 The Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, London, 1979 (first printed 1933), p. 398.

34 Transcendentalism, 'Kantian disinterest' and self-reference along with an externally imputed reified condition, are commonly accepted as attributes of the modernism of Greenberg, Fried and akin. And yet, how can we not see a rearward transcendentalism and a substantial reification of its objet d'art burgeoned across a certain neo-avant-garde apparently critical of that same modernism. Or, where do we place a figure like Yves Klein? On the subject of neo-avant-garde repetition of historical avant-gardist paradigms-Klein himself the representative-see: Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde", in October 37, Summer 1986.

35 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Conceptual Art 1962 - 1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions, p. 142.

36 Sure thing, we're simplifying the equation immeasurably. For once, we're not outlining a separation between gallery and museum, when this separation 'still' exists. Secondly, we're subsequently forgetting the classifications of public gallery and private museum that confound the picture. Thirdly, we're keeping the waters undivided a priori, under the notion that public museum and private gallery no longer perform respectively publicly and privately, when again this is a highly problematic simplification. Fourthly, we should distinguish between . public and private a priori, even if public and private intertwine in so many ways, because this categorical distinction exists mythically, if less substantially, within art spheres. We're thinking more etiologically, carrying along museum, gallery and associated professions, as defined by a capitalism of art, in our speculative effort, as a way to retrospectively operate in the meaning of the 200 posters.

37 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Open Letters, Industrial Poems", in Benjamin Buchloh ed., Broodthaers: Writings, Interviews, Photographs, October, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987, p. 73. Buchloh deduces anomie from a "modernist strategy of hermetic resistance by which the visual or linguistic sign constitutes itself to refuse the visual or sensual data the viewer demands" (Ibid.). We therefore try to see the archetype of this strategy in the intricacy of the modernist grid and further ascertain Buren's 'anomie of stripes' as a continuation of the grid's 'anomic project' under a reversed life. The idea is not new, since Buchloh, at least, saw anomie being engaged by the likes of Marcel Broodthaers as a strategy, at once it being exposed and investigated in Broodthaers' relentless practice of hyperbolising, labyrinthine arching and dereliction of that same anomic edifice.

38 Ibid.

39 In the sense that the 200 posters' anomic form inhabits the streets without the protective blanket of the museum or the gallery.

40 The question, initially posed by Hal Foster concluding an endnote and regarding the incident in face of "… institution critique in art and theory [in relation] to other political forms of intervention and occupation around 1968…" reads: "Was the placement inadvertent? How are we to mediate these image-events?" (Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century, pp. 238-239).

41 Ibid.

42 See, for instance: R. H. Fuchs ed., Discordance/Cohérence, p. 4.

43 For example: Daniel Buren, Photo-Souvenirs 1965-1988. Also: R. H. Fuchs ed., Discordance/Cohérence

44 Buren would repeat the strategy with variations on other occasions: in the streets of Düsseldorf and Bern in 1969, in the Paris Métro in 1970, in the streets of Paris again in 1971 and throughout. Besides, he would repeatedly name a few of those interventions as "affichages sauvages", according to the methodology he had used in 1968.

45 Flooding across Paris into the Sorbonne and giving rise to the first major confrontation between students and the police in the heart of the Latin Quarter on the 3rd of May.

46 Disdain therefore seems difficult to incorporate, since notices and action/protest posters in the streets were, in April, still sparse and somewhat centralised around activism happening in Nanterre. At this stage, it would rather look like negligence or inattention played the major role in the obstruction. The first major confrontation happened on the 3rd of May, precipitated, as is constantly reminded across the pages of every chronicle that details the occupation movement, by the authoritarian closure of Nanterre. Following Nanterre's interdiction, the students decided to travel across and gather in the courtyard of the Sorbonne, in what would lead to the engagement of a larger student population in the protests and confrontations. For a narrative-poetic account of 'May', see: Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn, The beginning of the End: France, May 1968, Verso, London, New York, 1998 (first published 1968). For an S.I. member's inside outlook, see: René Viénet, Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May '68, Autonomedia, New York, Rebel Press, London, 1992 (original edition by Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1968). Also: Maurice Agulhon, The French Republic 1879-1992.

47 CRS: Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the national riots police. Concerning Buren the activist: "J'y retournai ["à l'École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris"] seulement en mai 68, pour fabriquer et sérigraphier nos affiches contre de Gaulle ou les CRS, que nous allions coller dans tout Paris et la banlieue avec d'autres artistes comme Gérard Fromanger et Julio Le Parc, parmi d'autres". Jérôme Sans, Daniel Buren: Au Sujet de… Entretien avec Jérôme Sans, p. 23.

48 After all, Buren was using someone other than himself, at the time, as the carrier of his 'message', such as in the specific case of the "hommes-sandwiches" 'intervention'.

49 See: Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (notes towards an investigation), pp. 1-60.

50 Obviously, the worker can be incorporated into the creative process, which exists above him/her, under extraordinary circumstances that somehow have lead to a perception of his/her creative skills. However, this happens through a secretive process whereby his/her promotion and therefore substitution in the production-assembly line is determined accordingly with the interests of the company-the incorporation of singular cases of aptitude into a fixed structure instead of a structural change that meets the 'aptitudes' of its 'lower layering'.

51 There is a qualitative difference between creativeness and laxity, which is significant when analysing labour in the context of bourgeois-capitalism and otherwise labour in the arts. It seems that creativeness and laxity are largely assimilated as the same prohibited object across the lower end of the production gamut-the "good worker" postulate-, tending to separate into a positive entity, creativeness, and a negative one, laxity, when approaching the summit of the production strata. On the other hand, creativeness and laxity are often entwined positive constituents of the artistic process, inclined to disjoin when ideas of productiveness associated with the ethics of bourgeois-capitalism penetrate the artist's belief. And yet, the artist as an archetype of freedom is a bourgeois-capitalist construct. If Marcel Duchamp can be seen as a paradigm of that association between creativeness and the 'freedom of laxity', as the epithet "Engineer of the Lost Time" (Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Da Capo Press, 1987) declares, Picasso, for instance, can conversely be seen as the archetype of an association between creative freedom and productiveness, as the common discourse around vigour and the gravity of 'his' periods attests. It seems that art has to be powdered here and there and now and then with the semblance of labouriousness, so that workmanship and aesthetic production walk side-by-side in harmony, especially to satisfy Protestant ethics.

52 The inaptitude of 'consciousness' to perform repetitively on perpetual movement is the nodal point. Boredom or another cause of 'exhaustion', which urge the implementation and standardisation of breaks, bring to mind the comparison between worker and working machine as different components in any production apparatus: where the first is always adapted, the second is, by definition, always fabricated. 'Wasted time' is therefore invariably a problem related to a certain inadequacy of the 'desiring machine' in contrast with the automaton. A comparative study of swivel and rocking chairs as respectively a paradigm of the 'ergonomics of labour' and an example of the 'ergonomics of rest' would lead to similar conclusions.

53 Not that dada and pop art had ever been drawn along the same lines or had ever encouraged such cynical counterparts. Andy Warhol's silk-screenings embodied a dark side of life, a pathology of the spectacle, which is all too tragic and distant from any sanctioning of consumerism that might be superficially attached to them by way of a recurrent thematic.

54 As discussed across parts one and two.

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Miguel Faleiro, December 2000
(reviewed October 2001)

He is an artist. Currently, he is working on the 'British Museums' paper, a visceral attempt at linking and demystifying the made-up faces of British Museum and Tate Modern; also working on a Ciné roman, provisionally called 'A Feature Film', which will be an assemblage of architectural photographs and narration. Forthcoming shows include "Rehearsing Public Quarters: 3 x 3 architectural videofilms at the National Film Theatre", London, April 2002