Couleurs Superpos??es: Acte VII by Daniel Buren
Daniel Buren is nothing if not interdisciplinary. As an adjunct to his Guggenheim Museum exhibition, The Eye of the Storm: Works in situ by Daniel Buren, March 25-June 8, 2005, the French conceptualist orchestrated a theater piece starring his signature stripes on the show’s opening night. Titled Couleurs Superpos??es: Acte VII, the event at the Guggenheim’s Peter B. Lewis Theater was Buren’s first performance in New York since 1973.
Buren’s signature yellow, red, green and blue stripes came to life on stage, as student performers’following Buren’s directions’used wheat paste to put up variously colored rectangular sheets of paper onto a large black-and-white-striped wall. Colors and stripes appeared, disappeared and changed locations on the wall for almost over an hour, until Buren signaled the performers to pause and begin to reverse the process, peeling off sections of the layered surface, revealing odd shapes and lacerated bits of alternating colored stripes beneath.
The event encouraged viewers to notice the conceptual leaps proposed by the artist’s work. ‘Did Buren patch over the red, white and blue stripes reminiscent of an American flag consciously’? an audience member asked after the performance. For fans of Buren’s aesthetic, the performance was a demonstration of his devotion to the experience of beauty while dismantling it at the same time. The performance made literal Buren’s ‘interrogation’ of art and its various forms. PERFORMA director RoseLee Goldberg, who co-organized the evening, called the piece ‘a sparkling gem’ that perfectly demonstrated Buren’s ‘entire belief system as an artist.’
Couleurs Superpos??es: Acte VII was produced by Mary Cronson of the Guggenheim’s Works & Process program, and was co-organized by RoseLee Goldberg and Guggenheim curator Susan Cross.
03/27/05 by Defne Ayas