Daniel Buren

This photograph depicts one of 200 green-and-white striped posters Buren pasted around Paris without authorization, in the middle of the night. Buren insists the photographs in this book are not works of art, but rather, as he called them, “photo-souvenirs” of works he installed in public spaces like subway stations, billboards, and store windows.

The poster depicted here is one in a series of striped materials—including posters, billboards, fabric, and clothing—that Buren began producing in 1966. Buren considered this motif of alternating colored and white vertical stripes (each precisely 3.4 inches [8.7 centimeters] in width) to be a stand-in for painting, and hoped it would free painting from its traditional burden of having to tell a story, represent something or someone, or express emotion.

Buren hoped to liberate painting from the confines of the museum as well, by pasting them up in highly trafficked public spaces. Like other Conceptual artists, Buren was concerned that museums and galleries were assuming the authority to define art. As he put it, “The museum/gallery instantly promotes to ‘art’ status whatever it exhibits with conviction, i.e., habit, thus diverting in advance any attempt to question the foundations of art.”