Daniel buren biography oeuvres litterairess

On March 22, 1968, a group of students occupied the administration building of the Université Paris Nanterre.[1] The Mouvement du 22 Mars, as it became known, played a catalyzing role in the subsequent events of May–June 1968. Influenced in part by the critique of bureaucracy developed on the noncommunist Left during the preceding years, student militants emphasized spontaneity and principles of direct democratic self-organization.[2] This embrace of immediacy became a major theme during May ’68 and its aftermath, dovetailing with a broader ethos of personal and sexual liberation. The momentous agitation on the suburban campus couldn’t seem further removed from the vernissage held at the Galerie Jean Fournier in the seventh arrondissement, where the painter Claude Viallat made his Parisian solo debut, also on March 22 (fig. 1). Viallat’s large, unstretched canvases hung, free, in great swags from the picture rails, like flags or festive bunting. Colored blue or red or left raw, the surfaces were patterned by a repeated biomorphic shape, soaked directly into the weave of the fabric.[3] The resulting chromatic contrasts—between red and navy or sunny Mediterranean blue and the off-white surface of raw canvas—were vivid. Recalling the “buoyant effect” of the exhibition, Yve-Alain Bois suggests that Viallat revived the then-forgotten tradition of what he calls Matisse’s “expansiveness,” referring not simply to the cliché of Matisse as a hedonistic colorist, but to the visceral potency of his approach to color, to the pulsating force and dynamism of the surface of his paintings.[4] This chromatic intensity set Viallat’s canvases apart from the more austere and disciplined paintings shown the previous year by Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni as part of a series of high-profile Parisian manifestations.[5] These performative events featured canvases with severely reduced patterns of stripes, spots, or circles, which were marshaled in a

[Unpublished Conference, Venice, 2009]

By comparing early works of Calle to the 19-Century attitude of the dandy, I aim to test a hypothesis that came up a long time ago. The starting point was an academic dissertation on Sophie Calle, specifically on the question of truth and fiction. An aspect of her work struck me at the time, but I didn’t know what to do with it. It seemed that her work was based on life itself, with a twist, I do agree, but still, it appeared to the public that she was doing almost nothing, or at least, very few. Sophie Calle, now famous French artist born in 1953, came back to Paris in the late 70’s after a 7-year long travel all over the world. At the time of her come back, she had no proper job, no friends and actually, nothing to do in Paris. In his novel Leviathan (1992) the American writer Paul Auster borrows some features of Sophie Calle’s artistic experiments to create a fictional double called Maria Turner, who is depicted as an eccentric photographer. In the novel, he narrates this come back to the city, just like Sophie Calle did, and he explains that she started to follow randomly people in the streets in order to “find new ideas, to fill up the void in which she seemed to sink”. Even if Auster rearranges the facts for his story, Sophie Calle does not disallow the substance of it (on the contrary, she appreciates the ambiguity resulting from this blurring effect). This happened indeed for real in 1978, when Calle left California for Paris, on the basis of a deal with her father who agreed to sponsor her as long as she had found a real activity. One of the reasons Sophie Calle likes to give in interviews to explain why she became an artist is that she wanted to seduce her father. He is now a retired renowned doctor and an art collector who had a flair for contemporary artists, such as Christian Boltanski or the Nouveaux Réalistes in the 60’s. The legend (built by Calle herself and that the writer Hervé Guibert helped propag