Page 31 - Studio International - March 1973

political act, that every gesture is dictated by (or older committed artists and those like Buren who here to trace all the ramifications of state
linked to) a precise social, historical situation, emerged during the late sixties. For the first, involvement. They include ancient
then art is a fortiori ruled by these truths. . . . social commitment was expressed either in establishments, the museums, Sevres, the École
There is not an art which is political and an art terms of style, that is, a revision of style within des Beaux Arts, and new bodies like CNAC;
which is not. All art is political and as a whole the existing boundaries of art; or, in terms of they include potentially massive systems of
art is reactionary.' He's not the first person to new relationships to a public, expressed in terms support for individuals in the form of purchases,
have said that. His originality, it seems to me, of the integration of the arts, multiples and so whether for museums or state property,
lies in the way in which he has faced from a on. The audience postulated was an imaginary commissions under the law which diverts one
politically committed, materialist point of view one; the art therefore was utopian. The results percent of all building costs over a certain figure
the question of what a painting can be when were greedily absorbed, as a walk past the in the direction of artists, the allocation of state-
the idealism implicit in its traditional nature is showrooms of the Champs Elysees at night owned studios, of prizes and pensions. The
denied. If it is revealed that a painting is simply spectacularly demonstrates. The younger artists, point about all this is that the bargain struck by
a surface which has been painted, nothing more, responding to American art of the sixties the state is still, as it has been ever since the
what is implied in the agreement to recognize it (Morris, Rauschenberg) with its concern for seventeenth century, to do with the matter of

as a painting ? And who are the parties to that usage and its overrunning of media boundaries glory. There is a concept of public
agreement and what do they want of it ? His in the interest of certain questions asked, have embellishment and the public expression of
definition of museums and galleries as 'the seen how art can place itself in a critical national identity which has, in some
inescapable support on which art history is relationship to real, not utopian situations. extraordinary way, survived and is untouched by
painted' gives the clue to all his activity. His (This is putting it far too schematically, all I can the liberal nineteenth-century concepts of public
painting, his arrays of stripes from which all manage at the moment.) education and recreation whose memory
internal (idealistic) systems of meaning have All this takes place of course in the very animates the state support of the arts in this
been excluded, acts at one end only of an arch specific context of Paris itself. There are two country. The contrast is best indicated by the
that spans a social situation. At the other end is tourist points which need to be made. The first different ways in which funds reach their
the precise location, the precise occasion of its is a sheer ubiquitous obviousness of the art trade. destination. In England the model seems to be
showing. Hence, the precise nature, loose or I am not talking about its cash volume, which I the autonomy of the universities. The degree of
binding, of the contract itself. That contract, would guess is far less, relative to other centres, devolution enjoyed by bodies like the ACGB or
that agreement, is the 'work'. More than just set than it used to be, but of the way it hits the eye. the regional arts associations or the museums is
up and left to look after itself, the agreement is It is a message that comes off the street in unknown in France, where in the end everything
demonstrated and challenged. banner-sized posters on poles suggesting events has to be answered for to the Minister of
Of all the artists I met in Paris Daniel Buren of public importance, in the windows of Culture. The consequence is obvious: any
seemed to me the most confident of his stance. expensive shops, inescapably cementing involvement with the state is in the end a
He could afford to be; it was crystal clear. I connections with high nourishment, clothes, political endorsement of the government of the
didn't feel the same about those artists associated perfumes, in hotel foyers. Artists' names, the day. For an artist to take up a position of
with the Supports/Surfaces group whose institution of the one-man show, are inextricably a-political amnesia, to gaily screw the system, is
work I happened to see. A great deal of their bound up with delectation, and not just in actually to play into the hands of the system.
voluminous theoretical writing (Peinture — corners where a few people know to look, but Because gay, a-political and insouciant is how
Cahiers Theoriques) looks like an elaborate very publicly. No doubt a French artist would the system would like artists to be. Or so the
effort to talk themselves back from the extreme dismiss this as irrelevant to what is really argument goes.
and precarious position that Buren had happening. My point is that even if ninety-nine There is no doubt that there is still a lingering
postulated some years ago, without actually percent of what is so openly displayed is hangover, a trace of shock from the past, the
looking retrograde. Such painting as I saw by decadent rubbish, 'what is really happening' past of the École de Paris. Talking to artists of a
Cane, Dezeuze, Devade, Viallat (just which of takes place in that ambience. The institution of generation that emerged during the late sixties
these is at present with the group and which out art as resonant furnishing is too obviously woven I was repeatedly aware of a resentment at what
of it I am not sure) looked to me like gallery art into the fabric of the city to be irrelevant. The was felt to be their isolation from the rest of
of a kind which would sit perfectly happily with mere fact that there are columns and columns of western art, an isolation that they attributed to
any more or less systemic, material-based art in names in the yellow pages under the heading the myth of the École de Paris become official
London or anywhere else. artistes-peintres raises special questions . . . dogma. There was a hunger for information and
The politics of the Left have dominated a The other aspect of this high degree of an acknowledgement of ignorance about the
large section of French art ever since the war — institutionalization is the involvement of the facts of modern art — even of their own,
as they have intellectual life generally. A point state. Here the contrast with what is familiar in shrouded as it had been with poetic rhetoric and
that would be interesting to develop at length this country is, at bottom, a difference in the stuff about the radiant image of France. More
would be the crucial difference between the public value attributed to art. There isn't room than once I was told with some bitterness that
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