Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository

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Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni.
Manifestation Number Four, September
1967, Fifth Biennale de Paris, Musie
d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris.
framework determining it, Buren singularly succeeded in displacing both the
paradigms of painting and that of the readymade (even twenty years later this
critique makes the naive continuation of object production in the Duchampian
vein of the readymade model appear utterly irrelevant).
From the perspective of the present, it seems easier to see that Buren's
assault on Duchamp, especially in his crucial 1969 essay Limites Critiques, was
primarily directed at the conventions of Duchamp reception operative and predominant
throughout the late 1950s and early '60s, rather than at the actual
implications of Duchamp's model itself. Buren's central thesis was that the fallacy
of Duchamp's readymade was to obscure the very institutional and discursive
framing conditions that allowed the readymade to generate its shifts in the
assignment of meaning and the experience of the object in the first place. Yet,
one could just as well argue, as Marcel Broodthaers would in fact suggest in his
catalogue of the exhibition The Eagle from the Oligocene to Today in Dfisseldorf in
1972, that the contextual definition and syntagmatic construction of the work of
art had obviously been initiated by Duchamp's readymade model first of all.
In his systematic analysis of the constituting elements of the discourse of
painting, Buren came to investigate all the parameters of artistic production and
reception (an analysis that, incidentally, was similar to the one performed by
Lawrence Weiner in arriving at his own "matrix" formula). Departing from
Minimalism's (especially Ryman's and Flavin's) literalist dismemberment of painting,
Buren at first transformed the pictorial into yet another model of opacity
and objecthood. (This was accomplished by physically weaving figure and