PUBLICATIONS

The title Voile/Toile, Toile/Voile, immediately presents this catalogue as a description and representation of the performative event that Daniel Buren conceived and realized in concomitance with his exhibition. It was a question of a regatta of small sailboats—optimist dinghies—rigged with striped, colored sails produced by the artist himself. At the conclusion of the regatta, the sails were removed from the boats and installed in the halls of the museum, and were thus transformed, exactly as announced by the catalogue’s title, from sails into canvases: from voiles into toiles. The artistic strategy of Daniel Buren (along with Michel Parmentier, Olivier Mosset and Niele Toroni, all of whom were active in Paris at the end of the 1960s) was in fact quite polemic, and deployed a true and proper conceptual criticism of traditional painting, thus exploring new modes, more anonymous and industrial, of artistic composition. The catalogue is enriched by photos and texts which were taken and written by Buren himself.

Exhibition catalogue, Vierwaldstättersee (Lake Lucerne), May 3, 1980, Kunstmuseum Luzern, May 18 - June 22, 1980. Texts: Martin Kunz, and Daniel Buren