The Riddle of may 68: Collectivity and protest in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture

Abstract

In April 1968, mere days before a revolutionary movement would erupt and consume France, the artist Daniel Buren took a photograph of a work he had just installed on a Paris street corner next to the É cole des Beaux-Arts (Fig. 1). The photograph shows a billboard plastered with several posters, some torn and illegible, a few with abstract designs, a handwritten tract, and an unidentifiable advertisement. The various posters overlap and obscure one another with the most recent addition being an approximately 3 ft × 4 ft sheet with vertical stripes. Buren posted approximately 200 such sheets in various locations around the city, particularly in the Latin Quarter, in an attempt to escape the ideological determinations of traditional art institutions and spaces. That February at the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Grenoble, Minister of Culture André Malraux, had reiterated the assertion he had been making for over a decade, that in France, art had 'conquered its autonomy'. Buren's mute stripes, with their insistent lack of communication or individual expressivity, simultaneously insist on the institutional, ideological, and spatial structures that subtend that autonomy, structures that themselves are fully social, and at the same time posit an ambivalence about art's social role beyond such structures. © 2012 The Author.