#bmpt

Interesting take, posting here to read later

It is not known whether Guy Debord ever commented on the activities of Daniel Buren and his companions Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni when, working collectively in 1966 and 1967 under their surnames only, they staged the most radical critique of the neo-avant-garde on the road to spectacularization. Had he done so, he would no doubt have been the first to observe in relation to their practice something he had recognized ten years earlier in his damning commentary on the work of Yves Klein—that, under the totalizing conditions of capitalist consumption, spectacle and radical (neo-) avant-garde gestures were no longer mutually exclusive but rather increasingly complemented and reinforced each other. Buren, for his part, was well versed in the history and strategies of the Lettrist and Situationist internationals, rewarding his early interest in the theory of spectacle and détournement later with the acquisition of one of the most comprehensive collections of Situationist texts and documents, and even adorning the entrance to his living room with Debord and Asger Jorn’s collaborative painting calling for the immediate abolition of alienated labor. It is known, by contrast, that neither Roland Barthes nor Michel Foucault (the artist’s other, hidden philosophical Penates) ever paid any attention to Buren and BMPT. The philosophers wrote at that time on artists such as Jean Degottex, Gérard Fromanger, and eventually Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol, while Buren was articulating the most ambitious and epistemologically challenging artistic proposition to emerge from Paris that decade, if not in the postwar period as a whole. That fact points, of course, first of all to a lack of reciprocity between philosophers and theorizing artists in Paris, since Barthes’s essays—from those collected in Mythologies (1957) to "The Death of the Author" (1967)—were foundational for Buren’s elaboration of the written apparatus with which he buttressed his work, beginning in 1970 with the publication of Limites Critiques (Critical Limits), the central text for all subsequent understanding of the formation of "institutional critique."