Crítica ornamental / Ornamental critique

In his essay entitled "The Museum and the Monument: Daniel Buren's Les couleurs/Les formes" (1981), Benjamin Buchloh established the following: "As Buren's work adds surfaces onto architectural surfaces without actually altering the architectural elements, it enters the discourse that is traditionally defined as 'decoration.' However, Buren's concern for 'decoration' is not simply the result of the painterly origins of his work or an inherent incapacity of his tools to come to terms with architectural issues, but it is a logical consequence of his recognition that art production is innately bound to the realm of superstructure (i.e., decoration, fashion, etc.). (...) 'Decoration' in Buren's work therefore reveals the inherent tendency of the artist's production to falsify its own intentions: the work of art perpetually pretends to alter material conditions and always ends up condemned by being reduced to a superstructural or cultural embellishment (...)." Buchloh concludes: "The artist as deliberate decorator of the status quo, as a conscious purveyor of aesthetic and intellectual fashions, as a producer of superstructural changes, seems to realise cynically and with passive resignation the functions his work has in fact been reduced to." Buchloh's defeatist vision in this text is positively naive: once again it is the old Frankfurtian fable of an art animated by a revolutionary pathos which, on materialising in social space, is corrupted by the circuit and the symbolical economy in which it is inscribed, although it takes part in its "progress." Funnily -and luckily for him- the arguments which Buchloh aimed to use to defend Buren's work are ambiguous and reversible; they can also be used to attack it, to the same extent that Buren himself, by condemning the "superficial" character of modern art, is right only if the condemnation also affects, first and foremost, the work itself. After spending a few minutes looking at any of Buren's interventions in public spaces, it is easy to realise the extent to which said argumentative reversibility has allowed him to create a formalist oeuvre which, despite its desire to be shown in infrastructural spaces and not on the walls or exhibition surfaces, has not stopped growing in superficiality... The profound Mannerism, for instance, of his latest intervention at the Musée National Picasso in Paris reveals that Buren has gone from falling within the modernist historical line to being bound by the classicist tradition of French courtesan creators like Le Nôtre o Le Brun (although that does not mean that Buren is not a prominent creator within this courtesan tradition, quite the opposite, in fact). The art Buren has displayed at the Musée Picasso contains the chef's staple ingredients, cooked in situ: glass windows that alternate chromatic elements between glasses and stripes, his speciality, all duplicated by an enormous mirror that splits the building's façade in two, thus reflecting one of its halves and concealing the other. It would be vacuous to attack the work in detail as if Buren had achieved with it a particularly relevant level of aesthetic hollowness or celebration. Indeed, what is most surprising about this travelling illusionist and charlatan is the perseverance with which he always markets the same self-legitimising potion to the corresponding institution. By proving that art is not only a meaningless banality (without further importance than a floral print), but also a necessary banality, Buren fuels the exasperating nihilism that undermines contemporary artistic production.

As we were saying, the attempt to critically occupy the ornamental space results in an effort that is not only ineffective, but also apologetic. Returning to the obsolete, vaguely Marxist, polarity between infrastructure and superstructure, we could say that any work that manifests a surface (i.e., a "visibility") can be recycled as "decoration" by the symbolical economy it attempts to attack. The emphatic invasion of ornamental spaces is, in fact, ornamental and forces the artist undertaking it to embrace an ambivalent commitment that could be summarised as "cynicism," or in other words, as a jovial and masochistic tolerance of something he hates. It is the notion that Buchloh defined as the "inherent tendency of the artist's production to falsify its own intentions," that is, the propensity to question himself, or to support self-castration, is certainly a neutralising argument that enjoys major political efficacy: by criticising the ineffectiveness of the work of art and by making it an artistic theme, the artist can take part in the system he is actually criticising with peace of mind. Similarly, politicising a work of art legitimises its "indecency." At this point, we should perhaps quote the words that the narrator from Chris Marker's Le Tombeau d'Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik, 1993), pronounces at one point in the film: "That year in Moscow the talk of the town was: 'How far had Metropolitan Pitirim collaborated with the KGB?' -Not had he, but how far. Like a Welles character, like Kane or Macbeth, how far can you get along with evil. 'Use a long spoon to sup with the devil'. Did you wear out the length of your lives calculating the length of the spoon, only to discover that there was no supper?"