CATALOGUE ESSAYS

Pierre Buraglio: An Artist of the No Yes

Raphael Rubinstein

 

Let’s recall the situation for a young painter emerging in Western Europe or North America in the early 1960s. Leaving aside for the moment the question of national and regional specificity (a painter in New York didn’t face exactly the same conditions as one in Paris, whose experience wasn’t identical to a contemporary in Nice, and so on), most young painters felt that gestural abstraction, the mode that had been dominant for the previous decade, was looking exhausted. This apparent decline of abstract-expressionist/informel painting coincided with (and was partly provoked by) the emergence of Nouveau Réalisme and Neo-Dada, which rejected not just gestural painting but painting tout court. It’s true that in the early years of the decade Pop art reanimated painting, but only by relying on a new kind of content and an acknowledgement that mechanical reproduction had to be addressed. At the same time Minimalism was advocating a rejection of the handmade, a rejection of touch and, perhaps most importantly, a rejection of composition, while chance-loving Fluxus believed it was time to bid farewell to art objects altogether. For a painter who wanted, on the one hand, to insist on abstraction, and, on the other, to not dismiss the innovative art of the last few years, it wasn’t an easy moment. The challenges to abstract painting raised by the avant-gardes of the early 1960s–the bankruptcy of gesture, the collapse of relational composition, the power of objects, the burden of objects–led, in many cases, to a similar response from young painters like Giulio Paolini in Torino, Blinky Palermo in Düsseldorf and Jo Baer in New York. They approached the medium of painting as one would deal with a car engine that had stopped running: strip it down, examine each part, rebuild it. But the goal of these young painters was not that of a mechanic; they didn’t want to put the machine back together exactly as it had been before. As they considered the disassembled components of painting they found themselves fascinated by isolated parts, which they began reassembling in new ways, leaving out anything they couldn’t use. To many observers, the rebuilt vehicle that emerged was barely recognizable as painting. Lacking lyrical reverie or pictorial drama, it didn’t capable of transporting the viewer as painting was supposed to do.

 

Thus began a decade-long collective attempt to redefine painting, a deconstructive process in which the internal contradictions, and unexplored potentials, of the medium were coaxed out into view. Among the many artists who contributed to this project, perhaps none have been more faithful to that original confrontation than Pierre Buraglio, who, for over 50 years, has continued to find new and fruitful ways to reassemble the components of painting,   

 

It was in 1964 that Buraglio, then 25, began making works that disrupted the structures of the medium. This disruption was absolutely necessary because, as Pierre Wat has put it so well, Buraglio “entered painting at a moment when it was a closed space.” His first attempts he called Recouvrements, abstract works in which sheets of offset printing paper with roughly filled in areas of color were glued onto canvases he had already painted. With their expanses of single colors, absence of painterly gestures and general flatness, the Recouvrements seem, at first glance, like responses to the work of Rothko, Newman and the Color Field painters. Certainly, Buraglio had these artists in mind at the time, and the year before he had made his first trip to New York which enhanced his knowledge of American postwar painting, but there are several aspects of the Recouvrements that set them apart from any American precedents, and announce what will be Buraglio’s future preoccupations. First, there is the fact that the paintings involve the covering up of something. There were other artists who were experimenting with painting on paper glued to canvas–most notably Italian painter Mario Schifano, whose early 1960s monochromes sometimes resemble the Recouvrements–but Buraglio’s emphasis on effacement, made explicit in the title, introduces a conceptual dimension and metaphorical content to his work. Here paper is not simply a surface designed to receive paint, it’s a tool of revision, a device of cancellation, a philosophical statement of negation. Papering over a surface is also a technique that derives not from the realm of fine art, but from the quotidian world of posters and billboards, from the street. In effect, Buraglio is using the same materials as the Nouveau Réaliste affichistes, but without any sociological associations, and without any Duchampian strategies.

 

By covering the support with paper in the Recouvrements, Buraglio wants us to pay attention to how the work has been made and to his avoidance (for the moment not yet total) of conventional painting tools such as brushes. During a 1982 interview with poet Jean Daive, Buraglio explained how, beginning with the Recouvrements, his work always involved “this effort to let the operations be seen.”[i] Another significant aspect of the Recouvrements is that they depend on the reuse of an already existing object (the stretched canvas that is to be covered up). This, too, will become a central tenet of Buraglio’s work, and it is not fully realized until his next body of work, the Agrafages, which occupied him from 1966 to 1968.

 

In order to make the Agrafages (Staplings), the artist used a pair of scissors to cut up painted canvases (mostly his own but occasionally those of other artists) into small triangles which he dropped more or less at random onto a stretched canvas, stapling them where they fell. Usually he left the triangular fragments untouched but in some instances he painted them after they had been attached. What this tells us is that Buraglio, in contrast to an artist such as Daniel Buren who early on forbade himself from ever adding paint to his found materials, does not impose any strict limits on his work; he is less concerned with any kind of conceptual purity than he is with the final pictorial effect. Always willing to experiment with new materials, Buraglio sometimes connected the painted triangles with black or brown adhesive tape. Snaking through the composition like leading in a stained-glass window, the tape is at once functional and formal. In later Agrafages, the artist dispensed with the canvas support and simply stapled the cut-up triangles to each other to create a composite painting with irregular edges. While they have an evident relation to both School of Paris painters like Poliakoff and to Nouveau Réaliste décollage, and, further back, to Kurt Schwitters, the Agrafages also look forward in time, anticipating later artists from Julian Schnabel (how the picture plane and surface are fragmented in the Plate Paintings) to Mark Bradford (the creation of a painting from countless pieces of detritus). Collage, of course, is a central technique of 20th century art, but if we too quickly fold Buraglio’s recycling of materials into the history of collage, we miss some important distinctions. In a 1988 public conversation with Yves Michaud, Buraglio explains his affinity with Schwitters, and his disconnection from Cubist collage. He feels close to Schwitters “certainly for his relation to recuperated materials” but distant from the Cubists, who used collage elements as a “replacement” for a painted image or pattern. Chez Schwitters, the tram tickets and newspaper fragments are “there for themselves, for their color, for their texture. In this way, carried toward what is most humble.”[ii]

 

At the same time he was making the Agrafages, Buraglio developed another body of work, less extensive, and less labor-intensive but nonetheless significant, the Camouflages. These are large multi-part grid paintings in which each panel is either a white monochrome or a section of French Army camouflage fabric. If the gridded composition and the prevalence of white is intended to evoke Mondrian (a connection made explicit in titles such as Mondrian camouflé), the camouflage is a conscious evocation of lyrical abstraction. It’s also, obviously, a reference to military power. The paintings stage an eruption of war, specifically the 1960s colonial wars of Algeria and Vietnam, into the serene realm of geometric abstraction. (Buraglio has identified the camouflage pattern he used as the one worn by French paratroopers, who were infamous for their brutality in Algeria and recognized as symbols and agents of repressive state power.) For Buraglio, the Camouflages were thoroughly political. In an impassioned text written at the time, but only published in 1975, he called for a subversive art and offered the Camouflage paintings as an instance of such subversion. “The dominant class controls all the means of communication [diffusion], of cultural penetration,” but it is in the “interior” of this system that the artist must pursue subversion. Buraglio’s aim, he said, was to “understand painting as a field where our unfreedom [non-liberté] can manifest and exhibit itself.” The only path for artists was to “be within bourgeois culture” and dialectically oppose it, and the only kind of painting that can do this is “A painting foreign to all representation, to all spectacle.”[iii]

 

“Painting must destroy itself in order to reconstruct itself,” Buraglio declared in a 1966 statement.[iv] The idea of “destroying” painting was not in itself a new one. Destruction, after all, had been the muse of Dada. But the notion of reconstructing the demolished medium, rather than moving on to some new and more radical form of expression, struck a new note. Another aspect, one of utmost importance, distinguished Buraglio’s campaign of destroying and rebuilding painting from most other efforts, past or present: he was performing the process on his work work: the Agrafages were cut up pieces of his own finished painting, not a picture of the Mona Lisa (Duchamp) or a flea market find (Asger Jorn). Later, in the 1980s, Buraglio would create a series of works from studio leftovers given to him by Simon Hantaï, but even when he is using materials another artist, Buraglio has never been interested in appropriation or iconoclasm: his motivation is, rather, to let nothing go to waste, to base his work on an economy of deprivation, on his skill at scrounging. When he declares that “painting is nourished from itself” he isn’t merely referring to a reliance on art history or the use of tautological strategies–he means it quite literally: so much of his art is made from studio detritus.[v]

 

The attitude of refusal, the rejection of “representation” and “spectacle,” is of a piece with much art of the late 1960s and 1970s, a period in which painting was often concerned with exclusion and reduction. The danger with such approaches is that of any doctrinaire esthetic, whether it’s Socialist Realism, hardcore punk, or 12-tone music: after the initial burst of vitality that comes from rejecting the old way of doing things, the obligation to adjust one’s creativity to a set of rules, to always having a commissar, real or imagined, looking over your shoulder, saps energy from the work, takes the risk out of it. Buraglio has always been keenly aware of these dangers, which may help explain his independence (he has never been part of any artistic group) and his constant innovation (always seeking new techniques, new materials, new content). It’s why he has he seeks to avoid any artistic practice that, as he puts it, “doesn’t engage the body, that doesn’t put the career in peril.”

 

As a young man, Buraglio was struck by Michel Leiris’s text De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie (translated into English as “The Autobiographer as Torero”), which extols courting various kinds of peril through one’s art.[vi] Published as an afterword to Leiris’s 1946 autobiography L’Age d’Homme (Manhood), “The Autobiographer as Torero” describes the author’s wish to write with such candor that it will forever change his relationship with the world. It is this risk, which Leiris likens to the bull’s horn for the bullfighter, that would make him something more than a mere littérateur. Leiris acknowledges that a writer does not risk dying for what he or she writes in the way a bullfighter courts “a real danger of death,” but he at least hopes “to write a book that is an act,” an act in relation to himself to others (“the way in which I would be regarded by others would no longer be what it had been before the publication of this confession”) and on a literary level (“a backstage revelation that would expose, in all their unenthralling nakedness, the realities” that lurked beneath the surface of his previous writings).[vii] For Buraglio, the “shadow of the bull’s horn,” the “act” that will change his relation to the world, takes the form of a restless, relentless transformation of his work (so that he will never be identified with any artistic brand) and a refusal to rely on any kind of virtuosity, even any specialized skills: he appears to always want his art to carry with it a certain awkwardness, as if he is still learning how to make his work. He also wanted his work to consist of “things anyone could do.”[viii] These are ideals that many artists claim to pursue, but few of them have done so as thoroughly as Buraglio.    

 

Refusal is a stance that seems to have long fascinated Buraglio. He has often cited Harold Rosenberg’s discussion of refusal, and in 1994 he wrote an appreciation of Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” that classic instance of (to borrow a phrase from Enrique Vila-Matas) “an artist of the No.” In a 2008 interview, he places the notion of refusal at the heart of his work. “The great reference that has marked my life, even more than that of [Gilles] Aillaud and Hantaï, and who is an incomparable figure for people of my generation, is Bram Van Velde. I compare him a bit to Herman Melville’s character Bartleby, when he says ‘I would prefer not to.’ He did all he could to not paint, it’s marvelous, it’s the opposite of how things are today when you are asked to fill some space, to fill, always. Him, he sides with reticence. I try to comport myself like that.”[ix]

 

It was in 1968-1969, following the upheavals of May, that Buraglio’s political convictions and artistic ambitions brought him to a crisis point. (During the events of May, Buraglio joined the Atelier Populaire at Paris’s École de Beaux Arts to help produce street posters and fliers.) Finding it impossible to reconcile his artistic practice with the Maoist injunction that art must reflect the experience of the working class and contribute to the cause of socialism, he embarked on what he later called the “progressive abandonment of the metier, of the profession.”[x] It was during this period that he declined to participate in a group exhibition at the École spéciale d’architecture in Paris that marked the emergence of the Supports/Surfaces group.”[xi] In 1969, he took a job operating a rotary press in a print factory, a full-time job he held for four years, during which he stopped making art.

 

The impact of Buraglio’s experience as a rotary press operator–a demanding job that required him to work 8-hour shifts often stretched late into the night (3 to 11 pm or 11 pm to 7 am)–can be seen in the Caviardages of 1982, works in which newspaper pages from Le Monde have been partially effaced with colored pencil and adhesive tape. In other Caviasdages, Buraglio introduces a more personal kind of erasure by crossing out items from his agendas and notebooks. (The general title for all these works is “Les très riches heures de PB.”) Buraglio brings to the Caviardages his personal experience of rotary press printing, a technology that revolutionized the newspaper industry in the mid 19th-century, but rather than celebrate the iconic power of mass-communication as Warhol did, or treat it as a reservoir of imagery as one sees with Rauschenberg, Buraglio entirely negates the newspaper’s content. By eliminating all the information contained in Le Monde, the Caviardages offer a concise visual restatement of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message.” As one continues to look at these works, and consider the implications of the title, additional layers of meaning emerge. “Caviardage,” the French word for “redaction,” alludes to the heavy censorship practiced in Russian under Czar Nicholas I (the term caviardage neatly conflates the black ink favored by the Russian censors with the famous Russian delicacy). Thus, the Caviardages remind us of how all media are subject to censorship, but they also belong to the line of “erasure” art that includes Marcel Broodthaers’s blacking out of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dès jamais n’abolira le hasard, Emilio Isgrò’s Cancellature and Joseph Kosuth’s scored-through text works, among many others. In a further deepening of meaning, the strips of tape that the artist uses to impose rectilinear designs on the crossed-out newspaper pages introduces a formal and pictorial structure, which Buraglio has described in phenomenological terms: “The peripheral margins make a frame, while the internal margins form a cross, and designate a window. The material superimposition of a frame, alone or with an internal colored cross (of adhesive or masking tape) will limit the visual field, trace a window on the window. This frame produces an optical and tactile space that suggests and contradicts the interior/exterior illusion.”[xii] It’s typical of Buraglio’s work to derive such complexity, such multiple layers of meaning, from a set of self-evident operations performed with everyday materials.

 

As we note the consistencies throughout Buraglio’s oeuvre, it’s just as important to recognize the constant changes he makes in his practice. If recycling and foregrounding process are part of every body of work, it’s equally true that each series introduces different materials, different techniques and different forms/images. This, too, Buraglio made clear from the beginning. In his 1966 text he cites a remark of Matisse’s: “We must not create autographs . . . we must get away from the individualism of the artist.” By “autographs,” Matisse, and Buraglio, too, refer to works of art that become expressions of the artist’s personality. Buraglio has refused to assume an easily recognizable style, a repeatable iconography. He generally works for two years, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter, in one mode, before turning to something altogether different. When he returned to art making after his four-year hiatus in the early 1970s, he was no longer using painted canvas, nor even painted paper. Instead his main materials were wood and glass, yet he remained as deeply as ever within the discourse of painting. The Châssis-Cadres (Stretchers-Frames) of 1975-1976, wooden stretchers and frames, enclosed nothing more than a void, to which Buraglio sometimes added thin surfaces of paper, nylon or glass. It’s unclear if the features of these wood supports (screws, brackets, nails, patches of paint) are incidental or intentional, but either way they signal the artist’s deliberations. The Fenêtres of 1975-1982 pursue similar directions with fragments of recycled window frames and colored glass. Paradoxically, it is the absence of “painting” in these works that makes them so vital to the medium, that makes Buraglio a key artist in the evolution of painting from the zero-degree of the early 1960s.[xiii]

 

Papering over, cutting up, stapling, taping, crossing out, tracing–one could distill Buraglio’s oeuvre into a series of verbs. This emphasis on action, this definition of art as an activity based on the fact of labor, can be understood in relation to the artist’s engagement with working-class realities and leftist activism in the early 1970s. It can also be compared to Richard Serra’s “Verb List,” a compendium of infinitives published in the journal Avalanche in 1971. If one of Buraglio’s driving forces is refusal, the expansive list of procedures he uses suggests he draws just as much energy from inclusivity, from a continual expansion of his art.

 

The emphasis on process that is so central to Buraglio’s work draws on multiple inspirations, from the realms of poetry and philosophy as well as from art. The artist has credited an early reading of Harold Rosenberg’s Tradition of the New with making him aware of treating each painting as a “work in progress,” but Buraglio’s exposure as a young man to the writings of poet Francis Ponge and philosopher Louis Althusser were at least equally important in convincing him of the value of foregrounding process.

 

As a Marxist, as a reader of Althusser, Buraglio sides with an art that involves making, production, labor. Because painting exists within an ideological field in a way that readymades do not (for Buraglio, Matisse has always been more important than Duchamp) it provides more opportunities to explore the workings of the ideologies in question. One of Althusser’s insights (articulated in his 1966 “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”) is that artists, because their art in “born from” and immersed within an ideology, have the ability to make us perceive the workings of the determining social systems that surround it, and us. But to achieve this level of perception, the work must possess specificity, and the best source of specificity is technique. Yves Alain-Bois makes a similar point in his essay “Painting as Model,” which argues persuasively for the value of “the epistemological moment of techniques where thought and invention take place,” versus “all the rest, all the procedures that borrow from tradition or contest it without reaching that threshold that it is a question of designating.”[xiv] This is exactly what Buraglio achieves time and time again: emphasizing a specific technique not for the sake of a visual effect but as a vehicle of “thought and invention.” Further, it is by insisting in his work on the primacy of technique that Buraglio contributes to the demystification of art, a project he pursues through deskilling (his work is something that “anyone can do”) and directness (“let the operations be seen”), anything to avoid perpetuating the myth of the artist as genius, as demiurge, as the possessor of some secret knowledge.  

 

If Buraglio takes from Althusser the idea that political art must grapple with its own place in the ideological field, what he takes from Ponge, whose texts have inspired a number of the artist’s works such as La Fabrique du Près de M (1987), is the example of a writer who continually foregrounds his own working process. In books such as La Fabrique du Pré and Comment une figue des paroles et pourquoi, Ponge provides his readers with the countless drafts and notes that he accumulates in the process of writing a poem. Ultimately, there is no distinction between the finished poem and its earlier states. As one reads Ponge’s playful self-questioning, his reiterations with only minor variations of a theme or stanza, his excurses on the material history of words, his endless reworkings of his subject, sooner or later the barriers between writer and reader begin to dissolve: the formulation of the text, its prolonged provisionality, becomes a mutual project. This is very much what happens in the encounter with Buraglio’s art. In the exchange with Jean Daive cited at the beginning of this essay Buraglio explains that ever since the Recouvrements, he has sought to “let the operations be seen.” The reason he does so, he explains to Daive, is to attain “a contemporaneity between the one who looks and the painter, the one who operates.”[xv] It is one of the everyday miracles of art, especially art like Buraglio’s, that this “contemporaneity,” this solidarity between artist and beholder, can happen again and again, whether with a work made in 1964 or in 2019.  On the ground of refusal rises a house of accord.

 

 

 

[i] Pierre Wat, Pierre Buraglio, Flammarion, Paris, 2001, p. 19. All translations from French by the author unless otherwise noted.

 

[ii] In Pierre Buraglio, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, 1982, p. 91.

 

[iii] “Qu’est-ce qui manque dans le chariot?,” a dialogue with Yves Michaud (1988) in Pierre Buraglio, Écrits entre 1962 et 2007, Beaux Arts de Paris, 2007, p. 149.

 

[iv] “Préalablement. . . il faut admettre,” 1968, first published in T.P.: Travaux Pratiques, UER des Sciences, Limoges, 1975, reprinted in Pierre Buraglio, Écrits entre 1962 et 2007, pp. 34-39.

 

[v] “Il ressort de cet entretien,” an unpublished text written for the catalogue of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture (1966) in Pierre Buraglio, Écrits entre 1962 et 2007, p. 29.

 

[vi] The phrase “la peinture est nourricière d’elle même” occurs in the text “Ces transparances,” first published in Écriture-peinture, no. 2, November, 1976, reprinted in Pierre Buraglio, Écrits entre 1962 et 2007, p. 68.

 

[vii] Buraglio has cited the influence of Leiris’s text more than once. For instance, ““Par la force des faits, dix ans de la peinture, 1968-1978,” Documents Sur, 1979, no. 415, Juin 1979, reprinted in Pierre Buraglio, Écrits entre 1962 et 2007, p. 85.

 

[viii] Michel Leiris, “The Autobiographer as Torero,” in Manhood, trans. Richard Howard, Grossman, New York, 1963, pp. 151-155.

 

[ix] Buraglio made this remark at a May 16, 2018 colloquium on May 68 at the Institut de l’histoire de l’art in Paris while speaking with Monique Frydman and Eric de Chassay. A video of the conversation is available on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlRcmyzskr4. Accessed January 1, 2019.

 

[x] Entretien avec Pierre Buraglio, from the conference Le postmoderne: un paradigme pertinent dans le champs artistique? At the Institute national de l’histoire de l’art, Paris, May 31, 2008.

 

[xi] “Par la force des faits, dix ans de la peinture, 1968-1978,” in Pierre Buraglio, Écrits entre 1962 et 2007, p. 88

 

[xii] Organized by Jean-Pierre Pincemin and Claude Viallat, the exhibition included Marcel Aloco, Daniel Dezeuze, Noël Dolla, Bernard Pages, Patrick Saytour, as well as Pincemin and Viallat, which represented half of the 12 artists who would form Supports/Surfaces. (Aloco never became a part of the group.) The consequences of Buraglio’s refusal to join Supports/Surfaces, motivated by his political convictions, included his exclusion from many subsequent exhibitions and critical accounts. In “Par la force des faits, dix ans de la peinture, 1968-1978,” Buraglio describes his refusal (p. 87). He also recounts turning down an invitation from Dezeuze and Louis Cane to contribute to Peinture: Cahiers Théoriques, the journal that served as the house organ of Supports/Surfaces p.88).

 

[xiii] In Pierre Buraglio, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, 1982, p. 77. For more on the use of erasure in art and literature, see Heather and Raphael Rubinstein, Under Erasure, Nonprofessional Experiments, Milanville, 2018.

 

[xiv] Buraglio was hardly the first artist to exhibit wooden stretchers and frames as works in themselves. He acknowledges the precedent and influence of Daniel Dezeuze’s Chassis and Echelles of 1967-1970, and one could cite other stretcher-works by Imi Knoebel and Antoni Tapies, but Buraglio’s Chassis and Fenetres offer more variety, nuance and invention than other experiments in this mode. Given the achievement of these works, and their influence on subsequent artists, it is unfortunate they are absent from Peter Weibel’s selection of such work in Iconoclash, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, ZKM, Karlsruhe, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 593-602.

 

 

[xv] Yves Alain Bois, “Painting as Model,” in Painting as Model, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1990, p. 250. Bois’s text is chiefly concerned with the ideas of French art historian Hubert Damisch.

 

[xvi] In Pierre Buraglio, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, 1982, p. 91.