By Maria Pia Masella.
To a journalist asking the meaning of IN SITU in regards to his work, Daniel Buren (b.1938, Boulogne-Billancourt) replied “…quite simply, ( an IN SITU work is) a work which not only has a relationship with the place in which it finds itself, but also which has been made entirely in this place. ” In a Duchampian sense (interestingly, Buren has often denied any affiliation with Conceptual Art and has publicly disagreed with the movement’s belief that everything happens at the level of the idea), …an in situ project exists as a rendez-vous between an artist, a place and their mutual encounter expressed on one side by the fascination that a specific place exercises on the artist, and on the other side by the intervention, reinvention and often transformation of that place by the artist.
The relationship between Buren’s opus and context started very early, when, as an young artist just out from L’Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux -arts , he would disseminate the streets of Paris with his signs illustrating two coloured stripes (the 8.7 cm width striped pattern found in a flea market).
