Nathalie Daniel-Risacher
No. 102 - winter 2012

Daniel Buren, Les deux plateaux. A Controversial Restoration


Daniel Buren’s Les deux plateaux is a work that is squarely at the core of the controversies of its era. Contested at the time it was installed in 1985, it continued to be so in 2007 when the artist addressed the question of its maintenance and conservation directly to the State in an ultimatum: restore it or destroy it. Faced with the deterioration of the columns, the breakdown of the hydraulic and electrical systems, Buren said that he felt “ashamed” before the thousands of yearly visitors who make a detour through the Palais Royal courtyard, during tourist visits and on other occasions.

This controversy has a benefit: that of questioning the status of the work itself, of re-evaluating the rights and duties of the artists and owners (legal field), and of highlighting the problematic link between power and artistic creation.

Eventful Beginnings

Doesn’t a great work always spark a controversy? In 1981, when Francois Mitterrand appointed Jack Lang at the head of the then renascent Ministry of Culture, the latter was intend on promoting a “left wing” culture, which would move art out of its elitist terrain and make it accessible to the general public. The confinement of art in galleries and museums is a relatively recent phenomenon in the Western world. Up until the avant-gardes at the turn of the 19th century, artists were present in Salons, works were on display in churches, in the streets or as public monuments (equestrian statues, Carpeaux’s La Dance on the


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