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Daniel Buren and Robert Smithson : a comparative study

University of British Columbia

This thesis compares the works of French artist Daniel Buren and American artist Robert Smithson during the years 1965- 1968. Smithson and Buren have been chosen because their career paths exemplify the fate of the artist in an increasingly administered art world, but also because the subject matter of their respective works is a reflection of the importance of various kinds of infrastructures in shaping everyday life in the modern world. The questions that the thesis tries to answer are principally the following: how has this infrastructural and standardized reality been investigated by artists, and how did it affect their choice of artistic strategy? Furthermore, has their evaluation of this reality found the same formulation whether the artist lived in the United States or in France? Smithson's work recalls the physical infrastructures characteristic of public works, especially that of the highway system. His choice of infrastructure is significant for an American artist. The extension of the highway system, which will increase dramatically in the mid-1950s and throughout the 1960s, is a major event in the history of the United States, and represents the final confirmation of the supremacy of "car culture." As well as evoking the grid of the highway system, Smithson alludes to the corporation and its vast organizational structure that is the source of the need for an enlarged highway infrastructure. Buren's materials and their display in an urban space are intended to compete with the network of urban signs as it is found in the streets of Paris, which becomes in the period around May 1968 the site of a struggle for political affirmation, with wildly inventive slogans scrawled on the walls of the city. The thesis takes into account the different socio-historical, intellectual and esthetic contexts in which each artist elaborated his strategy, and, as well, relates their work to contemporary concerns over the evolution of the industrial world and its organizations as it develops, with a different national emphasis, in both France and the United States.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-08-06

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/11959

Fine Arts

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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