The Stripe Guy and the Stick Man

A review of Disordering the Establishment: Participatory Art and Institutional Critique in France, 1958–1981, Lily Woodruff, Duke University Press, 2020.

The book cover shows a man walking in the street carrying a multicolored wooden pole on his shoulder. The place is Paris, the man is an artist named André Cadere and the pole he carries, “a round bar of wood” as he calls it, is his signature artwork. How to look at a round bar of wood? is how an art critic called the catalogue of a Cadere exhibition. Perhaps we should look first as the surrounding scene: for as the French intellectual Guy Debord put it, “That which changes our way of seeing the street is more important than that which changes our way of seeing a work of art.” The location can easily be identified as Parisian; with its Hausmann buildings and streets paved with cobblestones, it represents an ordinary urban scene featuring a fruit stall with empty wooden crates, a man standing at a bus stop with his leather bag resting on his side, and an elderly passerby carrying her shopping basket, minding her business. The main character walks a slow pace, head slightly inclined, with long hair and an intense look. His bar of wood draws a diagonal that cuts across the picture, forming a triangle with the vertical street light pole. André Cadere was, by all accounts, an original. He regularly turned up uninvited at art-world parties, or left one of his signature batons leaning against a wall in exhibitions in which his work was not meant to be included. As well as bringing his batons into the art world, Cadere also presented them in public spaces, including restaurants and subways, announcing ‘exhibitions’ where he would appear between specific hours every day over a certain period of time, engaging passers-by with discussions about his baton and art. “Establishing Disorder” was the title of such a public talk where the artist discussed his work without exhibiting any, inviting his public to leave the room and return to their homes as a way to contest the art establishment.

Reengineering society

Disordering the Establishment, by Lily Woodruff, focuses on French artists or groups of artists in the period preceding and following the social upheaval of May 1968. She provides a total description of their artistic careers by putting their works into historical context and providing the critical apparatus built by art critics and influential thinkers to apprehend their contribution to French contemporary art and ideological debates. The 1950s and 1960s heralded the age of the technocrat: the new elite of administrators and technical experts who applied tools of social science to reengineer and modernize society. Their collective power was anonymous, science-based, and diffuse: they sought to exert authority through control of information flows, design of incentives, and manipulation of the environment more than by direct order and administrative fiat. One key word of the times was participation: for de Gaulle, workers’ participation in management aimed at substituting cooperation to antagonism and offered a way out of the class struggle that was plaguing French society. More generally, the public was invited to participate in the decisions that affected them, including aesthetic choices and cultural policies. The notion of feedback, taken from the study of cybernetic systems, was used to advocate a loop between the public, policy makers, and cultural producers in order to bring art closer to the popular audience and make it more relevant to its concerns. Technocratic idealism drove the projects of many artists, critics, architects, and urban planners. The creation of the grands ensembles or HLM (habitations à loyer modéré) in the suburbs was a grand scale experiment that attracted considerable attention at the time. Critics pointed out the dehumanizing aspects of modern habitats and the alienation brought about by a conservative social order. Others attempted not only to describe bourgeois society, but to change it through a new praxis emphasizing autonomy, creativity, and  political engagement.

The Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) was not a group of researchers, but a group of artists doing research. It was active in Paris from 1960 to 1968. Eleven artists signed the original manifesto, but only six of them formed the core of the group, among which François Morellet, Julio Le Parc, and Yvaral. Following the belief of Victor Vasarely (father of Yvaral) that the concept of the artist as a solitary genius was outdated, they cultivated anonymity and declared themselves to be “more a group of paintings than a group of painters.” In their “acte de fondation” manifesto, they spelled out nine stratagems that the group would use to unify their artistic activities and research discoveries so as to generate a constant movement of ideas and ensure that no one individual would claim authority on his own work or that of the group. Considering the objects that they produced not as finished artworks, but rather as research, they conceived of their creation process as a continual progression based on trial and error. The group guidelines closely resembled the technocratic language of the era. Using Op art and kinetic art as a medium, they defended abstraction against the prevailing popularity of figurative art among French left-wing artists and critics, and argued that abstract art was not opposed to the principles of dialectic materialism. Their plea for an abstract progressive art took inspiration from models of scientific research. They referred to “topology,” a branch of mathematics that served as a popular metaphor during the 1960s, and used Gestalt theory and cybernetics to create spaces of “visual therapy” in which viewers might discover more about their own process of reasoning than about the art itself. The cool, repetitive regularity emblematic of GRAV’s works embraced a rational geometric abstraction that stood in stark contrast to what the artists saw as the stagnating expressionisms and figurations of the French art scene. While the initial focus of the GRAV artists stemmed from experimenting with visual perception, the group’s works expanded to examine notions of spectator participation. In 1966, they brought their kinetic sculptures to the streets in a cargo van touring central Paris, distributing explanatory texts and questionnaires to the public. They installed walk-through labyrinths that they conceived of as social experiments, but that disgruntled critics compared to the devices one would expect to see at a Luna Park. They eschewed the art gallery circuit and imagined that ideally their art objects would be available for distribution at Monoprix discount stores. But the democratic ambition of their participatory displays was in tension with the rational and technocratic ethos of their approach. As the founder of the Situationist International Guy Debord put it, “What they call the avant-garde of absence is nothing more than the absence of an avant-garde.”

From enfant terrible to established artist

With the installation of his 260 truncated columns in the great courtyard of the Palais-Royal, Daniel Buren has become the symbol of the established artist. Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, this work provoked an intense debate over the integration of contemporary art in historic buildings and about the imposition of aesthetic choices by an establishment of art administrators and policy-makers over a reluctant public. But in the 1960s and 1970s, Daniel Buren was the enfant terrible of contemporary art and the personification of anti-establishment. In 1969, he refused to have his work included in an exhibition of “Art in the street” because he did not want to be represented as one artist among others. He mocked the pretension of GRAV and kinetic artists to reach popular audiences in the cités HLM through imposed participation: “I am sure that it would be much more agreeable to be exploited.” Buren discovered the stripe motif that would become his signature while searching for inexpensive material on which to paint at the Marché Saint-Pierre in 1965. He was pursuing the “degree zero of painting,” an expression taken from Roland Barthes’ 1953 book Writing Degree Zero. In April 1968, Buren began pasting posters that he had commercially printed with his striped motif at various locations across Paris in what he called affichages sauvages, or wild posterings. The posters went up on palisades surrounding construction sites covered with advertisements, but also among other fly-posted tracts condemning the war in Vietnam and announcing meeting times for protests—Mai 1968 was to erupt the next month. Spurred by the student protests, he accompanied his works with a deluge of explanatory texts, written tracts, manifestos, and interviews in which he declared “the only thing that one maybe can do after having seen a canvas like one of ours is total revolution.” He saw French society as massively repressive and the contemporary art world as irretrievably compromised: he retrospectively described “a suffocating atmosphere, with the appearance of being tidy and policed, where avant-garde artists had an open table at prime minister Georges Pompidou’s place.” But his own work crucially depended on institutions for ideological support. While objecting to traditional ways of presenting art through the museum-gallery system, he cultivated his relations with galleries and biennales, creating pressing demand to show via the same system. As a sign that the times were changing, he began to produce decorative tape and wallpaper for private residences in the 1980s.

If Daniel Buren was the “stripe guy,” André Cadere is remembered as “the stick man,” the artist known for carrying a stick. He shared with the GRAV collective a taste for formalism and mathematics: his round bars of wood, of various size and length, were composed of colored segments repeating a combination sequence in which one deliberate error was inserted. He was less engaged than Buren in political talk; if anything, his status as a refugee exiled from his native Romania exposed him to the surveillance of the state police, and he has had enough of a taste of totalitarianism to appreciate democratic freedom as it was worth. The man with a stick was much less famous than the stripe-man, but he used his fellow artist’s fame to free-ride on his egoistic self-promotion. In 1973, he left a colored bar in an exhibition featuring Buren’s works and, when it was removed and hidden away in a closet, circulated an exhibition announcement instructing visitors to seek out the sequestered bar in the broom closet. Like Buren, Cadere produced a single type of iconic work based on a systematically repeated formula that negated the subjectivity of the artist and neutralized the significance of viewer interpretation. While Buren’s work from this period similarly played across the boundaries of institutional limitation, the highly visible and intentional attachment of the artwork to the body of the wandering artist was the feature by which Cadere argued his opposition to Buren. Whereas in situ works generally complemented the sites in which they were placed, Cadere’s juxtapositions based their critique on the cultural inappropriateness of the art object’s presence within and outside artistic contexts. Cadere’s guerrilla tactics was in line with his hobo lifestyle. He fashioned himself as a rogue art celebrity, building his identity on marginality and independence. Photographs (remember the book cover) represent him in various circumstances, with his trademark stick and intense look, but he was careful to distinguish between the artwork and its representation through documentary media. Cadere wanted his bars to be seen in their materiality, and insisted that his work was “exhibited where it is seen.” His round bars of wood are now displayed in museums and private collections, but they have lost their potential to disturb and to unsettle. 

Sociological Art

Though relatively unknown today, Sociological Art is thoroughly emblematic of the historical upheavals of the late 1960s and 1970s in France. The Sociological Art Collective was formed by Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, and Jean-Paul Thénot in 1974 but each artist came to its positions independently by developing their own art projects. In 1971, Hervé Fischer invited other artists to send him their artworks which he tore up and disposed in garbage bags put on display in an art gallery. He also disposed of his own body by putting his head in a plastic bag or wrapping himself in vinyl sheets. For Fischer, tearing and throwing away was as much creative as it was destructive, and documenting this process of destruction was conceived as a work of art. Fred Forest, who worked as a telephone operator in the 1960s, organized his earlier works around the mediated participation of his audience. In Portraits de famille, he asked the residents of a suburban housing project to send family pictures at the dinner table, which he presented in a community exhibition. In Space-Media, he placed a blank rectangle in the newspaper Le Monde and inviting readers to fill it in with whatever they liked and mail it to him. Taking part in a popular television program, he made the screen grow black for a few seconds and invited spectators to fill that free space with the thoughts and comments that he then collected. On the occasion of the São Paulo biennale in October 1973, he organized a series of performances, including a procession through the city center with participants holding white placards: he was arrested by the junta police, who took it as a real protest. Jean-Paul Thénot distributed questionnaires with open or nonsensical questions that he analyzed with the statistical techniques used by opinion pollsters. Most of his polls reflected on the art world, as when he asked respondents to name the most representative French artist that would correspond to the mean average choice. Together, the three proponents of Sociological Art published manifestos, organized interdisciplinary performances, and conducted field experiments as in their large-scale artistic survey of the city of Perpignan. Rejecting aesthetic motivations, they argued that “sociological art has no style,” and they developed an ethics of nonintervention by providing raw data and community-based documents. 

I was completely unfamiliar with the episodes of contemporary art history that are described in this book. What I take from reading Disordering the Establishment is three things. First, Lily Woodruff succeeds in linking art to its historical context. Through her four case studies, she provides an alternative story of Les Trente Glorieuses, the three decades of robust economic growth, political dirigisme, and social upheavals that French citizens now remember with nostalgia and regret. Art is not estranged from its social and political environment: on the contrary, it reflects and contributes to the main debates of the day, projecting them on a different plane that makes the familiar look unfamiliar. By developing a critique of institutions, art brings disorder and dissonance into a well-ordered world. It reminds us that history always contains a part of randomness, of background noise and graphic disturbance that retrospective narratives tend to eliminate from the broad picture. When you switch the channel to this ambient noise, a different history appears, unfolding at street level and more attuned to the individual experience of passers-by. As a second contribution, the author brings contemporary art schools in close contact with intellectual history. I was in more familiar terms with the many intellectuals, social critics, and thinkers that Lily Woodruff quotes in abundance. The writings of Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Jean-François Lyotard, Edgar Morin, and others are very relevant for understanding artistic developments in France and putting them into their ideological context, not least because these thinkers were themselves close watchers of the art scene and commented upon contemporary artists in their work. Intellectual debates at the time were as much about aesthetics as they were political or philosophical. The anti-establishment mood was widely shared and gave way to various expressions: taken together, they form the most valuable inheritance that we received from this period. Artists and critics developed a form of specific courage: their attack on the establishment was not only intellectual posturing. They walked the talk and drew the consequences of their radical political stance in their specific field of activity, without fear of confrontation and marginality. That some of them rallied later on to existing institutions and centers of power only shows the precarious nature of the artistic field, where only institutions or the market can guarantee independence over the long term. As a third point, Disordering the Establishment seems to me a good model of how to write about art. Especially when it comes to contemporary creation, I am all in favor of pedagogy and even didacticism in the appreciation of the arts. I believe art and literature ought to convey information and instruction, along with pleasure and entertainment. Artworks cannot do this by themselves: they have to be accompanied by a critical apparatus or scholarly material that allows the public to shape its perception and understanding of art. In her masterful essay on participatory art and institutional critique in pre- and post-1968 France, Lily Woodruff  provided me with such a companion to an intelligent understanding of some recent artistic creations.