“[The Guggenheim Museum] really kills a piece of art, primarily because it’s a work of art itself.”
— Daniel Buren

Daniel Buren (b. 1938). Photo-souvenir: Around the Corner, 2000–05, and The Rose Window, 2005. Works in situ. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Founation, New York

Over his long career Buren has developed additional strategies for his signature stripes. His recent work has become more architectural and ambitious, and it frequently incorporates areas of intense color and mirrored surfaces.

Buren’s 1971 work for the Guggenheim Museum caused a major controversy, and before the exhibition’s official opening it was permanently removed. Buren’s new project for the museum considers some of the same institutional and architectural issues, but they are resolved through his current methodology.

Since the Guggenheim’s opening in 1959, artists, critics, and architectural historians have noted the power of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. Through an architectural intervention, Buren has temporarily transformed the way the building is seen and used. Around the Corner (2000/05) rises from the floor of the rotunda to the top of the sixth ramp, bisecting the great space. The structure represents one of four corners of an imagined cube, which, if built, would be larger than the entire museum. A wedge of this cubic structure occupies the rotunda. Reminiscent of a skyscraper under construction, the work’s straight walls intersect at a right angle in the center of the rotunda. The structure, whose sides are parallel to 5th Avenue and East 88th Street, reintegrates the grid of the city into Wright’s defiant spiral. This major site-specific work features Buren’s signature 8.7 cm vertical stripes, as well as color, light, and mirrors.

A major feature of Around the Corner is the mirrored exterior surface that reflects the museum’s landmark architecture and presents us with an exact, reversed replica. Mirrors have intrigued Buren for years and he uses them, not symbolically, but as another material with unique properties to explore. He is most interested in how mirrors enhance the viewer’s ability “to see better, to see more or, better still, to see what, without them, would not be visible at all (interviewed at comune.palermo.it/Eventi/Lo%20Spasimo/Daniel%20Buren/Buren2.pdf)”

Buren’s primary concern remains the interaction between the viewer and the space. He states, “The work is activated only by the physical presence of the spectator. . . . Whether or not there are mirrors, for me, a work exists from the time, and only from the time, that it is seen by a person other than the one producing it” (Ibid).

• Compare Buren’s 1971 work for the Guggenheim with his present work. Which aspects of the works are similar? Which have changed?
• The title of Buren’s new work for the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda is Around the Corner. How does this title relate to the work? Buren’s title for the entire exhibition is The Eye of the Storm: Works in situ by Daniel Buren. Why might he have chosen this title?
• Describe how Daniel Buren’s Around the Corner alters the experience of the Guggenheim Museum. What materials and strategies has he used to accomplish this change? What aspects of the museum’s architecture and history does his work seem to comment on?
• If you have visited the Guggenheim Museum previously, make a list of adjectives you would use to describe its architecture. When you visit the Buren exhibition, create a new list of words that describe your experience. How are the lists similar and/or different from each other? Create two poems that incorporate words from your lists to describe the two experiences.
• Buren has said, “the work is activated only by the physical presence of the spectator” (Ibid). What do you think he means by this? How can you, as the viewer/spectator, “activate” his work?

• Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) is the best known American architect of the 20th century and one of his most famous buildings is the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Research Wright’s philosophy of architecture and then write an imagined letter from Frank Lloyd Wright to Daniel Buren on the occasion of the opening of The Eye of the Storm: Works in situ by Daniel Buren at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. How do you think Wright would respond to Buren’s project?
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• In 1971 Daniel Buren stated, “[The Guggenheim Museum] really kills a piece of art, primarily because it’s a work of art itself.” If you have visited the museum to view previous exhibitions, do you agree or disagree with Buren’s statement? Go to the museum’s Collection Online, where you will find a selection of works in the Guggenheim’s collection. Find a work that is particularly compatible with the museum’s architecture. Find another work that might be difficult to exhibit in the Guggenheim’s spiraling rotunda. Explain the reasons for your choices.
  English / Language Arts
  
  Visual Arts


• Other contemporary artists have focused on the architecture of the museum in their exhibitions at the Guggenheim. Two examples include Dan Flavin’s use of commercial florescent lights and Jenny Holzer’s LED (Light Emitting Diode) display board messages, which when installed along the inner wall of the spiral ramp transformed the museum’s rotunda into a dazzling electronic arcade. Images of these works are on the museum’s Web site:
  
  Dan Flavin
  Jenny Holzer
  
  Compare these works with Buren’s work for the rotunda. Then conceive of additional ways to interact with Frank Lloyd Wright’s signature architecture through either visual or performance art strategies.
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• Much of Buren’s work is ephemeral, meaning that it is created to be experienced for a limited amount of time. By creating ephemeral work, Buren is challenging another expectation, that in order to be important, a work of art must endure. Do you think that art needs to be lasting to be important, or can it be transitory and important as well? Explain your answer.
  English / Language Arts