written by Tim Griffin
shared by scott on October 17th, 2007 at 11:00 am
Excerpt of conversation between Daniel Buren & Olafur Eliasson:
“DB: Speaking of working outside, I want to address the question of memory in some of your works, like Green River [1998-]. Although the writings and interviews in your catalogues sometimes refer to earlier works of art, I am very struck by two specific examples for which I have seen no references. One is the piece you did on the windows at MOMA [Seeing Yourself Sensing, 2001]. I’m sorry to say this, but I did exactly the same piece, which involved mirrored stripes glued to a window, in 1971. Of course, I have no proper ownership of the stripe, nor of the windows or the mirrors, and you may not even know this work of mine. But there’s also the action of coloring the river, which was done several times exactly the same way by an artist from Argentina called Nicolas Garcia Uriburu, and I’ve never seen any reference made to him either. I understand a work can be repeated, but my question is how a real connection like this can be completely lost to memory. I’m intrigued by this situation, which is certainly not limited to your work alone. But were you aware of these earlier pieces? And whether you were or not, why do you think more people don’t speak of them or make these connections, as though they wanted to block out certain precedents or ignore them? “
(See: making room for redundancy)