1968/69
Sheets of Paper

Buren put up alternating stripes of paper over billboards and advertisements around Paris. He was doing his own form of detournement, which meant taking something that has a common use or meaning and reusing it for a different manner without public approval. His take on detournement was producing public art work by hanging these hundreds of stripped posters over advertisements and in metro stations, showing his refusal of the status quo. It also showed his motive that art does not need a gallery or museum to exist, and that its existence can be boundlessness. For Buren the city was a limitless exhibition without rules. Art can then freely exist as an uncommodified and unreciprocated event that exists anywhere.