DANIEL BUREN, Sketches for a Work in Situ, Serpentine Gallery, 1987

An exhibition catalogue published by the Arts Council of Great Britain for Daniel Buren's commission at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 20 June–19 July 1987. The work, later titled Structure pour deux Catalpas in Buren's own catalogue raisonné, consisted of two intersecting wall structures in his standard red-and-white stripe, cutting through the gallery and continuing outside onto the lawn — named for two catalpa trees already growing there. The Serpentine's origins as a former park tea pavilion, rather than a purpose-built white cube, made it the kind of building where the line between architecture and artwork could be made to blur.

Twenty-four pages that read less like a catalogue and more like something still open on a drafting table: architectural elevations repeated from different angles, crossings marked and re-marked, annotations in black marker and red pen. One spread is given over to a red-and-white striped working drawing, numbered band by band — Blanc 1 of 17 — followed by a page left entirely blank. Specific Object catalogues the publication as an exhibition catalogue in the form of an artist's sketchbook; MACBA keeps its copy filed under Artists' Books rather than general exhibition literature.

The form fits the problem. Buren's practice since the late 1960s had reduced itself to a single repeating unit — 8.7cm alternating bands, taken from ordinary striped awning fabric — precisely so the stripe would stop being interesting and the space around it would become the actual subject. A work dependent on specific walls, trees and light cannot be photographed and circulated as though it were portable. So the catalogue doesn't try. It circulates the planning instead: the drawings, the measurements, the thinking that produced the structure.

By 1987, the stakes around Buren's work were considerable. The year before, his permanent Les Deux Plateaux at the Palais-Royal had triggered one of France's most contentious public art disputes, halted by legal action and completed only after the culture minister invoked the artist's moral rights. In 1986 he represented France at the Venice Biennale and received the Golden Lion. Six days before the Serpentine opened, his permanent La Porte was unveiled at Skulptur Projekte Münster. The exhibition closed 19 July 1987; the Serpentine Trust was formally incorporated five days later, as the gallery moved from Arts Council administration toward independence.

Daniel Buren, Sketches for a Work in Situ, Serpentine Gallery, London, 20 June–19 July 1987. [London]: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1987. Approx. 21 × 29.5 cm, 24 pages, softcover, green wrappers. ISBN 0-7287-0539-7.

Condition: Very good. Covers clean with a few faint small marks; corners sharp, no creasing. Interior crisp throughout, reproductions sharp, no foxing.