POL BURY — Librairie Tschann, Paris, 1988

Issued on 8 December 1988 to announce a meeting with Pol Bury at Librairie Tschann, 84 boulevard du Montparnasse, Paris, on the occasion of two new publications: Le Syndrome de Pontier ou l'inspiration surveillée (L'Échoppe) and Guide des musées de l'art inopiné (Daily-Bul). Single printed card, 10.5 × 14.5 cm; black ink on cream stock; verso blank.

By 1988 Bury was internationally established as one of the great artists of slow movement — from Belgian Surrealism and CoBrA into kinetic sculpture, then the polished steel spheres and fountains for which he became famous. This card belongs to his other practice: the writer, publisher, satirist and persistent irritant of the machinery surrounding art.

Le Syndrome de Pontier takes its name from Henri Pontier, the former curator of the museum in Aix-en-Provence who notoriously declared that no Cézanne would enter the museum while he was alive. Bury turns Pontier into a syndrome: the recurring condition in which institutions, critics, dealers and markets acquire the authority to judge, rank and assign value to what artists produce. The book is short, funny and viciously precise about the strange distance between artistic value and la cote — the market rating that can rise or collapse around an artist. The timing gives the joke an especially satisfying afterlife: in 1984, only four years before this invitation, the French state finally deposited eight works by Cézanne at the Musée Granet — the very institution Pontier had once determined to keep Cézanne out of.

Beside it came Guide des musées de l'art inopiné, published by Daily-Bul, the irreverent Belgian publishing project Bury had founded with André Balthazar in the 1950s. Daily-Bul grew out of the territory around Belgian Surrealism and CoBrA but developed its own wonderfully unserious seriousness: aphorisms, bogus institutions, détourned criticism, artist publications and jokes aimed squarely at the solemnity with which the art world explained itself. Bury had been developing his idea of art inopiné — unforeseen art — for decades: from the Catalogue inopiné du musée imaginaire de la ville de Binche with Pierre Alechinsky in 1967, through L'Art inopiné dans les collections publiques in 1982, to this Guide des musées in 1988. The joke keeps acquiring infrastructure.

The pairing on the invitation is sharp. One book attacks the authority that determines what art is worth. The other invents institutions for art that was never waiting for institutional permission in the first place. Pontier guards the museum door. Bury simply invents another museum.

The object itself could hardly be less theatrical. Warm cream card, centred serif typography, generous empty space, Bury's name enlarged but still restrained. Beneath the date sits a small line drawing of a reclining figure sprawled across a cushion — a quiet interruption in an otherwise almost bureaucratic announcement. The verso is completely blank. No gallery branding, no reproduction of a kinetic sculpture, no grand retrospective language. Just a Paris bookshop, two books and an invitation to come meet the artist.

This is not secondary material advertising the real work somewhere else. It records the moment when Bury's sculpture, writing, publishing, humour and institutional criticism occupy the same practice. The artist famous for making objects move very slowly was also spending decades quietly moving the definitions around them.

Condition: very good vintage; gentle overall age toning and light handling consistent with age. Verso clean and unmarked. Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.