In 1968, amid the political unrest and visual saturation of Paris, Daniel Buren made a decisive break from the conventions of artistic production. Without a studio and operating outside the gallery system, he initiated Affichages sauvages—a series of unauthorized public interventions that would come to redefine both the site and function of the artwork.

Buren printed industrial posters composed of alternating vertical stripes—uniform in width and repeated with mechanical precision—and pasted them directly onto the city’s advertising surfaces. Inserted among political slogans, commercial imagery, and public notices, these works appeared unsigned and without narrative content. Stripped of gesture and symbolism, they proposed a deliberately neutral image—one that resisted authorship and conventional meaning. What emerged was not simply a visual motif, but a conceptual device.

The stripe functioned as a tool to reveal context rather than occupy it. In a dense urban landscape defined by persuasion and spectacle, Buren’s interventions operated differently: they neither advertised nor declared. Instead, they interrupted. Their repetition and anonymity made them both conspicuous and elusive—images that captured attention while refusing interpretation.

As Buren later reflected:

“I was curious about trying to work outside of the system… the only way to know how to work outside of the system was to go outside of the gallery.”

This act of “going outside” was as much ideological as it was spatial. By bypassing traditional frameworks of display and validation, Buren challenged the conditions under which art is encountered. Yet this was not a rejection of the gallery altogether. When invited into institutional spaces, he presented the work as it had existed in the street—maintaining a direct dialogue between interior and exterior, between sanctioned and unsanctioned space.

Installed without permission and subject to the rhythms of the city, the posters were inherently ephemeral. They were gradually torn, weathered, and covered by subsequent layers of urban communication. This condition of disappearance was not incidental but integral—positioning the work in opposition to permanence, authorship, and the fixed object.

Today, Affichages sauvages stands as a foundational gesture in conceptual and site-specific practice. It marks a moment in which the artwork shifted from a self-contained object to a critical inquiry—foregrounding context, visibility, and the structures that shape how art is seen and understood.

To encounter a work from this series today is to engage not only with its formal clarity, but with the radical conditions of its origin. What once appeared fleeting and unsellable has, over time, become foundational—an enduring reminder that some of the most significant gestures in art begin by stepping outside the system entirely.

Courtesy of Daniel Buren / ADAGP, Paris.
Photography: Bernard Boyer and Jacques Caumont.