André Cadere’s Disorderly Conduct
On January 22, 1977, artist André Cadere hosted an anti-artist’s talk that he titled Établir le désordre (Establishing Disorder), at art agent Ghislain Mollet-Viéville’s apartment. In the style of self-evidence that characterized much conceptual art of the period, he began by describing the technical manufacture of his signature objects, which he called “barres de bois rond” (round bars of wood); he then commented on the décor of Mollet-Viéville’s apartment; and he observed the sociological likelihood that the attendees had come due to Mollet-Viéville and Cadere’s art-world authority.1 After only three minutes of speaking, he suggested the guests themselves should “establish disorder” by leaving. In the decades since the artist’s death, the photogenic and display-friendly round bars of wood are the works for which Cadere has become best known. In the period during which Cadere himself showed them, however, this visibility had functioned as one requisite element in a constantly evolving series of display tactics that allowed him to access the subject of his critique: art-world social codes and boundaries.2 In a seeming limit-test of the visibility required to make his critiques, he showed none of his bars at Mollet-Viéville’s apartment and thereby focused attention on the role of expectation and participation in upholding institutional convention, and their corresponding usefulness in establishing disorder.
The bars were the point of focus, and alibi, for the great majority of Cadere’s activities. While approximately half of the exhibitions that the artist mounted during his lifetime were gallery-authorized and took place in white-cube environments, he designed the round bars of wood so that they could be carried in hand and easily displayed nearly anywhere at any time, including in the streets, at cafés, or, most notoriously, uninvited at other artists’ exhibition openings (Figure 13.1).
The portability of the bar made it possible for him to traverse boundaries between public and private spaces and “establish disorder” within the walls of the most reputable and affluent exhibition venues in the city. In this way, he was able to show his work at prestigious patrimonial venues like the Louvre, where in 1975 he loitered in the museum’s high-traffic Darue stairwell with a small bar in hand and conversed with both intentional and accidental visitors to his exhibition. Frequently, however, his display tactics put him in direct conflict with curators, gallery employees, and security guards. Such was the case in 1973 when, with the publicity aid of experimental gallerist Ida Biard, he held an exhibition, uninvited, at an opening for the celebrated Italian painter Valerio Adami at the Maeght Gallery, an institution that was instrumental in attempting to return Paris to its prewar cultural stature by exhibiting an international selection of young artists whose works resonated with those of the historical avant-garde.3 When a Maeght employee confiscated the large round bar of wood that Cadere had come with, he shook a smaller, hidden bar out of his pant leg, thereby attracting even greater attention to his work. This infiltration came a year after security guards had escorted Cadere away from the Grand Palais—a monumental exhibition space and site of key moments in the history of modern art and innovation—where he had come to show his work at a retrospective for Barnett Newman two years after the American painter’s death. The reason given for his ejection was a nineteenth-century law that forbade umbrellas in museums. In many instances however, Cadere’s display practice involved breaking with institutional structures altogether to simply walk with his bars through streets far from galleries and museums—a practice that he continued even into the last weeks of his life before dying of cancer at 44 in 1978. Through his unflagging commitment to his unconventional display practices, he demarcated an alternative art-world that challenged the hegemony of institutional landmarks by moving among the public at large.
As Cadere saw it, engagement with the public was programmed into the formal decisions that he made in constructing his bars. This was the argument that he made at a lecture titled “Presentation of a Work, Utilization of a Work,” which critic Bernard Marcelis helped him organize for the department of Philosophy and Letters at the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium in 1974. With a bar propped against one of the walls of the lecture room, he explained how the basic construction of the bar produced its social function such that its very presentation could be considered its utilization. He listed “V”s, “J”s and “B”s across the chalkboard to signify the different colors that he might use to paint the individual wooden segments that composed the bars, and explained that the colors had no meaning in themselves, but were merely intended to signify difference among the segments.4 To minimize connotation and ensure consistency from one bar to the next he took his colors from cans of house paint, limiting them to the colors of the rainbow plus white and black. The spools came in a range of sizes with the largest measuring 10 cm across. He fixed the height-to-diameter ratio of the segments at 1:1, and glued them together using wooden dowels that fit into holes that he drilled through each spool. The number of spools that made up the length of each bar was determined by fixed mathematical systems of permutations of either three or four colors that he sequentially reordered until exhausted. In a gesture that resonates with his display practices, he then disordered this system by switching the placement of two spools or introducing what he called an “error.”5 This programmatic rigor in construction was intended to maximize interaction around the art object by subverting what Cadere described as “the refuge in comforting subjectivity,” that would be invited by “recourse to literature and sentimentality.”6 As he explained during the lecture, “We put two people in relation in presenting one to the other. This placing in relation normally leads to a conversation. This evening the situation is different: we present an object, a thing. The point is to see, and the seeing, here, leads to a discussion.” By maintaining the objective autonomy of the artwork, he noted, “all the components, all the presented coordinates, can be discussed.”
Cadere’s minimal abstractions and impassive rule-based designs resonate with other conceptual practices that an international network of artists exhibited throughout the 1960s and 1970s.7 His repetitions of imperfect serial structures recall Sol LeWitt’s obsessional systems of lines and cubes based on the subversive “idea of error.”8 His juxtaposition of the display of the object against the power that resides in the locale of the museum or gallery draws strongly on Daniel Buren’s site-specific critiques of institutional power. His democratic impulse recalls Lawrence Weiner’s concern to make his work available to anyone who might want to reproduce it at home or elsewhere. As Weiner stated in his 1968 “Declaration of Intent,” “The artist may construct the piece,” and “the piece may be fabricated,” but crucially, “the piece need not be built.” This total openness would then create what Weiner called “a universal common possibility of availability.”9 The idea of universality was similarly critical to Cadere’s work, which sought to broaden its spaces of visibility. However, unlike Weiner, he did not allow anyone to construct any of his predetermined configurations, and his insistence that they be seen meant that their dissemination could not bypass the challenges of materiality as could Weiner’s pure concepts. Although Cadere’s pre-established system of construction meant that his entire life’s work was preconceived, the social purpose of the bars necessitated that they take form as visual objects since, as I am arguing, their cause was to highlight the availability of the universal by pointing to the relations between the actors who compose it. More than universality, Cadere was interested in contingency.
His institutional protest took the form of vandalism in a series of graffiti actions in 1972. Most spectacular among these, and the event that probably brought him the widest notoriety, was a protest in which he crudely spray-painted red, yellow, and blue circles outside the secretariat at Documenta 5 after being excluded from exhibiting at the last minute for refusing the director, Harald Szeemann’s, attempt to force him to play the role of Romanian “pilgrim” and travel from Paris to Kassel on foot.10 The graffiti marked the absence of his round bar of wood and the artist from the exhibition at the same time that it inserted Cadere into this community of artists by inviting them to imagine the presence of his work via a painted visual cue. Back in Paris, the graffiti marks that he left across the city corresponded more to his meanderings as he composed something like an imagined community of an extra-institutional art world. The locations were diverse and decentralized. He sprayed representations of his bars along a perimeter fence in the middle-class neighborhood surrounding the Parc Montsouris; in the heart of the Saint-Germain Gallery district on the rue Visconti; and on a hoarding set among high-rises in a popular neighborhood of an outer arrondissement. The marks of the spray-paint left a record of Cadere’s presence, an abstract mode of communicating, “Cadere was here.” Just as taggers use spray-paint to give private names to, and claim, public spaces, so Cadere’s graffiti acted as a signature that recorded the human presence that animates a city.
Although the bands of color did not display an overt message, the very gesture of producing graffiti recalled the slogans that had been sprayed across the city four years earlier during May 1968.11 With the movement’s imperative that the everyday citizen should “seize speech,” the public began using the walls to encourage each other to “live without dead time,” experience unshackled joy, and exhume the ludic leisure that has been paved over by the drab necessity of daily life. As philosopher Maurice Blanchot reflected, the authorless phrases of May’s public graffiti offered instances in which “despite the differences and the incessant controversies, each person recognized himself or herself.”12 The ambient association that Blanchot evokes is not so different from Cadere’s stated ambition of bringing people together in dialogue. The social encounter might not be immediate, but the graffiti creates the image of an imagined potential conversation taking place among a community linked to a particular space.
Cadere’s relationship to the sort of public engagement that his work would generate was ambivalent, however, as it reflected the heightened engagement of the public in 1968, but also concerns over President Georges Pompidou’s post-1968 cultural plans that, as some argued, aimed to draw street culture into a controlled space. Pompidou’s proposed new National Museum of Modern Art was attacked as a technocratic effort to modernize the city that would destroy the historical and cultural significance played by the neighboring Les Halles markets. The extensive community of vendors, restauranteurs, prostitutes, street sweepers, and others that radiated out from Victor Baltard’s nineteenth-century glass and cast-iron architecture came under threat when the iconic building was torn down in 1969 after years of battles.13 The new Centre Pompidou, as the museum came to be called after the president’s death, was built on the annexed lot of the former Les Halles. Its architects, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, designed the space to function as spectacular architectural packaging for the street life that animated the city, and as a result, the building was condemned by artists and critics alike for providing a way to regroup and control cultural manifestations while transforming them into opportunities for commercial gain.14 As the building was still under construction in 1974, Jean Clair, the editor of the influential popular magazine Chroniques de l’ art vivant (Chronicles of Living Art), publicly accused the project of asphyxiating and ransacking popular culture. Calling it the finial of “capitalist multinational societies,” he reflected that one witnessed the construction of Pompidou’s museum as “a micro-cultural genocide.”15
This cultural climate then brings into relief the poignancy of Cadere’s solicitation of public audience and debate to complete his work as a mode of institutional critique. Cadere, in fact, made reference to the opening of the museum, as though in passing, during his talk at Mollet-Viéville’s apartment. “I tell myself that chance does things well, and there is, perhaps, a relationship between establishing disorder and the opening of the Beaubourg museum,” he said, using a moniker that emphasized the neighborhood in which the structure was built rather than the name of the president who commissioned it. By inviting the audience to “establish disorder” by leaving and returning home, his anti-spectacular event invited participation by non-participation, and implied that this disorder was a conscientious act of refusal.
In a 1973 interview for Opus International, critic Claude Bouyeyre points to anti-participatory tendencies in Cadere’s work. After accusing him of violating an unsuspecting public by accosting them in the streets, however, Cadere turned the judgment around, countering,
“Just the existence of the museums and galleries is an assault … One can insult me, throw me from the doors of the museum, sequester my work: in this way one proves without ambiguity that ‘Beauty, Art’ are imposed with the police … Of course from the point of view of power I deceive. But as I am saying, the rules of the game are not to be respected.”16
In order to make his independence from institutions functional, Cadere engaged in the types of hijinks that made him a recognizable figure, or in his self-affirming words, “a star.” He hoped that his efforts to work independently of arts institutions of the time would surpass those of other institutionally critical artists with whom he exhibited such as Marcel Broodthaers, Buren, or Hans Haacke, who designed their artworks to engage museum history, politics, and power within the spaces of museums themselves, and whose audiences were largely circumscribed by those who made up the art world. Cadere’s methods for not respecting institutional rules, of course, necessarily worked with regard to them nonetheless. The individualist stance that he took could be seen as surprising given that, as Michel Foucault demonstrated, it is useless to try and escape a system based on sovereignty through a liberal invocation of rights because doing so will always ultimately legitimize that system’s basic values.17 Art institutions that depend on the concept of the autonomous artist will not be overthrown by an artist whose central preoccupation is to be autonomous with regard to that system.
The individualism of Cadere’s institutional critique should be understood in terms of his background as an artist who migrated to Western Europe to escape persecution he suffered in communist Romania. Because his father had been a diplomat under the monarchy of King Carol II, his family was stripped of its livelihood when the communists came to power and the young Cadere’s ambitions to attend university as a philology student were quashed, due to his “unhealthy social background.”18 In the following years, he gained artistic training working for official artists as an assistant and life model, and by attending an underground salon where non-aligned intelligentsia gathered for music recitals and readings of literature in an effort to keep alive the humanist culture that was otherwise being censored.19 In 1967, he left Romania for Paris, where he developed a new, more conceptual mode of art production that resembled the anti-authoritarian politics of those on the left during May 1968, yet he explicitly rejected the Marxist politics that others embraced.20 Indeed, as art historian, and fellow Romanian émigré Sanda Agalides has noted, it would have made sense for Cadere to begin making art for art’s sake once he arrived in the West and was no longer constrained by state prohibitions.21 The abstractions that he made in Paris might not be described this way, but it could be argued that the relationship between art and autonomy was Cadere’s primary concern. Rather than making works of art that are aloof from the interests of the world, however, he concerned himself with his own autonomy as an artist unburdened by the codes and cues of art-world politics and graces.
These power negotiations were made available to him specifically because of the confrontation between his personal history and Western expectations of that history’s meaning. Cadere was explicit about this during his Leuven lecture. “It should be pointed out that the author comes from an Eastern country,” he said. “This represents a determining factor. Can we imagine an American artist bringing his work to an exhibition without being invited? The Western mentality, nourished by pride, by intellectual scorn (and material comfort), makes such an attitude inconceivable; except to those who, coming from marginal countries, have nothing to lose.”22 Yet, the role of Cadere’s background in his work is ambivalent. As Magda Radu argues, nationality played a negative role as he mostly “rejected autobiography” and overt association with national identity (such as Szeemann attempted to impose upon him), preferring instead to embrace the cosmopolitan fluidity of a contemporary artist negotiating the currents of the international exhibition circuit.23 As Cadere claimed in an interview with Lynda Morris, it was only in “international situations” that he did not feel like a “stranger.”24 Agalides uses the term “frontier position” to describe this combination of a lack of sentimentality toward his homeland and a lack of interest in capitulating to the models offered by institutions in the West. Aware, on one hand, of “the difference between revolutionary promise and lived reality,” he was equally attentive to the ways that “democratic freedom in Western Europe was largely a vague approximation of true freedom.”25 The freedom that he aggressively sought to assert vis-à-vis the gallery system was a way of correcting for the lack of freedom that he found in Paris, Kassel, and elsewhere in the West.
That he would adopt such a strategy comes as self-evident to Radu, who argues that the reason he built his identity on marginality in the West was not because he was from the East, but because marginality already described his condition of existence in Romania.26 The form of autonomy that Cadere pursued in the West resembled his experiences of the Romanian salons and other “zones of autonomy” in which, as writer and literary theorist Matei Călinescu described it, “What we were doing was an attempt to construct a parallel universe and an identity … completely alien to the reality of those years of Stalinist Russification of the country and our (false) public identity.”27 Against this stacking of the associated binaries true/false, with freedom/ideology, with private/public, Cadere did not align only with one side or the other, but instead chose to pursue a “true freedom” that pointed to, and resisted, such binaries. This movement across the frontiers of the art world, between public and private spaces, while frequently playing the role of the uninvited guest, created an “insider/outsider” position that Agalides argues is “an index of crisis.”28 In Western Europe this contradiction of occupying an impossible position did not resolve into stability; rather, it took a new form as that of a “displaced person,” and eventually became the logical basis of Cadere’s institutional critique. In Jean-Pierre Criqui’s analysis, his new “place was that of a man who has no place, who infiltrates the interior in order to embody the exterior.”29 Whereas in Romania he negotiated his marginal position by taking up whatever jobs were available to him and working within the constraints of the system, in the West he moved purposely and visibly across positions of exteriority and interiority to invent a place for himself that perpetuated negotiation of the boundaries that delimited institutions rather than assimilating into the system as it existed.
One of the defining themes of May 1968 was its rejection of political representation, and its promotion of both direct democracy in politics and self-management in the workplace. Cadere used an uncommon degree of individual self-management to undermine the conventions of participation as practiced in the art world. By becoming a recognizable figure, he stated, “I hope to integrate myself into the system—a system that exists because painters make the machine work.”30 In his view, improving the system meant granting the artist more independence, and more responsibility. “Stardom,” in his imagining, would ideally displace culpability from the museum to the artist himself. “Establishing Disorder” was a one-time event, but more than this, the expression describes his entire practice. It is an apparently paradoxical proposition that caused both himself and his public to reassess and reinvent the art world—that is, to participate in it more consciously, more actively. Showing his work where it did not belong created a state of perpetual uncertainty, of undermined structures, but also of dynamism that would result from such conspicuously unstructured situations. The presentation–utilization of the round bar of wood had not only to do with the aura of the object, but moreover with its ability to organize a situation without predetermined content. This is not to say that his work had no message. Rather, his ceaseless pursuit of autonomy figured an ideal liberal art world in which every individual is free to exhibit equally and on their own terms without being constrained by the conventions of artistic exhibition.
The research for this chapter began as part of a dissertation that I defended in 2012. Hannah Feldman and Éric Michaud provided invaluable guidance throughout that process, while funding from the bourses Chateaubriand and Jeanne Marandon allowed me to conduct research in France. I would like to thank Michèle Cadere-Pierrel and Hervé Bize for their insights and generosity, and Catherine Dossin and an anonymous reviewer for their very thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter.
1 André Cadere, Histoire d’un travail (Gent: Herbert–Gewad, 1982), § 44. Cadere assembled this book as a sort of catalog raisonné of his bars and display practices. It includes notes on his display concepts, in some cases who was present, and any controversy that the display might have caused, as well as notation on the composition of the bars themselves, newspaper clippings, exhibition invitations, and photographs of exhibitions. Unlike the catalog raisonné published on the occasion of the 2008 exhibition André Cadere: Unlimited Painting, Histoire d’un travail does not emphasize the visual appearance of the bars themselves.
2 Most notable among these posthumous exhibitions are the retrospectives André Cadere (1934–1978) at PS1 in New York (1989), and André Cadere: Unlimited Painting at the Musée d'A Moderne de la Ville de Paris—MAM/ARC, Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden, and Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht (2008).
3 For this he was officially represented by Ida Biard’s experimental Galerie des Locataires, which had sent out exhibition announcements in advance alerting people to Cadere’s guerilla exhibition at the Adami exhibition.
4 The bar that was actually present in the room for the exhibition consisted of the four colors blue, white, red, and yellow. André Cadere, Présentation d’un travail/Utilisation d’un travail (Hamburg: Hossmann/ Brussels,MTL, 1975), 7. This text is available at the Bibliothèque Kandisnky.
5 An excellent formal analysis of the bars can be found in Matt Jolly, “The Barred Colors of Andre Cadere,” October 144 (Spring 2013): 115–48.
6 Cadere, Présentation d’un travail, 5.
7 For descriptions of the positions and interactions among many of these artists see Sophie Richard, Unconcealed: The International Network of Conceptual Artists 1967–1977: Dealers, Exhibitions and Public Collection, ed. Lynda Morris (London: Ridinghouse, 2009).
8 Rosalind Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” October (1978), 56–60.
9 Benjamin Buchloh and Lawrence Weiner, “Conversation with Lawrence Weiner,” in Lawrence Weiner, ed. Alexander Alberro (London: Phaidon, 1998), 19.
10 Szeemann’s idea would have placed Cadere in the over-determined lineage of his compatriot, Constantin Brancusi, who famously walked from Romania to France in 1903. People have frequently likened Cadere’s works to Bracusi’s wooden sculpture, citing in particular Bracusi’s Endless Column (1938), which, like Cadere’s bars, was composed of a progression of segments.
11 Analyses of the way that graffiti has figured in the historical recounting of May 1968 can be found in Julian Bourg, “Writing on the Wall: 1968 as Event and Representation,” in Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 289–94; and Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 10, 147, 186–7.
12 Maurice Blanchot, Les intellectuels en question (Paris: Fourbis, 1996), 60, cited in Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 175.
13 Louis Chevalier, L’ Assassinat de Paris (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977), translated by David P. Jordan as The Assassination of Paris (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 210–263. A historian of Paris, Chevalier tells the story of how technocrats under de Gaulle transformed the city into a museum of its former eccentricity and grandeur.
14 Nathan Silver, The Making of Beaubourg: A Building Biography of the Centre Pompidou, Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 104. Notable among criticisms of the building project is Jean Baudrillard, “L’Effet Beaubourg” (1977), trans. Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson as “The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence,” October, no. 20 (1982): 3-13.
15 Jean Clair, “Les arts de la rue,” Chroniques de l’art vivant 46 (February 1974): 2–3.
16 Cadere and Bouyeyre, “Cadere,” Opus International, no. 47 (November 1973): 63.
17 Michel Foucault, “14 January 1976” in “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey T (New York: Picador, 2003), 29–30.
18 Magda Radu, “Andre Cadere,” 63–80, and Ioana Vlasiu, “Andrei Cădere: The Exercise of Marginality Before 1967,” 133 in André Cadere/Andrei Cădere, ed. Magda Radu (Bucharest: National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011). Unlike French and English-language publications that only discuss Cadere’s work after he moved to Paris, this book goes into detail about his time in Romania and the influence that his experiences as a youth had on his art production. It includes essays by art historians, critics, and curators who were friends of the artist and who came from both Eastern and Western Europe.
19 Radu, André Cadere/Andrei Cădere, 90.
20 Radu, “Andre Cadere,” 72. Andre Cadere and Sylvère Lotringer, “Boy with Stick” [1978] Schizo-culture: The Book, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2013), 144. Romanian artists and intellectuals began to leave the country after 1965, when the death of the General Secretary of the Communist Party Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and the rise of Nicolae Ceausescu led to a relaxation on travel and other restrictions.
21 Sanda Agalides, “Cold War Cadere,” in André Cadere/Andrei Cădere, ed. Radu, 195.
22 Cadere, Histoire d’un travail, § 13. Quote cited in Radu, “Andre Cadere,” 76.
23 Radu, “Andre Cadere,” 72–73.
24 André Cadere in “Andre Cadere. Talking with Lynda Morris,” André Cadere: Peinture sans fin (Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris: W. König, Köln, 2007), 33.
25 Agalides, “Cold War Cadere,” 195–196.
26 Radu, “Andre Cadere,” 76.
27 Matei Călinescu and Ion Vianu, Amintiri în dialog (Jassy, Romania: Polirom, 1998), 75, quoted in Ibid., 80.
28 Agalides, “Cold War Cadere,” 200.
29 Jean-Pierre Criqui, “Meditations on a Round Bar of Wood (and Several Other Matters),” in André Cadere: All Walks of Life, ed. Carole Kismaric, Chris Dercon, and Bernard Marcelis (New York: Institute for Contemporary Art, P.S. 1, Museum; Paris: Le Chambre, 1992), 139.
30 Cadere and Bouyeyre, “Cadere,” 63.