Daniel Buren's vertical bands of alternately white and coloured stripes have no internal composition, no painterly texture, no referential content or emotional impact, attempting a neutrality without intrinsic interest.
Conceived as 'a proposition', the stripes intervene in different locations, drawing attention to the location as public or private or institutional space, re-inscribed by the intervention.
To be successful in this revelatory purpose, the installation of the stripes should have a certain awkwardness, avoiding the suggestion of the ambient wallpaper they often resemble. A surprising, accidental or disturbing relation to their location, an intrusive quality, seems essential to their critical or indicative purpose.
Since the invention of the stripes in 1967, Buren's work has resolutely refused to develop.