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Twenty years ago, a quirky thicket of 260 black-and-white-striped marble pillars sprang up amidst the grandeur of one of central Paris' historic palaces, to widespread scorn and ridicule and a brief but fierce campaign of organised resistance.
Today, the sculpture is accepted, liked or even loved by many Parisians, but the artist who braved the controversy now says he wants to rip down his work, accusing the Government of deliberately letting it be destroyed by the ravages of time.
Known popularly as "Les Colonnes de Buren", after the artist Daniel Buren, the 3000 sq m installation is located across part of the vast baroque courtyard of the Palais-Royal, once the home of royal toadies, upmarket prostitutes and revolutionary plotters.
The pillars, ranging in height from a few centimetres to several metres, are formally known as "Les Deux Plateaux". It is a rare work of art to combine the practical and aesthetic. Children clamber over and hide behind the columns, teenagers speed around them on roller blades and break dancers leap about on the tops.
They are a never-failing backdrop for fashion shoots and tourists' cameras, for advertisements to boost Paris as an avant-garde centre of art, and they also serve as a handy seat for workers eating lunch.
Amid all this, Paris grandes dames scuttle past with their coiffed pooches to the larger courtyard alongside which boasts the more traditional French garden fare of linden trees, a circular fountain and tiny manicured lawns with warnings of severe punishment for those daring to set foot on a blade of grass.
When the pillars were first erected in 1986, they attracted extraordinary resentment, led by conservatives who branded them the symbol of the egomania of Francois Mitterrand, a President obsessed with leaving his imprint on the French capital. Today, all that is a distant memory.
"Everywhere I go, and I never stop travelling, people talk to me about the pillars at the Palais-Royal," Buren, 69, told the daily Le Figaro on December 30. "When I went to New Zealand last week, architects showed me pictures of the holidays they spent in Paris, with all the family standing on my pillars."
Buren says the public sees only a part of his intended work. The pillars are just part of an installation that should include red and blue lighting, as well as sound from a hidden stream that runs beneath the courtyard. He accuses the Ministry of Culture - whose offices are in the courtyard overlooking the sculpture - of practising "state vandalism" by refusing to maintain these essential components.
"The work has to be viewed in its entirety, not just as pillars," explains Buren. "Water and lighting give different textures to my work in daytime or night time, making it sonorous and alive. If it were a picture, no one would think of showing just a quarter of it to the public."
Buren says there has been no water at the sculpture for the past eight years, and the underground channels, covered by metal grilles, that in Paris evenings should be alive with tinkling aquatic sounds are clogged by cigarette ends.
He has been fighting for five years to have the full scope of his sculpture restored and the work renovated. Nothing has been done, even though two years ago the work was added to France's list of historical monuments, a move that gives it special legal protection, he says.
The ministry says the Palais-Royal is to be refurbished under a four-year, €14 million ($28 million) plan, and officials intend to talk to Buren about how to restore Les Deux Plateaux. Buren, though, is sceptical, recalling the bureaucrats who loathed the installation from the start, although it only replaced an ugly carpark.
"Thousands of visitors come from around the world to see something that is half wrecked," he said.
"Either it gets fixed, in the same way that you would clean a fountain and get it working again, or the authorities decide to do otherwise, in which case I cannot accept leaving it the way it is. If so, it has to be demolished."
