Ben Vautier, a French Fluxus artist whose humorous work and performances imploded the division between life and artwork, incomes laughs and admiration alike from critics, has died at 88.
Vautier, who typically labored below the inventive moniker Ben, was discovered lifeless in his residence in Good on Wednesday, lower than a day after his spouse died following a stroke. The Good prosecutor’s workplace mentioned that his physique was found with a gunshot wound; the workplace mentioned it could open an investigation to find out the trigger.
Ben, together with different artists related to the Fluxus motion of the Sixties, got down to blur all boundaries between the on a regular basis and the hallowed area of art-making. He succeeded in doing so, creating artworks that generally included the detritus of life itself, serving to to level artwork in a brand new path in an period when high-minded summary portray was nonetheless most well-liked by the institution.
He’s remembered for one aphorism particularly: “Every thing is artwork,” a phrase that he wrote in paint again and again, with many alternative variations, through the course of his six-decade profession. But he was fond of making paradoxes as effectively, and would generally deliberately contradict himself in different artworks and writings.
“Artwork will not be LIFE however life communicated by X,” he wrote in 1966. “My EVERYTHING is for me an EVERYTHING of sincerity and of contradiction. It needs to be a BOUNDLESS EVERYTHING CONTAINING ALL the opposite’s EVERYTHING. That’s, subsequently, a piece of pretension.”
On the 1972 version of Documenta, the famed artwork pageant in Kassel, Germany, Ben put it extra bluntly, hanging a big banner over the Fridericianum museum that learn “KUNST IST ÜBERFLÜSSIG,” or “Artwork is superfluous.”
Amongst his most well-known creations is Le magasin de Ben (1958–73), an set up that started off as a practical store in Good. What started as a retailer for purchasing information and cameras quickly turned one thing greater than that: a “complete artwork heart,” in Ben’s terminology, whose partitions have been scrawled with the artist’s cursive phrases and hung with overflowing wheels, hats, and knickknacks.
Though the set up is now thought of an essential paintings, Ben final yr instructed Forbes that it was “not for the artwork crowd as a result of the artwork college was 100 meters away and the scholars have been forbidden from coming to my place.” Right now, it resides with Paris’s Centre Pompidou, which is at the moment exhibiting the piece inside its galleries.
Benjamin Vautier was born in 1935 in Naples, Italy. After his dad and mom divorced when he was a child, he led an itinerant childhood, transferring together with his mom from Egypt to Switzerland earlier than lastly placing down roots together with her in Good. He didn’t do effectively in class in that coastal French metropolis, so his mom acquired him work in an area bookstore, the place he aided in English translations. His first vital expertise with artwork, he mentioned, was not in a museum or a gallery, however in that store, the place he would excise parts of books he favored and collage them collectively at residence.
“Then I developed a concept once I was 18 or 19: artwork should be new,” Ben mentioned within the Forbes interview. “So I got here to artwork like that.” He by no means attended artwork college.
His store in Good turned identified to members of the French avant-garde, together with Yves Klein and Martial Raysse, who uncovered him to the concurrent Nouveau Réalisme motion. Ben recalled exhibiting Klein his drawings of bananas, which Ben took as his topic as a result of he believed no different artist had ever accomplished so. Klein, unimpressed with the bananas, mentioned he was extra fascinated about Ben taking on the written phrase and linking up with the Lettrists, who had enlisted textual content in visible varieties. However Ben discovered Lettrist artwork to merely be “mannered graphics,” and as a substitute sought a extra truthful type of textual content.
Ben’s official introduction to the Fluxus motion got here in 1962 by way of its founder, George Maciunas. Drawing on the Dada motion from a half century prior, Maciunas’s Fluxus manifesto, written the next yr, known as on artists to “PURGE the world of lifeless artwork, imitation, synthetic artwork, summary artwork, illusionistic artwork, mathematical artwork.” That spirit was already within the air, and Ben thrilled to it, heeding Maciunas’s recommendation to hunt out works by John Cage and George Brecht.
In 1963, Ben organized a Fluxus pageant in Good, bringing over artists like Nam June Paik and Benjamin Patterson to carry out there dwell. Ben would proceed creating related occasions together with his personal idea of complete theatre, which was designed to carry performances off the stage, into life itself. A pesky prankishness pervaded Ben’s complete theatre: he as soon as satisfied a theater that he was going to stage a manufacturing of a Molière play, then proceeded to smash pianos and fill a room with paper.
Although Ben’s work and associated ephemera stay his most well-known works, he additionally gained renown through the Sixties and ’70s for his efficiency artwork, which was intentionally crass. One piece consisted of urinating in a jar, then exhibiting the vessel as an paintings; one other concerned Ben repeatedly ramming his head towards a wall. Anybody may’ve accomplished these quotidian actions, however Ben carried out them as artwork, so onlookers have been compelled to simply accept them as such.
Critics didn’t all the time reply kindly to Ben’s provocations, particularly those produced through the ’80s and onward. “Tout est artwork? Possibly, however not all of it belongs on show,” quipped Quinn Latimer in Frieze in 2010, writing on the event of an enormous Ben retrospective staged on the Musée d’Artwork Contemporain in Lyon, France.
Others have been extra charmed by Ben’s humor. In 1998, the New York Instances devoted a whole evaluation to Ben’s images, addressing works similar to Polaroids that have been fully clean. “‘I’m not photographer,’ he confidently introduced. That’s honest. Nobody will ever confuse Ben with Ansel Adams,” critic Vicki Goldberg wrote. “However whether or not in English or French, he poses extra philosophical questions concerning the medium than Adams had time for, in a dry and even ridiculously naive method, as if he have been explaining Roland Barthes on ‘Sesame Avenue.’”
No matter criticisms adopted Ben all through his profession, they appeared to fade away on Wednesday as French officers mourned him. Rachida Dati, France’s tradition minister, known as him a “legend,” writing in a put up on social media, “We’ll miss his free spirit terribly, however his artwork will proceed to make France shine all through the world.”
Ben might have been accused periodically of egotism—allegations that have been little doubt aided by the truth that he created a persona known as Mister EGO. However he typically approached his artwork in a plainspoken manner that befitted his challenge of reaching most people.
He as soon as instructed curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, “My definition of artwork is: astound, scandalize, provoke or be your self, be new, create.”