The art of Ben Vautier lies in his ability to seize with impertinence and authenticity the main issues ailing society. A born agitator, the 85-year-old embodies the role of the disruptive artist society simply can’t do without. He observes, analyses and proposes his point of view through hand-painted texts that have become so familiar yet have not lost their relevance nor their ability to solicit a response, deconstruct our reality and challenge our habits.
His epigrams are a kind of brushstroke, getting straight to the point, yet deeply profound. Some of his writings in French translate to “No art without suffering”, “I’m waiting for glory”, “Art is a virus”, “Ben is art”, “Art doesn’t exist, everything is ego”, “Who decides what’s beautiful and what’s ugly?”, “Sell your soul to Lucifer now”, “I love naked women” or “I don’t know who I am”.
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He places a throne-like chair on a pedestal with the words “He told the truth, he will be executed”, inscribes “this mirror tells the truth” on a mirror that has viewers staring back at their own reflections and makes atrocious copies of other artists’ work, such as a Paul Cezanne Provencal landscape, and scribbles “the poor man’s Cezanne” on it.
A master of aphorisms and epigrams, he has transformed writing into painting, elevating script to the level of contemporary art.
The Non-Conformist
Every new word or gesture is part of Ben’s quest for truth. At the same time, he is always questioning himself. “When I do something, I always have doubts,” he says. “I’m never sure of anything, but truth and doubt go together.” Blessed with visionary insight, he is as much a provocateur as a philosopher of art. His work reflects the meaning of life and the role of art and the artist in society.
Relating the joys and misfortunes of his quotidian with an innate sense of humour, he expresses his feelings, passions and obsessions, condensed into concise catchphrases. He loves women and his friends and dislikes sectarians and Parisians. Believing that art can only live and make sense through the artist’s fragile, oversized ego, he demonstrates a critical mind that doesn’t hesitate to interrogate everything, including his ego, one of his favourite subjects.
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“Firstly, I have it in front of me and in me,” he notes. “So I just have to ask myself questions and answer them. My interest in the ego ties in with my general theory on art that all life is survival and that ego is a form of survival.
“Today, I have become a much bigger philosopher because I think there’s nothing alive without ego. My cat is an egoist, and this plant is an egoist because everything wants to survive. If you look at nature, they spend their time fighting and eating each other.”
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“To find something new, an artist must look at what was done before and say, ‘What can I do that hasn’t been done before?’ This is an egoistic exercise, but it’s also the same for an entrepreneur, factory worker, financier or journalist,” he says.
“Ego is there even if you’re not an artist. I’m trying to explain the beginning of the universe because I have accepted that all artists, people, animals, plants and microbes are egoists. Everything that reproduces itself is full of ego, but the world itself, the volcanoes are not full of ego, so where does ego stop? Must it be alive?” he adds.
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A Grand Start
Born in Naples in 1935 to a Swiss father and French mother, Ben’s great-grandfather was recognised as one of the great 19th-century Swiss painters, known for his depictions of peasant life. His parents divorced when he was young and he moved with his mother to Izmir, Alexandria, Lausanne and, finally, Nice in 1949
“I was born into a petit bourgeois family,” he recalls. “If I had been from a family of labourers, I most likely would not have become an artist. I had to make a drawing every Christmas for my father, so I used to draw a horse or a boat because it was very easy to make and send it to him every year. And once my father complimented me.”
Enduring a rather sad childhood, he was traumatised when his father left home with his brother. A poor student, he dropped out of school at the age of 16 to work in a bookstore.
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Ben describes his initial attraction to art:“I lived in the attic of the bookstore and my first artistic experience came from opening books. If I found something new, I used to cut out the page and stick it up in my room. I used to spoil all the books, then try to sell them.
I chose only artists who shocked me because I was looking for something new, so I started with abstract painters Poliakoff, Soulages and Picasso. After Marcel Duchamp, it opened the possibility that everything was art. I became interested in newness and developed a theory that art must be new.”
Driven by the constant desire to create something new, Ben is obsessed with being the first and never copying others. “I looked at what Viseux, Poliakoff, Soulages, Malevich and Mondrian did, and said what can I find that they didn’t do? Whatever your style, you must do something new. I look at something and think can that be art or not; did anybody do it before? If nobody has done it before, how could I present it?”
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The Write Approach
Embarking on his signature written paintings in 1958, it was the meaning that mattered and not the aesthetics of his letters. “It was to tell the truth. I said I would become the specialist of truth. They were objective truths, subjective truths. However, the truth is not easy to find.”
Around the same time as he had been searching for an abstract shape that had not been used before in art and could shock, he produced his Banana series. “I’m going to be the king of bananas,” he thought to himself.
Then his friend, fellow artist Yves Klein, said to him: “Your bananas are nothing new. The monochrome is much stronger than the banana!” Klein told him to exhibit his hand-painted texts instead of his banana drawings on the pretext that the deliberate use of writing and language was more in touch with reality.
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In his first written images, Ben traced his words with a brush, generally in oil on wood and then resorted to a technique consisting of “writing” on canvas with acrylic paint straight out of the tube. Due to their format, greatly reduced colour and the signalling effect of writing, his early works have more impact as message signboards than conventional paintings, and he’s even hung some on the facade of Laboratoire 32, his used record store-cum-art gallery in Nice, to distinguish it from the surrounding buildings.
“At the time, I never made money from my art. I had to earn my living, so I had a shop in which I used to buy and sell records. My principle was you give me two records and I give you one, so my stock became bigger.” His store soon became a meeting place for all the young people who were doing something new and a hub for artistic debates. “It was very good because it was alive,” he remarks. “Fighting, exchanging ideas and saying to people they stole your idea was being alive.”
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Out Of The Spotlight
A visit to Ben’s home on the hilltops of Nice is unforgettable. The sound of cicadas and wind chimes fills the air, while he sips on pastis and enjoys the company of two dogs, five cats and a bird. Artworks and junk cover every square inch of its facade, interiors and garden. Not a single space is left empty.
There are objects he’d found on the street or donated items purchased from Emmaus charity shops – pots and pans, garden gnomes, toy animals, wigs, toilet brushes, lamps, arcade machines, African masks, books, pirate statues and old TVs. He even has a few toilet bowls with plants growing in them. “I didn’t decorate my house,” Ben admits. “I just don’t throw anything away.”
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He’s a collector who accumulates the smallest and most modest objects over time to transform them into works of art. Lately, he has been working on a movie called Vous (You) that doesn’t have an actual scenario. The film is the audience and he speaks to them, instructing them to move their feet or to look at one another, or tells them he has hidden money in the room.
It is cut with images of him trying to find a way to make a movie. Unknowingly becoming the protagonists, the public becomes more important than the film. “It’s important that it looks like it was done by an amateur, who doesn’t know how to create his film,” he divulges. “If you take away everything that’s boring and keep only the good sequences, then it’s going to look just like publicity.”
Last summer and autumn, the Departmental Domain of Chamarande, a chateau located 45 minutes away from Paris, held a retrospective called Etre Libre (Being Free), uniting over 400 works mainly from Ben’s personal collection, but also from other private collections. A historical section presented significant works from 1958 to 1978, including paintings, posters, photographic archives, videos and a selection of his performances entitled Gestures.
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He was one of the first artists to put art directly in the streets of Europe through his performances, which consisted of everyday activities, such as waiting at a bus stop, eating pasta at a table in the middle of the street or even swimming across the port of Nice with his hat and clothes on. Through his many actions, Ben became a pioneer of the Fluxus art movement in Europe in the 1960s.
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The second part of the exhibition featured more recent and new works based on themes like portraits, mirrors, the ego and sex. Ben explains what being free means: “
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We’re in a world where freedom is in danger. We’re not free. There are more and more restrictions. Artists should look for freedom because they must do something new that others haven’t done before. They will feel free when they discover something new and show it, but freedom is very difficult. It has to be won.”
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