Vautier Ben

Ben Vautier spent the first five years in Naples, the son of Max-Ferdinand, who came from a family of Swiss painters and painter himself, and from the last descendant of those Giraud who had left Antibes in 1787 to settle in Smyrna in Turkey. In 1939 Ben (Beniamino Paolo Lucio) followed his mother after the divorce, first in Switzerland, then in Turkey, then in Egypt, then again in Naples, then again in Switzerland, to settle permanently in Nice in 1949. This is to say of a vocation already traced or an experience that marks the activity of Ben and explains the cosmopolitan character, unstable, constantly in turmoil of his work. More: the indissoluble link between daily experience and artistic activity leads him to declare, in 1958, that art must cause shock and be new, and in 1960 that everything is' art and everything is' possible in art. Friend of Yves Klein, of Daniel Spoerri, of Arman, of Boltanski, Le Cle'zio, Buren, he participated in the activity of the international movement Fluxus with Filliou, Brecht, Maciunas, La Monte Young. From here we understand the expression of a tumultuous and overflowing spirit. Ben’s art, which constantly questions itself and constantly overturns reasoning, is summed up, perhaps, in the aphorism: "I wanted to tell the truth and I made a lie of it"; it even goes so far as to transform his house into a permanent "work in progress".
Ben constantly questions the legacy left by Marcel Duchamp and the consequences of "ready made", ending up declaring, in agreement with the exponents of the Fluxus movement: "Everything is art". The borders between life and art are completely abolished. Every action he takes is a work of art: for example, he lives for fifteen days in the window of a London gallery in 1962, proclaims statements "neodada" like that: "I undersigned Ben Vautier declare authentic work of art the absence of art".
In his eyes the history of art must be read in terms of continuous breaks (of which he represents the last). Between 1958 and 1972 he managed a boutique of used records in Nice that became a "sculpture" in perpetual evolution from the moment he decided not to throw anything. At the opening of the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, it was acquired by the museum, dismantled piece by piece and reassembled in the exhibition halls.
An international specialist in the "white word traced on a black background", Ben never ceases to deal with art, his ego, his anguish and the artistic avant-garde. Questioning art, culture and the artistic and cultural institutions themselves, Ben represents both the accomplice and the beneficiary. In 1995 the contemporary galleries of the museums of Marseille organized a major retrospective of his work, entitled Pour ou contre, inaugurated during the Festival Marseille Mediterranée 95, whose vernissage ended with a "Dance at Ben".
In 2007 the Province of Modena invited him to exhibit fifteen paintings in the Church of San Paolo as part of the Festival of Philosophy. The chosen theme is that of the "knowledge of the ego". In this case too, Ben has a contradictory attitude: he starts from the observation that the creative act is the product of the artist’s ego (I, super-ego, impulses, etc.), but since the artist tends to change the given situation, he comes to the conclusion that "To change art you have to change man, and to change man you have to change, transform and even destroy your ego (I, super-I)".
Ben has not yet finished settling his accounts with the art world, with culture and with his ego.


Museums where his works are kept:

PariS Musée National d’Art Moderne;
Nice, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporaine;
Trento e Rovereto, Mart, Museo di Arte Moderna e contemporanea.

Bibliography:

Lara-Vinca Masini, Arte Contemporanea, La linea dell’unicità, Firenze, Giunti, 1989; C. Minière, L’art en France, 1960-1995, Paris, Nouvelles Editions Françaises, 1995

© Ben Vautier, by SIAE 2023