Ben Vautier’s latest performance has been the most radical. The French artist of Italian origin committed suicide yesterday, just hours after his wife Jacqueline died due to a stroke. The author, aged 88, died in Nice, the city … where he has developed a good part of his creative career, characterized by the lack of distinction between art and life. Ben, as he was known, was one of the last and most original members of the Fluxus movement.
The aphorisms written in white letters on a black background are its hallmark. Short and forceful phrases like ‘What is art for?’ or ‘I have nothing to explain to you’ showed his thought, apparently simple, but subject to an interpretation of plastic creation that conceives it not as an end, but as a means to explore the unconscious, question our imagination and challenge the viewer. These pieces, widely distributed, reached the MoMa in New York.
‘Nothing and everything’, the title of his first exhibition in 1960, already showed the direction of an artist who mixed combative ideology, steely poetry and the resort to appropriation, because, in his opinion, everything he signed could become construction site. This line of work, called Mail Arte, seduced George Maciunas, the father of the Fluxus movement, who encouraged him to join the training. Like Ben, his acolytes renounced conventional work and demanded total art, a form of interdisciplinary expression, linked to everyday expression, through which to promote a way of life marked by freedom of choice.
The calligraphed poems with a certain childish aesthetic were a substantial part of an abundant and diverse production that included painting, sculpture, photographs, books and cinematographic incursions. In the eighties, Ben was one of the instigators of French Free Figuration, a current statically associated with the Italian Transavant-garde or American Neo-Expressionism. The transgression of canons, chromatic discordance and the use of heterogeneous materials characterize this reaction to minimalist sobriety.
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