| BEN VAUTIER | you can also see the exhibition and the works on ARTSY | |
| Selected Works | Exhibition 2007 | |
| 25 june – 1 august 2020 | browse the Catalog |
Ben Vautier is one of the most important figures in spreading the transgressive theories of Fluxus. A maestro “[…] in the systematic game of annexing to the universe of art everything that would seem to be outside of it […]”, Ben uses his childlike script to indicate everything that is art, and at the same time to remove the physical nature of every indicated object and make it rise into an abstract concept. Following the Duchamp tradition, Ben challenge all boundaries of what can be seen as an artistic object, developing the idea of the limit of the art. In an increasingly reckless game, where whatever his hand and its mark/script touches becomes art, Ben risks removing sense itself. As a result, his art becomes the art of the limit, fiercely hazardous, on the brink of annihilating values. |
WHO IS BEN? There were many Ben’s aspects, a provocative Ben who comes from Marcel Duchamp, who signs Everything and Nothing, who signs the life showing himself in a London’s shop window in 1962, who searches for the limits of the art saying that God is a work of art etc. etc... But there is a theoretical Ben who questions himself about the developing of the art “What is art? Why art?” A Ben who, when he was asked about the matter of his work, always replies: I research the truth. Objective truth, when he writes on a canvas: “This canvas measures 47 cm length” and it really measures. Subjective truth, when he writes: “I’m jealous of the glory of Boltanski and Beuys” and it is truth. But mostly, after 1972, an analyst Ben who deconstructs, excoriates, who questions himself about the developing of the art and of the man, who takes position towards the avant-garde with his theory of the “Ethnisme”, an humanism that not consider any population as underdeveloped and that every population have the right to their own contemporaneity. “Annie 1997” |
ART IS USELESS: When Henry Flynt was demonstrating at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, carrying a sign reading “Demolish Serious art” was a political statement against bourgeois art. When, instead, at the Maeght Foundation, I demonstrate saying that art is useless with cartels, is the result of the following consideration: if everything is Art, and if Art must always be new, the fight against the art has never been done. Indeed, I fight, therefore, as a work of art. My attitude is, therefore, Art. |
AVAILABLE WORKS
