The French artist Benjamin Vautier—typically referred to easily as Ben—died on 5 June on the age of 88. Ben was a core member of the worldwide Fluxus motion, and he died by suicide in his house in Saint-Pancrace, France, lower than a day after his spouse Annie died of a stroke. The dying was confirmed by the couple’s youngsters Eva and François.
Although he labored throughout media, Ben’s most well-known physique of labor was comprised of work that featured handwritten textual content with messages that had been at instances quippy or irreverent, at instances profound, and most frequently a synthesis of the entire above. The work’s accessibility lent to its mass attraction, and reproductions abounded in his native France, the place he was broadly widespread. French president Emmanuel Macron even launched a press release on the event of Ben’s dying, that learn partially: “On our youngsters’s pencil instances, on so many on a regular basis objects and even in our imaginations, Ben had left his mark, manufactured from freedom and poetry, of obvious lightness and overwhelming depth.”
France’s cultural minister, Rachidi Dati, additionally paid tribute in a social media publish, saying: “With the disappearance of Benjamin Vautier, the world of Tradition loses a legend.” Dati added: “A goldsmith of language, Ben leaves behind practically 12,000 creative creations. His humorous, typically satirical writings have accompanied and marked generations. We’ll miss his free spirit terribly, however his artwork will proceed to make France shine all through the world.”
Ben was born in Naples in 1935. His dad and mom divorced in his childhood, his father taking custody of Ben’s brother, who was one 12 months older, and Ben going along with his mom, who relocated them to Turkey, Egypt and Switzerland, earlier than arriving within the French coastal metropolis of Good—the place the artist would stay for the remainder of his life—when Ben was 14.
A mediocre pupil, Ben left faculty as a teen to work in a bookstore. In a 2023 interview with Forbes, he cited his time within the bookstore as his introduction to artwork. “I bear in mind my first creative expertise was opening up books and if I discovered one thing new, I used to chop it out and stick it in my room, so I used to spoil all of the books, then attempt to promote them,” he mentioned. “I picked solely artists who shocked me as a result of I used to be on the lookout for one thing new, so I began by the summary painters: Poliakoff, Soulages and Picasso. The shock Marcel Duchamp got here with a gathering with Arman, and after that, I opened as much as the likelihood that the whole lot was artwork. Then I developed a concept once I was 18 or 19: artwork have to be new. So I got here to artwork like that.”
From 1958 to 1973, Ben ran a document retailer in Good with a small prime flooring that he used as a gallery area referred to as Galerie Ben Doute de Tout (its identify interprets to “Ben doubts the whole lot”). It was via the gallery that Ben met the likes of Yves Klein in addition to Fluxus cofounder George Maciunas, each of whom can be very influential in shaping Ben’s follow. (At Klein’s encouragement, Ben wrote all around the partitions of the store, which can have led to the incorporation of textual content into his work that adopted quickly after.)
Like many artists of the Fluxus motion, Ben sought to interrupt down the limitations between high- and low-brow artwork, in addition to minimising the excellence between artwork and on a regular basis life. By the late Fifties, he had already begun his Dwelling Sculpture sequence, during which he would signal his identify on objects, mates and even strangers, thus dubbing them artworks. All through the Nineteen Sixties, he started his gestes or gestures—akin to the Happenings that had gained reputation within the US just a few years prior—during which his personal physique turned the first vessel for the work.
Although he would proceed to function throughout many various media, together with efficiency, set up, conceptual practices like Mail Artwork and images, it was his textual content work—with the immediacy of their messaging, their lack of pretension, and their attraction to wide-ranging audiences—that may be Ben’s most celebrated physique of labor. Many of those works had been dotted with the phrase tout est artwork—or the whole lot is artwork—a maxim and worldview that Ben each championed in others and lived by in earnest.
