Download PoSt FacE - Ben Vautier

There is also a lot of modesty in the writings of Ben, at
least in his calligraphy: it looks childish, without frills
and accepting its “mistakes” in composition. Never­
theless, what has been and always will be hidden in this
modesty is the irony of an artist who opposes the
obviousness of the type-set or calligraphed message, of
the painted letter, and the Hermeticism of great art in its
excessiveness.
Revolts
In The Rebel, Albert Camus postulated that “Rebellion (…)
is a fabricator of universes”. The arts- whether visual,
musical or literary- create worlds, and the artist who
conjures them up, creates them “as his own”.
Since the beginning of the 1960s, Ben has been annoyed
with cultural Parisianism and the laws of the art market.
Moreover, the artist has fought to put an end to ethnocentrism and push for a new post-colonial reflection on
the topic of culture. In 1986, he wrote and published a
text, a sort of an interview, conceived as the (or a) “première internationale ethniste”. This idea, formulated at
the end of the 1950s by the philosopher François Fontan,
whom Ben met in Nice in 1956, is the “political awareness that language is the principal factor that defines a
people, a nation”. Ethnism is not a science, but a political stance that aims to combat the oppression that one
group has over another, and hopes to suppress the hierarchy between peoples and cultures. Ben wishes that
peoples would free themselves from all their chains and
choose to value their differences. He thus declared: “the
next revolution in art: embracing one’s language and
culture”.
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The infinite and the absurd
One of Ben’s curious obsessions is making lists. In truth,
what can be more subjective than the list! It puts a personal order to a sum of words, objects and ideas that is
never achieved. The list represents in fine the symptom
of “something beyond us”, like “an emotional state”, as
Umberto Eco once wrote. It is the sign of dissatisfaction
and even frustration: being aware of it can lead to a
sense of its uselessness and its absurdity. Therefore,
you might as well stop thinking, as Ben sometimes
whispers, all while continuing to feed from an “immense
internal boiling”, taking from the words of Antonin
Artaud over the suicide of Vincent Van Gogh. For the
question of suicide as a loophole to the absurdity of life
is not far; and Ben brings it up regularly. Camus, again,
made the mythological hero Sisyphus the model of a
would-be suicidal, as he was condemned to “pointless,
hopeless labour”.
Ben’s writings and lists are thus endless, like mathe­
matical sequences, an accounting of the years; they
also raise the question of time and its footprint.
Jon Hendricks further concluded about Ben that “the
work states the potential of the unknown in something
that is unlimited, incomplete and unfinished.” However,
the absurdity of the task, which brings a certain spice
to the idea of death, is no less poetic and even builds
art like a life impulse and motivates like a revolt or
rebellion.