To celebrate the centenary of the Victorine studios, the city of Nice is planning Nice 2019, the odyssey of cinema, a whole year of exhibitions and events to promote the history of cinema and current film production in Nice. The 109, on the site of the former slaughterhouses, route de Turin, is a place of extraordinary dimensions converted by the municipality into a center for contemporary creation.
Within this artistic breeding ground, the City of Nice and the artists’ collective La Station, with the support of Éva Vautier, invite Ben Vautier for a large summer exhibition entitled: Life is a film. More than 500 of Ben’s works, retracing 50 years of creation, will be installed in the large hall of more than 2,000 square meters, which he has chosen to share with guests, artists, long-time friends and young creators. This space in perpetual motion will host filmed productions, events, performances and debates, so dear to the artist.

A major artistic figure of the second half of the 20th century, Ben is known for his actions and paintings. His production, both philosophical and impertinent reflection on art, integrates our daily life in its most particular. Ethnism, ego and truth are also important issues in his work.
Ben’s story and his art are deeply rooted in Nice. He was fourteen years old when he moved to Nice with his mother. Ten years later, at the end of the 1950s, he opened a second-hand record store at 32 rue Tonduti de L’Escarène. He quickly transformed the facade by accumulating a quantity of objects. Ben’s store was born. This place of meetings and exhibitions became the meeting place for the main artists of the Nice School: Ben was convinced that “art must be new and bring a shock”. 1959 saw the creation of numerous performances, including “I sign life” and “Look at me, that’s enough” on the Promenade des Anglais. In 1963, he invited George Macunias to Nice for the first World Festival of Fluxus and Total Art in France. Historical actor of this movement, on this occasion, Ben signs Nice “open work of art” on the Mount Alban.
When the Magasin de Ben became part of the Permanent Collection of the Centre Georges-Pompidou in 1975, he transferred his activities to his home on the hill of Saint-Pancrace. Ben continues to organize exhibitions with Supports/Surfaces, the Figuration Libre and launches the first Pour ou contre debates.
Very involved in the contemporary scene, Ben has always supported young artists, encouraged encounters, and given his point of view on current events, initially through leaflets, posters and newspapers, today through rich and regular newsletters.

 

Cinema section

Camera in hand Ben has built up a considerable filmic collection over a period of sixty years in which anonymous people and artists appear in everyday situations such as on the terrace of a café, during openings or happenings.
His first films archiving his street actions from the 60s, his conceptual films and also his latest creations are presented.

The first film : CANNES VILLE 1963

During the Cannes Film Festival in 1963, Ben put up posters on the walls of the city:
Ben, creator of total art, presents and signs his extraordinary film CANNES VILLE 1963 during the Festival.

 

Guest artists

As he has always made a point of doing, Ben invites artists, historical or emerging, locally or internationally recognized, recent acquaintances or long-time friends, met along the way. It offers them a space in the hall to present their works, projections, performances or poems.

Marcel Alocco, Christian Balmier, Benoît Barbagli, Tom Barbagli, Marcel Bataillard, Charles Sebban dit Bébert, Emmanuel Benichou, Sylvie Boulloud, Frederik Brandi, Anna Byskov, Vincent Calassi, Martin Caminiti, Max Cartier, Catherine Cattaneo, Baptiste Caesar, Marc Chevalier, Robert Combas, Verana Costa, Sandra D.Lecoq, Noël Dolla, Louis Dollé, Jean Dupuy, Kristof Everart, Jacqueline Gainon, Jean-Baptiste Ganne,Olivier Garcin, Jo Guichou, Laurie Jacquetty, Lyonel Kouro, Krajewicz and Rowlands Arnaud, Labelle-Rojoux, Thierry Lagalla, Patrick Lanneau, Natacha Lesueur, Jean Mas, Florent Mattei, Maurice Maubert, Patrick Moya, Henri Olivier, Yoko Ono, Gérald Panighi, Jean-Luc Parant, Louis Pastorelli, Pascal Pinaud, Michel Rabanelly says Raba, Caroline Rivalan, Franck Saïssi, Alain Snyers, Stéphane Steiner, William Sweetlove, Monique Thibaudin, Agnès Vitani, Anne-Laure Wuillai, Junko Yamasaki…

 

 

Debate section

In 1958, one day, on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, Ben met François Fontan. Both of them love discussion and debates and meet every night to discuss life, sex, people, international politics, cultures, languages, ethnicities. All are welcome to participate in the discussions. We talk about the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, Marx, Freud, etc. François Fontan’s position: the political future of the world is not in uniformity but in diversity.

In 1974, the first debates in Saint-Pancrace, on the lawn of Malabar and Cunégonde’s house, were animated during the For or Against events. There is a microphone, a big table, a buffet and we discuss until late in the night. Some come for the speech, others for the merguez. Among these pros and cons, we remember Arman’s Tas, the discussion with Combas and Di Rosa, Olivier Mosset’s exhibition and his noisy arrival with 80 bikers from the Bastille and the spat between Martine Doytier and Noël Dolla.Cultivating this tradition, Ben has set up a space in the big hall of the 109, with several sofas, carpets on the floor, a table to put glasses on, a big white board with markers, a microphone, music, books and when he is there, he will launch a debate and invite the public to participate.

Performance section

 

Biography

Ben is one of the major artists of the 20th century known for his actions and paintings. His production, at the same time reflection on art in its most fundamental and integrating our daily life in its most particular, succeeds in making life an art. Thus entered in his work universes as far from artistic Duchamp as the ethnism, the ego or the truth. Ben enjoys an incredible popularity thanks to his writing, which combines the greatest impertinence and the greatest accuracy.

Ben, whose real name is Benjamin Vautier, is a French artist of Swiss origin. Born on July 18, 1935 in Naples, of an Irish and Occitan mother and a French-speaking Swiss father, he is the grandson of Marc Louis Benjamin Vautier, a Swiss painter of the 19th century. He lived his first five years in Naples. After the declaration of war in 1939, Ben and his mother travelled extensively: Switzerland, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, and finally settled in Nice in 1949. He studied at the Parc-Impérial school and at the Stanislas College boarding school. His mother finds him a job at the bookstore Le Nain Bleu as an errand boy, then buys him a bookstore.

At the end of the 1950s, he sold it to open a small store, transforming its facade by accumulating a lot of objects and in which he sold second-hand records. His store quickly became a place for meetings and exhibitions where the main members of what would become the Ecole de Nice met: César, Arman, Martial Raysse, etc. Close to Yves Klein and seduced by the New Realism, he is convinced that “art must be new and bring a shock”. At the beginning of the 1960s, the game of appropriations began. The rule established by Yves Klein was to appropriate and sign the world as a work of art without ever copying and always being the first. Duchamp had the rags, Christo the packaging, Arman the Accumulations, Klein the Monochrome, Ben is going to sign everything that wasn’t: the holes, the mysterious boxes, Nice, the kicks, God, the chickens, etc., linking art and life, explaining that everything is art and that everything is possible in art Essentially, Ben is a conceptual artist, an artist of ideas. He is a provocateur, a scoffer, an iconoclast, he is unclassifiable.

Ben, by Bernard Blistène

Director of the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou

The era is amnesiac. It celebrates over and over again those who “perform”, a way of letting people believe that they are thwarting the system. No longer an exhibition without the presence of the body. No project without a multidisciplinary dimension. No longer a manifestation without reconciliation of opposites. Art is everywhere and each appointment is there to prove it.
The dissensus sinks into complacent representations. We stage the misfortunes of the world with the idea of being witnesses and accusers. The good conscience does its work and the trick is done.

Ben Vautier sees the world differently. Sixty years he has been calling us out and sending us back to our vain vanities. For sixty years, he has been fencing and expressing himself, struggling and flaring up in a jumble mixing tragedy and farce, suffering and joy, pros and cons. Praise for the difficulty of being oneself, self-criticism of the ego, aphorisms of all kinds. Ben is there, between truth and lies, between impertinence and wisdom. Ben is a necessary artist.
From the end of the 1950s to today, Ben stages and stages himself in the heart of a world that he never stops saying scares and amuses him. Ben rants and raves. He writes and he apostrophizes. He gesticulates and talks loudly. He is a scholar and a popular person. Ben is without a doubt one of the most extraordinary human animals I’ve ever been around.

From all this, from this daily fight against himself and the time that never ceases to pass, Ben makes a work like no other, a work recognizable among all. Familiar and inventive. A work that resembles him and in which everyone, one day in his life, has recognized himself and found himself. We all have something of Ben Vautier in us, so much Ben Vautier tells us something of ourselves, of our misery and our joys, of our fears and our vanities, of our desires and our failures. In short, Ben is the man in search of the truth, without doubt a moralist. Never a moralizer.
You have to look at Ben’s work again and again. It is necessary to follow the course and the metamorphoses. You have to see him trying to build his language. “I would draw shapes that I would throw away if I found their source of influence,” he writes of his early work. It is necessary to hear it seek “a beginning of personality” when appears in 1957, the shape of the Banana. And then come the Lines, the Stains, the Object Sculptures, the Hanging Objects, the Vomit, the Unbalance, the Holes, the Living Sculptures, the Lack and the All… The Whole as the search for reality in its totality, the Whole so that nothing escapes him. Between decoy and mastery. No doubt a superb definition of creation.

Because Ben is a creator. The word seems to be overused and suits him well. A creator who exposes, signs and sells God, his rival, at any price. A creator who runs and does justice to the Wasteland. A creator who gives form to words and invents, as his friend Jon Hendricks says on the occasion of Ben’s full striptease, a word painting. And then, there are the Gestures which, beyond the Actions – or “Aktion”, if you want to make Germanic and learned – beyond the “Performances” and other “Happenings”, of George Brecht’s “Events” with which they maintain a tender affinity, are the very expression of the life in all its states, of the body in all its manifestations: “Bumping my head against a wall”, “Spitting”, “Shining other people’s shoes”, “Digging a hole and selling earth”, “Urinating”, “Going into the water fully clothed with an umbrella”, “Painting myself”, “Beating myself”… And so on and so forth. To say everything, to do everything, never to stop, never to rest. The body, his body, mine, yours in all its states to never stop fighting against the inevitable. Well, never offside. Ben, “our contemporary”, in the absolute urgency to be and to leave traces. To never disappear.

Bernard Blistène, 2018