With the support of the Galerie Eva Vautier, the MUAC (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporàneo) presents La muerte no existe, a retrospective exhibition of…
With the support of the Galerie Eva Vautier, the MUAC (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporàneo) presents La muerte no existe, a retrospective exhibition of Ben, curated by Ferran Barenblit (former director of the MACBA, Barcelona). Spanning nearly 1,500 m2, this retrospective brings together works by the artist across three spaces: historical, contemporary and ethnic. The exhibition traces the path and the artistic reflection of Ben. “In his prodigious production, Ben Vautier creates an uninhibited, powerful and total oeuvre. Over the course of his career, Ben Vautier has fused art and life with as much sincerity as force. The main theme of his work is art itself: the need to always commit oneself and to be radical, the idea that any human practice can be understood as an expression of culture, and even of its apparent uselessness. View of the exhibition, a retrospective of Ben, La muerte no existe, MUAC, Mexico His attitude is one of constant irony, the kind found when one says one thing and perhaps, only perhaps, means the opposite. The genesis of his practice lies in the late 1950s, within the New Realism movement. With Yves Klein and Arman, among others, he took part in the creation of the École de Nice, invoking the legacy of Marcel Duchamp and rethinking the meaning of art. During this period, Ben champions a new avant-garde art. A few years later, he came into contact with Fluxus, a movement originating in New York which went further by privileging process over result, prefiguring conceptual art and proposing an intense dialogue with poetry, music and the theatrical arts. Ben’s work takes very diverse forms: actions, often almost invisible, such as the most minimal gesture possible carrying varied meanings; textual pieces, always in his characteristic cursive handwriting, in white on a black background; sculptural pieces, often the result of assembling various objects; and installations that encourage audience participation. The recurring ideas in his work are ego and ethnicism. The former relates to simple existence, to the desire to go on living and, of course, to the fact of being an artist. For Ben, ethnicism consists in recognising the specificity of each of the peoples of the world, which Eurocentric colonialism has tried to silence. For this exhibition in Mexico, this notion is found in certain texts in Nahuatl. Polyhedral, intense, tireless and tenacious, Ben has expanded his boundless production by fusing art and life in the key decades of recent history, always ahead of his time. His attitudes and his ways of operating in his early years of work anticipated many trends of the 1980s and 1990s: the radicalism of certain actions, often concealed by their simplicity; the centrality of the passing of time; the importance of the text; the capacity to bring together different people in apparently ordinary actions. In a large part of the artistic practices of the last two decades of the century, one can find elements that lead us back…
