Ben, pseudonym of Benjamin Vautier, born on July 18, 1935 in Naples in Italy, is a French artist of Swiss origin.

He became known to the public at the end of the 1960s, notably through his “writings” in various media and forms. Part of the post-modern artistic avant-garde, Ben is one of the main founders of the Fluxus group and close to Lettrism. He is an artist known for his performances, installations and writings.

In this way, universes as distant from the artistic field as ethnism, ego or truth have entered his work. Ben enjoys an incredible popularity thanks to his “writings” which combine impertinence and accuracy of purpose.
Ben, whose real name is Benjamin Vautier, is a French artist of Swiss origin, born on July 18, 1935, in Naples (Italy), of an Irish and Occitan mother, and a French-speaking Swiss father. He is the grandson of Marc Louis Benjamin Vautier, a nineteenth-century Swiss painter. He lived his first five years in Naples. After the declaration of the Second World War in 1939, Ben and his mother travelled extensively: Switzerland, Turkey, Egypt, Italy… to finally settle in Nice in 1949. He studied at the Imperial Park School and at the Stanislas College boarding school. His mother finds him a job at the bookstore Le Nain bleu as an errand boy, and then buys him a stationery store. 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 École 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”. In 1955, he discovered the shape of the banana and made a series of drawings. This series marks the beginning of his graphic research. In 1959, he begins his “living sculptures”: he signs people in the street, his friends, and even his family. In 1965, he signed his own daughter, Eva Cunégonde, then three months old. In the early 1960s, several artists attempted to appropriate the world as a work of art. Ben will sign anything he finds: “holes, mystery boxes, kicks, God, chickens, etc.”, linking art and life, explaining that everything is art and everything is possible in art. He joined the Fluxus movement in October 1962, following a meeting with George Maciunas in London. Between 1960 and 1963, he developed the notion of appropriation, of everything being art and everything possible in art. He then began his “Tas” series, piling up dirt and garbage on lots and signing them. In 1965, in his store, he created a three by three meter gallery in the mezzanine: “Ben doubts everything”. He exhibited Martial Raysse, Albert Chubac, Daniel Biga, Marcel Alocco, Bernar Venet, Serge Maccaferri, Serge III, Sarkis, Robert Filliou, Christian Boltanski, etc. In 1972, at the request of Harald Szeemann, he participated in Documenta V, where he met Robert Filliou, Marcel Broodthaers, Giuseppe Chiari and Joseph Beuys, among others. In 1977, the collective exhibition “A propos de Nice” inaugurating the Centre Georges Pompidou was a kind of Parisian recognition of the research carried out and matured outside the capital, by the School of Nice. In the preface to the catalog, Pontus Hulten wrote: “Contemporary art would not have had the same history without the activities and encounters that took place in the Nice region. He entrusts the preparation of the event to Ben. At the beginning of the 1980s, on his return from a year spent in Berlin at the DAAD, thanks to a grant, he met young artists: Salomé, Luciano Castelli, Helmut Middendorf and the members of the German Violent Painting. On his return to Nice, he organized with Marc Sanchez an exhibition-exchange between what he called the French Figuration Libre and young German painters. Robert Combas and Hervé Di Rosa are exhibited in his house in Saint Pancrace, and François Boisrond and Rémi Blanchard, among others, are exhibited at La galerie de la Marine in Nice. Very involved in the contemporary scene, he has always supported young artists and gives his point of view on all current events, whether cultural, political, anthropological or artistic, in his regular and prolix newsletters. He lives and works since 1975 on the heights of Saint-Pancrace, a hill in Nice. Ben’s work can be found in some of the world’s most important private and public collections, including MoMA in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, the MUHKA in Antwerp, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Solothurn, the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice, the M.A.C. in Marseille, and the M.A.C. in Lyon. Married to Annie Baricalla since 1964, he has two children, Eva Cunégonde and François Malabar.

Inscribing himself in the post-Duchamp context, and influenced by John Cage, George Maciunas, Dada and Isidore Isou, asking the question “What to do after Duchamp?”, Ben chooses the whole world as his workshop. From 1963 to 1967, Ben wrote ten conceptual films. The first one was a declaration-posters stuck on the walls of Nice and Cannes at the time of the Cannes Film Festival.

Writing: His first word painting seems to be “Il faut manger. You have to sleep” from 1953, a simple affirmation of life. However, this simplicity conveys a strong concept: Ben produces an art of the idea, well before the beginning of conceptual art as defined in most specialized books. At the time, Ben was looking for new artistic forms to talk about art and the art world. He then developed through his writings numerous and varied themes (ego, doubt, death, sex, the new, money…). The sentences Ben writes can be truths, comments (on the world, current events), scenarios, invectives (to the public, to the art world), observations… Suddenly appearing in the viewer’s field of vision, they bring a smile to the face and often give food for thought.
The signature: He starts to sign in 1958: paintings, people, photos. Ben then thought that if art is only about signature, then why not make a painting with just his own signature. Working with the concepts of self, ego and artist identity, Ben, “seems to be saying that since, to the public, art is synonymous with the artist’s signature, the more visible it is, the more the public will want that work. {…} At the same time, Ben speaks to the ego/self and the importance of self-reference in art, the exploration of the self and the ego – both subjectively and as a subject.” His manifesto “Moi Ben je signe” in 1960 shows the radical nature of his approach.
Gestures / Actions: Down to earth, Ben’s gestures are close to George Brecht’s “events”. They are also called “shares”. His first gestures date back to 1960, theorized in what he calls “appropriations”. At first poorly documented, they are then photographed and titled, on a support most often black, with a brief description. These gestures show small, a priori banal, daily, unspectacular actions that Ben puts forward, in a Fluxus spirit.
The performances “Life never stops” is one of Ben’s phrases. Playing on the codes of happenings and performances developed in the United States in the 1950s (Black Mountain College, Allan Kaprow), Ben mixes life and art from the 1960s to produce performances called “Vomir”, “Hurler”, or “Dire la vérité”, which he realizes near his store in rue Tonduti de l’Escarène or in the streets of Nice, warning the public or not.