Ben Vautier
La muerte no existe
MUAC, Mexico City (Mexico)
From October 1, 2022 to April 02, 2023.
Ben Vautier, La muerte no existe. Views from the exhibition, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, MUAC/UNAM, 2022. Photos : Oliver Santana
With the support of the Eva Vautier Gallery, the MUAC (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporàneo) presents La muerte no existe, a retrospective exhibition of Ben’s work, curated by Ferran Barenblit (former director of MACBA, Barcelona).
Spread over nearly 1500 m2, this retrospective showcases works by the artist in three spaces: historical, contemporary and ethnic. This exhibition retraces Ben’s artistic journey and reflection.
“In his prodigious production, Ben Vautier creates an uninhibited, powerful and total work. Throughout his career, Ben Vautier has merged art and life with equal sincerity and strength. The main theme of his work is art itself: the need to always engage and be radical, the idea that all human practice can be understood as an expression of culture and even of its apparent uselessness.
His attitude is one of constant irony, the kind you find when you say one thing and maybe, just maybe, mean the opposite. The genesis of his practice lies in the late 1950s, in the New Realism movement. With Yves Klein and Arman, among others, he participated in the creation of the School of Nice, invoking the legacy of Marcel Duchamp and rethinking the meaning of art. During this period, Ben advocated a new avant-garde art. A few years later, he came into contact with Fluxus, a movement originating in New York that went further by privileging the process over the result, prefiguring conceptual art and proposing an intense dialogue with poetry, music and theatrical arts.
Ben’s work takes many forms: actions, often almost invisible, as the most minimal gesture possible with varied meanings; textual pieces, always with his characteristic cursive writing, 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 first has to do with simple existence, the desire to continue living and, of course, being an artist. For Ben, ethnicism is about recognizing the specificity of each of the world’s peoples, which Eurocentric colonialism has tried to silence. For this exhibition in Mexico City, this notion can be found in some Nahuatl texts.
Polyhedral, intense, tireless and tenacious, Ben has expanded his unlimited output by merging art and life in key decades of recent history, always ahead of his time. His attitudes and ways of operating in his first years of work foreshadowed many of the trends of the 1980s and 1990s: the radicality of certain actions, often hidden by their simplicity; the centrality of the passing of time; the importance of text; the ability to bring together different people in seemingly ordinary actions. In a large part of the artistic practices of the last two decades of the century, we can find elements that bring us back to his work. In any case, Ben’s masterpiece is Ben himself: a perpetual motion machine that analyzes the complex reality we must negotiate every day. Displaying boundless talent and work ethic, Ben sets out to explain the meaning of everything to us.”
Excerpt from the MUAC press release
