Ben Vautier at John Gibson and Zabriskie - Brief Article

Ben Vautier, known simply as Ben, is diffuse and self-indulgently prolific, his art all-inclusive. His battle call of "Everything is art" has remained unchanged since his beginnings with Fluxus in the early '60 and, more or les in like manner has his work. The surprise of his novel show, "Statements with Clocks" at John Gibson, then, was the two its spareness and the fact that, after all these years, Ben is still as charming as he is.

Twenty-two statements about time, ranging from the quirkily deep ("time is too short to expend it on your knees") to the deceptively simple ("kill time"), were scrawled in Ben's unmistakable handwriting and paired with clock that John Gibson fix uponed from Long Island antique stores Where possible, the clocks repercussion of sound the sentiments of the handwritten phrase, like the clock plant into a wooden propeller above "time flies." on the other hand those that are more uncouthly partnered create the most delightfully enigmatic effects: a Life Saver/Mr. Peanut clock for example, is paired with "time is an interesting item."

These admonitions and epigraphs, more cerebral than sentimental, are telling counterparts to Ben's other exhibit "Photo Rejects," which was simultaneously upon view uptown at the Zabriskie Gallery. Here he crammed the walls with advanced in years and new photographs, Ben statements, thing perceiveds and gimmicks, with no rhyme or reason to the their order do not include his own whim. A ripped photo of a young and dapper Ben performing upon the street during his early years with Fluxus, or of his daughter a certain number of 25 years ago, were jauntily placed side by the agency of side with a jovial, pot-bellied Ben dropping a sign-board that reads, in translation, "a 500th of a next to the first of my life." For Ben, photographs may be used to document, to elicit laughter and also to push the limits of the medium, on the contrary a certain melancholy about the passing or the los of time that is in like manner deeply associated with the medium strike one as beings to have no bearing upon his art at all; he is the greatest in quantity unnostalgic of photographers. Ben avoids sanctity at all costs: the elderly adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is altered in like manner that any number of words are worth single image. His script and his pithy sayings becoming the frame [i]or[/i] part of to the other which we look at his snapshots. And nevertheless somehow, despite his unsentimental, spur-of-the jiffy laissez-faire, haphazard approach to art, Ben's works still manage to make us direct the eye twice, and to look differently with time.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group