Resumen de Terrain vague: Ben Vautier and the Ecole de Nice
The street figures as a primary location for Ben Vautier’s early performances in 1960s Nice. This essay focuses on the potential slippages explored by Ben between the artist and the ‘man in the street’, whose fundamental anonymity was hailed as a paradigmatic feature of the everyday by Maurice Blanchot in 1962. Such theories of the everyday by Blanchot, and by Henri Lefebvre before him, shed new light on Ben’s original experiments in redefining both his role as an artist and the material status of his artworks. Furthermore, theories of the quotidien provide a useful framework for a comparative study of Ben’s practice and other perspectives on the everyday developed by a number of his contemporaries affiliated to three different artist groups who were also active on the Côte d’Azur at the time: Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus and Supports/Surfaces. In this way, debates concerning the everyday are shown to have touched upon central issues of consumption, leisure and revolution that signifi cantly shaped French art and thought in the 1960s.
