At the 109 Ben has gathered 120-plus artists, some renowned, others confidential, into a "salade niçoise" of the best sort. We take a look at an eclectic, multitudinous, living exhibition.
Unmissable. The only possible word to describe this Ben-instigated "happening" christened Life is a Film. "I didn't want people saying it was a museum or consecration or look-at-me set piece proclaiming "this is art"," states the hyperactive octogenarian who only agreed to mount the exhibition on condition the walls were all painted white! Little by little the project expanded within the 109 art hub (formerly the municipal abattoirs) and took shape as a glorious organised mishmash in which each of Ben's guests has 3.5 metres to show their work. A Ben-stirred creative melting-pot, a succession of artists' lives encompassing everything from Nouveau Réalisme to Fluxus to the young generation, in the course of which Ben questions every truth with his customary cheerfulness.
First performances
The exhibition takes us through the artist's life in Nice, his home town since the Fifties, from his initial Ben Doute De Tout (Ben Doubts Everything) gallery where he showed the Nice School artists to his home up in Saint-Pancrace. Ben has always encouraged creativity: "I collected others' artworks too, perhaps because I never believed in myself and was jealous!" he teases. Now the artist reveals a part of his "non-elitist collection" to us. Ben himself took art into the street by means of actions and activities mostly carried out in public and which constituted fully-formed artworks.
Big collective exhibition
"For the occasion I called on established and emerging artists, local and international, recent acquaintances and long-standing friends," Ben explains. So here art is everything and everywhere, as we come across Marcel Alocco, Noël Dolla, Jean Dupuy, Patrick Moya, Jean-Baptiste Ganne, Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, Natacha Lesueur, Stéphane Steiner and innumerable others. There's a discussion space furnished with old sofas that each seems to have a soul, and an open-programme Ring of Doubt where anyone can perform, "from reading a poem to playing a Fluxus concert". A living exhibition, delightfully iconoclastic, where we tell ourselves yes, life, every artist's life, is undeniably a film.
Par Tanja Stojanov
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