Sarah Gold: This is an introspection on Ben.
Ben Vautier: Introspection… This is a nice word ‘introspection’. I’m looking at myself in the mirror and I‘m hoping I change, and the more I look at myself, the more I see a stupid old man who is always the same and cannot change. So, art is change, but we cannot change; we are just the same.

Karlyn De Jongh: I think you are too afraid of change. You do not seem to go into reality, you do not act.
BV: I would be a serial killer, if I could change. I would kill humanity.

SG: Why would you kill humanity?
BV: Because all humanity is ego. We cannot get rid of ego.

KDJ: What do you mean, ego?
BV: Ego means you cannot get rid off thinking, I, I, I… I want this, I am there, I am here. Je suis, je suis, je… Always ‘I’.

KDJ: But you are, your work is about that. You are ‘I’.
BV: But I do not want to be. That is why I want to become a serial killer.

SG: Are you a jealous person?
BV: I am jealous of other artists, never of women. Not ‘never’, really… I say I am not jealous, but maybe I am jealous of my wife fucking with someone else, that could be… It excites me, it excites me but at the same time that it excites me, it gives me anguish, both… It goes up and down.

KDJ: So why are you jealous? Is it because you cannot do it yourself?
BV: Because you do not want to do it with me. No, no… It is because I cannot do it myself. I am jealous, because… it’s complicated.

SG: Are you afraid?
BV: We are always afraid. Afraid of being oneself, afraid of death, afraid of losing or not being who we want to be, afraid of wanting to be another.

KDJ: Who do you want to be?
BV: I want to be truthful. I just want to find the truth and to say, “I am not a liar.”

SG: Do you think, you have been truthful in your life?
BV: No, I have been a liar. You know, once George Brecht told me he liked a painting in which I wrote, “I am a liar.” I said, “why do like that painting?” He said, “Because it is not true, you are not a liar! And if it is not, and if it is the truth, then you are not a liar. So, to write ‘I am a liar’ is a truthful sentence.”

KDJ: Can you still look in the mirror and be serious about yourself?
BV: When I look in the mirror, I … I once did a piece called Mirror Piece, in which I looked into the mirror, hoping to see myself change. But it takes a lot of time. Now, when I look at myself in the mirror, I have bags under my eyes. When I was young, I did not have bags under my eyes.

KDJ: But that is a visual impression. Can you look at yourself in an human way? Are you proud of yourself?
BV: No, I always see the same. I suppose, I always see the same ego.

SG: If you have to choose one: art, sex, truth. Which one would you choose?
BV: Truth!

KDJ: What does it mean, ‘truth?’
BV: I do not know.

SG: What is the most elementary emotion you have?
BV: Anguish. Not knowing what to do.

KDJ: Not knowing what to do? Or not daring to do?
BV: Not knowing. Anxious. Looking for. Worrying. Thinking of.

SG: Where do you think this comes from?
BV: Survival. Art survival.

KDJ: Is art about your survival?
BV: Yes.

SG: Is it survival of the fittest?
BV: It could be.

KDJ: Are you fit enough, Ben?
BV: No. Truth is sometimes against survival.

KDJ: Are you afraid? Of yourself?
BV: I am tired. I want to go to sleep. I have been afraid, but not of myself, no. I want to go on, continuing…

SG: Who am ‘I’?
BV: I do not know. I’m tired.

KDJ: Who is Ben?
BV: A boring artist, who is looking for something new and does not find it.

Ben Vautier, Introspection, Truth, Sex & Art, 2013. Art project with Karlyn De Jongh & Sarah Gold. Photo Credit: Global Art Affairs Foundation.

KDJ: Is there a difference between I and Ben?
BV: Who is I? Who is behind there? We are all the same in a way. A mirror is … I wonder who discovered the first mirror and what he thought when he saw himself for the first time. He must have said, “what is that?!”

KDJ: I think you are trying to avoid giving an answer.
BV: Yes

KDJ: Why?
BV: I do not know the answers. I am not so clever. I do not know the answer.

KDJ: After fifty years of performance, of making art, can you not give an answer to the question ‘what is ego?’
BV: I can show off, that is all. To know ‘why’ and philosophy is too complicated this morning.

SG: We spoke about your mother yesterday, tell us about her.
BV: My mother was very, very important to me, because I lived with my mother and she used to say, “Ben, the only thing that counts is the truth, the truth, the truth!”

KDJ: What did she mean?
BV: She always used to meet her friends and play bridge together, and my mother used to make horrible fights between them, because she used to say, “In the name of the truth, I must tell you that you went with another man and your husband does not know it!” So, they were horrible stories!

KDJ: If you cannot say now who ‘I’ is, can you tell us: who is the other?
BV: Who is the other? On a morning like this, I am not a good philosopher. I would love to talk with you about it. The other is always. You cannot be someone else, but another. Marcel Duchamp once said, “c’est le regardeur qui fait le tableau.” This means, “the man who looks at the painting, makes the painting.” Then you always need another to exist; a big one to become small; a rich one to be poor; a poor man to be richer; a strong man to be a weak man. You always need another, you cannot be alone. You are beautiful, because there are girls who are—I suppose—less beautiful. You are tall because there are people who are less tall, because there are little people. In a world full of little people, maybe one of the little people would be a giant compared to some other little people. So, to be another is always to be in comparison with others. And let’s say in art, we have those who succeed in bringing something new and those who repeat themselves and are not new enough. We are fighting to try to find newness. We are trying to find something that makes our difference. If I am different from the others, people will say, “I recognize it! That is a Ben!” Or, “I recognize it! That is a Rembrandt!” So to be, to exist, is to be someone in comparison to the others. But maybe today it is interesting for artists not to look like one another, but to (on purpose) look like everybody. So that is another simple art, too. But then they also cannot get away from being different. When John Cage says, “Everything is music.” At the same time he is changing the games, the world’s games. In previous times composers had a certain personality. The personality of John Cage was to open up a window through which everything else could pass.

KDJ: If it is like you told us that ‘ego is jealousy.’ I am not a jealous person. Do I still have ego?
BV: Maybe you do not know your jealousy sometimes. I think, jealousy is culturally different. Maybe. I do not know, I can’t tell you. For myself and I think for most artists when they look at another artist, they think in their mind, “Oh, that’s good! I would have liked to have done it.” So, “Oh that’s good, I can do better” or “that’s not good, mine is better.” It’s a way of ‘the other.’ It is a degree different in jealousy, it is the presence of the other. There could be jealousy in a way, when you say, “I did this! He took my idea. Why did he get success and I don’t, and I did it before him?” So, there I would say is a more condensed jealousy. But that is always, for example when you go into a show and you look at the work, you think, “That is good! I would have liked to have done that.”

KDJ: So when you see some writing and you know that you have done it before, then the jealousy starts? Or how does it work? I think you have a very strong tendency to prove yourself. You want to prove that you were there first.
BV: That was true. I even used to write texts, but now it’s different. Now it is 2013, and I have changed. These days I am pleased when somebody recognizes what I did, and I am less anxious than before. It is not becoming more ‘zen,’ but it is about taking life as it comes. Now, I do not bother as much. But when I was 30 or 40… Now I am 78. I think time has changed me a bit.

KDJ: But now we have been speaking with you the last days for this PERSONAL STRUCTURES Art Project and you mention it very often. So, that would mean that during your 30’s and 40’s, you must have been impossible!
BV: No no, it is that time, Lu-ci-di-té. Lucidité means… Sometimes you meet people who reject art. I say: “be lucide”. Do not tell yourself stories! You can say: “I’m not jealous.” Others might say, “I don’t care. I do this for God. I will pay for others to help humanity.” I say, “be lucide”. Your ego is there. You are in front of the world. You react to the world. To be lucide, means to be aware.

SG: You just mentioned God, do you believe in God?
BV: Yes, I could believe in God. But I am closer to being an atheist than to believing in God. But still when I look at science and we are talking about the Big Bang, and we are talking about our ego presence, then I think there is an interrogation point.

KDJ: So you did not throw God away completely? You threw him out of the country, but then you were traveling quite a bit and took him back home?
BV: He does not look like me and he does not do bad things. He is a kind of … I have some theories … I do not know. I cannot tell you … It is a mystery. But I had to take him away. But there is a mystery in the words ‘life,’ ‘survival,’ ‘ego,’ ‘reproduction,’ ‘time,’ ‘space’… and if you put all of these words together and combine ego with time and space, you only get an interrogation point. You do not get an answer. To see time, space, ego, survival … these ‘things’ exist. But the ‘why,’ the ‘when,’ ‘how’… We don’t understand them.

SG: Are you fine with not knowing?
BV: No! I’m always trying. But you see… When Copernicus said that the world is round; and when Newton said that the world has gravity; and Einstein said the world is time; then Hawking said something about the black holes and that the universe started many millions of years ago and before that was a Big Bang; each one has given an explanation. Then came another explanation, and another one. Today we have the explanation of the quantity. The world is full of explanations.

KDJ: What is your explanation?
BV: My explanation of the universe is a funny one. [Ben starts drawing] My explanation of the universe is that there was—at the beginning of time—an ejaculation. Just as when I fuck. This ejaculation contains ego, reproduction, survival. Now, what happened before, I do not know. But I feel that the world today is an expansion. The universe expands, the galaxies … This is the ejaculation of ego. Why do I see ego as more important than galaxies? It is because ego contains the explanation of these galaxies. I mean to say that we need the ego of Hawking to say this-and-that about the world, we need the ego of Einstein, we need the ego of Freud, we need the ego of Heidegger, we need the egos of the ones who spend their time explaining things. So what do we have? We have the universe, which is full of explanations. These explanations come from ego, because Einstein was jealous of so-and-so. All these egos are there.
That interests me as a theory. I’m actually trying to find the particle of ego, which I want to be able to scientifically find. And then I will call it ‘particule de Ben’ [Ben’s particle]. And people will be able to say: “Of course, the particule de Ben! C’est très important!” And it is all a joke! But somebody will see the particle of love, which is very important too!

SG: So what you drew here, that is all? Everything?
BV: Yes, it contains all. The ‘particle of ego’ means lucidité. It means ‘introspection’. You cannot speak of ego unless you know what it is made of. What is ego? Ego is the name of jealousy, ambition, wanting to be, not wanting to be, lucidité, lucidité over the others. What means ego? We come back to my famous verse [Ben searches the right plate out of the collection he made that day.) This one! And it becomes this one! How did the ejaculation come? It comes from an ego, which was all alone in the universe. There was nothing. And he met another ego by chance, we do not know how they met. He became very angry and started to fuck the other one. And then… bang! … The ejaculation! The bang of two egos gave the ejaculation.

KDJ: Are you afraid of sex because your ejaculation is not as powerful as this one?
BV: Yes this one is very powerful … But I have two children and five grandchildren.

SG: This was such an intense ejaculation that he must have died after his ejaculation and we do not want that to happen with you, of course.
BV: This one? Yes! But I have another theory. Today we have the extremes, the extreme world. We have the extreme big and the extreme small. We are losing this sense of knowing where is the middle. So, I was thinking, if you take your brain … Your brain is full of billions of neurons. It could be that my ‘ejaculation of ego’ has led to tons of other egos that are ejaculating too. So, we have not one universe but we have many universes. I’m still working on this. It is very complicated.

By Karlyn De Jongh and Sarah Gold

The post An Introspection with Ben Vautier appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Yoko Ono’s new work Arising was presented at the 55^th Venice Biennale at Palazzo Bembo, as part of the exhibition “PERSONAL STRUCTURES” and it will soon be published with the Global Art Affairs Foundation as a limited edition book titled Yoko Ono: Arising. On 9 June 2013, Ono visited Palazzo Bembo, where she did an interview with Karlyn De Jongh and Sarah Gold.

Sarah Gold: Yoko Ono, it is a great honour to be sitting here with you, and to have your work Arising in our exhibition “PERSONAL STRUCTURES.” I think this work is an amazing opportunity for women to express their experiences, and this seems to be confirmed when considering the response that we have gotten already: women from all over the world have been sending letters and emails. Also in the exhibition itself, women are contributing by sitting down and writing their stories behind the desk that you placed here in Palazzo Bembo. It seems to help them to express their experiences, to share their stories. And it seems to open doors for other women who did not participate in your work, too.
Yoko Ono: I am very, very happy that my work is presented here in this “PERSONAL STRUCTURES” exhibition. I think it is always important that we reach other women. After I did this, I thought, “Did I forget about men?” But let’s do women first, because women have really been in trouble for over 2000 years. All that time, there was a male society. So, we just have to hear what women had to go through. I think it is very interesting to hear their stories and did not expect it would open such a big door. Now this door is open! And there are so many women who wanted to say something, and they are coming here to Palazzo Bembo. It is a very big thing: it is as if the whole world of women is getting the opportunity to say something.

Some of my work is just asking people for conceptual participation, but many of the works ask people to physically participate. This is why it is interesting to me that these women are talking to me and there is a big exchange. I hope that this is going to help the world a little. It is also Interesting, I thought we would be needing only about twenty letters from women.

Karlyn De Jongh: The response has been overwhelming. You got many, many more letters!
YO: Yes! As soon as we opened the website (www.imaginepowerarising.com), 84 women immediately came with their story. I thought, “What am I going to do?” I am going to treasure each one of them and we are going to make a book out of it as a record of the women’s right in our society.

KDJ: Yoko, in this work Arising that you are presenting here at the 2013 Venice Biennale, in “PERSONAL STRUCTURES,” you have also asked women to send or give a photo of their eyes. Why do you wish to connect the visual image of the person with their story? And why did you choose to ask only for a photo of their eyes?
YO: I am so glad that you ask that question. The reason is because many women are in danger of speaking out. We have to protect them. We cannot have a full face, because maybe they will be attacked again. So, I just wanted something from them—a part of the face—so that we can connect with that woman. When I saw some of the eyes, it was remarkable to see how destroyed some of the eyes are. Some of the eyes are really frightened or shocked. The things that these women went through are visible in their eyes. I think it worked. The fact that we cannot ask them to show their faces nor to spell their full names, is because of how our society is nowadays. That is how much we are threatened and how we are scared. We are human beings, so naturally we are going to be scared and that is all right. We have to protect each other.

SG: Your work is called Arising. What does the title mean to you?
YO: We, women, are now rising together. Arising expresses the rising of our spirits.

KDJ: Arising is now presented in Venice, a city that is visited by tens of thousands of people every day. Why did you choose Venice as the location for showing this work?
YO: It is not about choosing the location. It happened. Many of my works have some kind of strong faith that I did not create. It just came to me and I really appreciate that. I found out that it is very difficult to do something here, with the burning of the silicone female bodies. “Did I make a mistake?” I thought. No! When you see the work and the video, you see that it was totally important that it was done here in Venice.

The sound that you can hear in the video is my voice, from my 1996 record Rising. The recording is approximately 14 minutes in length, but it is like that from beginning to end—no editing, nothing. I created that work a long time before this work ARISING. It just fits very well.

From left to right: Karlyn De Jongh, Yoko Ono and Sarah Gold at Palazzo Bembo, Venice, June 9th, 2013. Photo Credit: Global Art Affairs Foundation.

SG: What was for you the relation between Arising and your record Rising? Why do you think the two works fit so well together?
YO: Rising was telling all people that it is time for us to rise and fight for our rights. But in the process of fighting together, women are still being treated separately in an inhuman way. It weakens the power of men and women all together. I hope Arising will wake up Women Power, and make us, men and women, heal together.

It was very interesting, the way this record was created. I was about to do a recording session with my son and my son’s friends. At that time, my son was a teenager. He and his friends were just impossible people. They came to my recording session and I thought, “What am I going to do? Can I trust them with playing my work?” I thought I would just do one harmony and said, “Just play that from beginning to end.” It just went “whooom!” like that. No editing, no rehearsal.

I think it is important that I did it, because it is the voice of a woman who went through a lot of pain, which was me. The reason why I created such a vocal—many people disliked it, so I might as well get a credit for it—was because when I was a young girl, my mother told me: “Never go near the servants’ room, because they are talking about things you do not want to know.” Of course, I wanted to go there! I sneaked up and heard them speak, “Did you know that my aunt just had a baby? And having a baby is a very strange thing, because she was going, “whoa, whoa, whoaaa!”.” I thought, “Hmm, this is scary!” and ran back to my room. I never forgot that.

Later I realised that in society, woman are liked for being pretty and making pretty sounds and singing pretty songs. Those are the ones that sell the most, not someone who sings “whoaaa!” If you can’t sell it, what are you going to do?

I thought, I have to tell the world that women are not just pretty, but they created the human race. We brought the children into this world. And that is a very difficult act. It is not very often spoken about, but giving birth is a very dangerous thing to do. Many women die from it. It is a very important and dangerous thing and we all have to go through it. It is not a pretty and happy thing at all. It is a very important and serious thing! It is even much more powerful than a huge earthquake. Each child that comes into this world is going to influence our society.

So, what are we doing when only showing the pretty side? The reason is that men cannot have babies. They do not want to know that the other sex can do that, in a way it is a competition between the people. They do not want to talk about it, not think about it. Men want to euphemise the situation, saying that it is such a beautiful thing and that women love to do it. Women love to do it? Let them do it! Then men will see that it is not that pleasant.

I learned all that and thought I should at least use some sounds that we, women, make. As soon as I sang, “Whooaaaa!” the teenagers stopped working and all went into the bathroom. Because they could not say they wanted to escape, so they just went to the bathroom. When we made the song, John said, “did you get that?” checking if the song was recorded. It was one of the rare moments that it was recorded.

This is the kind of thing that women go through and when you listen to that song, you will understand that it is your emotion. It is your experience that is turned into music.

KDJ: When we burnt the silicon bodies for your work, we went with a whole group of people to one of the islands in the Venetian Lagoon. There were also many men present. To burn these bodies, was a very strong experience for everybody I think, not only for the women that were there. It seemed to me that also for the men it was a strong experience.
YO: Yes, it would be unfair to say that men just like pretty voices. They are nobody without the presence of women. When you face them with this, then they start to understand. Now there are also what I call ‘new-age men': there are many men who are very understanding and they are also suffering because of that understanding. John was one of those men and he always said he felt lonely, because there were not many men around who understood it. He wished there to be a group of men to talk about it, because he felt very alone. Now there are many new-age men and that is great. When I am in New York and go to Central Park, I see many men pushing a baby car. Now this is a natural thing, nobody is surprised about it. But they do not know that when John did this, nobody did it. No man wanted to be seen with a baby car. I am very happy that now it is a normal thing. I thank John for being so courageous.

SG: Do you think that by addressing these themes in your work and at the same time asking people to participate in your works, that you contributed in educating our society?
YO: Yes, very much so. The more you participate, the more you make this a normal thing. It became normal that women are strong. It is ok to be strong. We were so scared of being strong and we made ourselves small, I made myself small. In China they for example had to make their feet very small. Women were suffering from it. Every night they cried. That is how bad it was. That is how bad the society was to women.

Now it is getting better and better, but we have to understand: we are not the only ones in a society. We also have to understand the suffering of the opposite sex. They have suffering too, you know. I started to learn about this, when I was reading a lot of books about WWI and WWII, for example. The books described how men’s faces were destroyed and how they lost their limbs. It was a terrible situation that men went through. Men have a different way of dealing with it. They are so macho that they do not want to complain. But we have to understand all the difficult situations that they have, which they cannot speak about because they are macho, but they are very lonely. We women make men lonely in that sense. So, this work Arising reaches out to men as well.

KDJ: I have the feeling that through the participation, in this work particularly, the women feel really part of it. They can share their thoughts, and maybe even share ‘your’ work. It seems almost as if ‘the group’ is making the work, rather than only you as an individual.
YO: Yes, this thing—participating and telling your story—is almost like a therapy. They can send in their stories of what they had to go through. It is like a therapy. However, it is better than therapy, because with a psychologist you can talk about your feelings and it is being taped. Your personal words are being taped by the psychologist and you have to pay for it. In my work, it is really just about saying it. I feel the power of the people.

KDJ: What is it that you hope for the future?
YO: Well, for the future, I am always hoping that we are able to create a better society and we are doing it. Some people are skeptical about it, because we still have war. Ok, but you know, the thing is that the world did not collapse. Maybe we are holding up the sky, but at least we are still ok. We no longer have the luxury to indulge in negative thinking, because this is becoming incredibly dangerous and complicated. If we want to survive as a human race, we have to start by being positive. Be positive first and then complain later.

The post Sarah Gold and Karlyn De Jongh Talk with Yoko Ono appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.