NEW YORK, NY.- Ben Vautier, a French artist and agitator who often worked under the moniker Ben, and who as a core member of the anti-art collective Fluxus blurred the boundaries of high and low, art and life, while adhering to the credo “Everything is art,” died on June 5 at his home in Nice, France. He was 88.

He died by suicide shortly after his wife, Annie Vautier, a performance artist he married in 1964, died of a stroke, his children, Eva and Francois, posted on social media. “Unwilling and unable to live without her,” they wrote, “Ben killed himself a few hours later at their home.”

Theirs was an intense, if tangled, relationship. “We called her “Sainte-Annie,” Mascha Sosno, a friend, was quoted as saying in a recent article on the France Info website.

“It was difficult to live with him,” she added. “They argued all the time, but in fact they adored each other, and he was inseparable from Annie, too.”

Forever looking to provoke, Ben Vautier found a kindred spirit in 1962 when he met George Maciunas, who spearheaded the avant-garde Fluxus movement of the 1960s, which included Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and other artists, and which drew from the iconoclastic Dada movement of the early 20th century.

Fluxus, as articulated in Maciunas’ 1963 manifesto, was intended as a revolution, a call to comrades to “promote living art, anti-art, promote non-art reality,” while purging the world of “dead art, imitation, artificial art.”

Vautier certainly did his part, as both a visual and performance artist, with works that straddled the line between conceptual art and punchline.

At the Documenta art festival in Kassel, Germany in 1972, he famously strung a banner that read “Kunst Ist Überflüssig” (“Art Is Superfluous”) across the top of the august Fridericianum museum.

He strove to show that art could be found in daily life, and in ordinary objects, as with his series “Tas,” in which he piled dirt and garbage into lots and signed them as if they were masterpieces.

Starting in the 1960s, Vautier gave staged performances — he called them “gestes” (“gestures”) — that could seem like practical jokes on the audience. In one, “Audience Piece No. 8” (1965), guests were informed that the next piece was to be presented in a special area. Ushers then led them in groups through back exits and abandoned them.

In “Piano Concerto No. 2 for Paik,” an apparent concert from the same year, a pianist fled the stage before playing a note and the orchestra chased him in hot pursuit, trying to drag him back.

Vautier was often all too willing to shock. In one performance piece, he urinated in a jar, which he then exhibited as if it were high art. In another, he repeatedly slammed his head against a wall.

He drew inspiration from Marcel Duchamp’s dictum “Everything in life is art.”

“We’re no longer looking for the aesthetic form of art, but we’re questioning art,” Vautier said in a 1973 interview. “That’s why I’m interested in these attitudes that call themselves anti-art, non-art, life is art, anonymous art,” he said — even, he added, “if I do believe that these are hypocritical and, on the whole, impossible attitudes.”

He was most famous for his “écritures,” or written paintings, often rendered in white handwritten letters scrawled on a black background.

His aphorisms included “Ce text ne peut pas changer le monde” (“This text cannot change the world”), “Oublier que j’ oublier” (“Forget that I forget”) and “je signe ‘rien’” (“I sign ‘nothing’”), which was particularly ironic, given that Vautier signed seemingly anything and everything — household objects, friends, even his three-month-old daughter — to appropriate the quotidian as art.

Despite the decree in the Fluxus manifesto to “purge the world of bourgeois sickness” and “professional and commercialized culture,” Vautier’s work ended up on tote bags, toothbrushes and other ordinary items.

“On our children’s pencil cases, on so many everyday objects and even in our imaginations,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a statement after Vautier’s death, “Ben left his mark, made of freedom and poetry, of apparent lightness and overwhelming depth.”

Vautier was born on July 18, 1935, in Naples, Italy, to a French-speaking Swiss father and an Irish and French mother.

As the great-grandson of renowned Swiss painter Benjamin Vautier, he had artistry in his bloodline. In an interview last year with Forbes, he described his parents as “petit bourgeois” but noted with some consternation that they had highbrow leanings: His father was an antiquarian, and his mother played classical piano.

“They were snobs who thought they knew what was beautiful and what was ugly,” he said, “but it was just bourgeois imperialism.”

His parents divorced when he was young, and his father took custody of his brother. He said that this left him sad as a child: “I think I must have been traumatized, because I made a kind of wall.”

“I never talk about my childhood,” he added.

After World War II broke out, Ben followed his mother on an itinerant life, living for periods in Turkey, Egypt and Switzerland before settling in Nice in 1949.

He was a poor student, he told Forbes, “so my mother put me to work in a bookshop,” which also became home after he moved into the attic when he was about 16.

Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

One of Vautier’s best-known works is “Le Magasin de Ben” (“Ben’s Store”), an installation, now property of the Pompidou Center in Paris, which began as a shop in Nice where he bought and sold secondhand records and cameras. He eventually opened a gallery, Galerie Ben Doute de Tout (Ben Doubts Everything), in the mezzanine, which lured notable artists like Yves Klein.

But it was earlier, in the bookshop, where his creative vision first began to crystallize. “I remember my first artistic experience was opening up books and if I found something new, I used to cut it out and stick it in my room,” he said, “so I used to spoil all the books, then try to sell them.

“I picked only artists who shocked me,” he continued, “because I was looking for something new, so I started by the abstract painters: Poliakoff, Soulages and Picasso.” Upon discovering Duchamp, he added, “I opened up to the possibility that everything was art.”

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If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.