Background
Robert Filliou was born on January 17, 1926 in Sauve, France.
Robert Filliou trained as a political economist in the US after studying economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1948 to 1951.
Robert Filliou was born on January 17, 1926 in Sauve, France.
Robert Filliou trained as a political economist in the US after studying economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1948 to 1951.
In 1947, Robert Filliou traveled to the United States and work as a laborer for Coca-Cola in Los Angeles and achieved a master’s in economics. In 1951, he took dual French-American nationality and worked as a United Nations adviser and was sent to Korea for three years. He lived in Egypt, Spain, Denmark, Canada, and France.
In 1960, Filliou designed his first visual work, “Le Collage de l'immortelle mort du monde” (“Collage of the Immortal Death of the World”), a transcription of a random theater play comparable to a chessboard where individual experiences are expressed. His participation, with this work, in the 1962 London Festival of Misfits introduced him to a wide circle of Fluxus artists and festivals that he soon became a part of.
Filliou first proposed "Art's Birthday" in 1963. He suggested that 1,000,000 years ago, there was no art. But one day, on January 17 to be precise, Art was born. Filliou said it happened when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. He also proposed a public holiday to celebrate the presence of art in our lives. “Art's Birthday” was first publicly celebrated in 1973 in Auchen, Germany and at the same time in Paris, France.
In 1971, Filliou created la République géniale (the Republic of Genius) where people enter its territory to develop their genius rather than their talent and research is no longer the privileged domain of the person who knows, but of the person who does not know. In his work “Le Petit Robert Filliou”, Filliou defined the principles of Poetic Economics and its scale of values. This work served as the script for a “Super 8” film that he made in 1972 with Bob Guiny. In 1974, Filliou produced “Recherche sur l'origine”, a work made of cloth 90 meters long and 3 meters high where spectators could walk around inside.
Video works by Filliou include: “14 Songs and 1 Riddle” (1977, document of a performance), “And So on, End So Soon: Done 3 times” (1977), “Porta Filliou” (1977), “Telepathic Music Nø7 - The Principle of Equivalence Carried to a Series of 5” (1977), “Teaching and Learning as Performings Arts, Part 2, Video” (1979). Filliou also produced video works at Vehicule in Montréal, and an obscure work done in the basement of the Pompidou.
His later video works and text-based works from the 1970s and 1980s show a progression towards relational aesthetics, requiring the audience as both author and participant. Long-term collaborations with George Brecht, with whom he founded the shop La Cedille Qui Sourit (aka Centre of Permanent Creation), Daniel Spoerri, and Emmett Williams cemented his standing as a member of the Fluxus group. He would remain a prominent member for the rest of his career.
In Naples Filliou exhibited in 1990 at Nicola Incisetto’s Framart Studio, on the occasion of the exhibition Al di là della pittura, with Allan Kaprow and Brecht. The “absolute” value of the artistic idea, the awareness of the social foundations of the “creative act” as against the skepticism that politics and economics can solve society’s profound problems, constitute the grammar of an artistic thought that the artist often embodied in poor and ephemeral materials such as cardboard boxes.
Filliou worked together with artists such as Emmett Williams and George Brecht. In 1982, Filliou received the first Schwitters prize of the city of Hanover. In 1977, Filliou moved to Canada and continued to work with video. Later, with his wife Marianne Staffels, Filliou withdrew for 3 years 3 months and 3 days to a Buddhist center in Les Eyzies, France. Filliou died on December 2, 1987 in a monastery in Les Eyzies, France.
Poème invalide
1964Phantomas no. 50
1965Main d'artiste
1967Jocker
1969Raining Cats and Dogs
1969the art of living of the criminal classes
1969The Mona Lisa is on The Stairs
19697 Childlike Uses of Warlike Material
1971avant le concert, après le bal
1971Research in Child Language
1971Galerie Legitime
1972Il y a un noeud au milieu de cette ficelle au centre de cette page au il y ent un dessin
1972Telepathic Sculpture
1975In 1984 Robert Filliou retired to the Buddhist monastery Chanteloube at Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil in the Dordogne.
In 1943, Filliou became a member of the French Communist Party during the war.
Underscoring Filliou's work is an interest in what defines and constitutes an artwork. A trained political scientist, Filliou was greatly inspired by the work of Charles Fourier, especially his concept of 'attractive passions' that championed the concept of work as pleasure. Play and joy occupy crucial roles for Filliou, who believed art making was part of a permanent, universal and endless process deeply embedded everyday life.
Quotations: “I am not just interested in art, but in the society of which art is just one aspect. I am interested in the world as a whole, a whole of which society is one part. I am interested in the universe, of which the world is only one fragment. I am interested primarily in the constant Creation of which the universe is only one product.”
Filliou is often associated with Fluxus but never ‘belonged’ to this or any other movement or group, although he worked closely with friends such as the artists Daniel Spoerri and Dieter Roth, the composer and artist George Brecht, the poet Emmett Williams or the architect and artist Joachim Pfeufer.
Filliou met his wife, Marianne Staffels, in Denmark.