Robert Filliou (1926)
France

"French artist, Robert Filliou was born in Sauve (Gard) on January 17, 1926 and died in Les Eyzies de Tayac (Dordogne) on December 2, 1987. At the age of 17, in 1943, he joined the Communist Resistance (FTP). After the war, he went to the United States; he remained employed at Coca-Cola for two years. He then studied economics at the University of California at Los Angeles, obtaining an MA in 1951. He worked as an economist in Seoul (Korea) for the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency. , between 1952 and 1954. Abandoning his functions, he devoted his time to traveling, staying in Egypt and Spain. In 1957 he moved to Copenhagen, where he married Marianne Staffeldt. In 1959, he met Daniel Spoerri in Paris who introduced him to the artistic avant-garde, and the following year Emmett Williams, with whom he had a fruitful artistic collaboration. He began to write plays: C'est l'ange, Submission au possible... Among his first works, the Study of transporting poems in small speed, which proposes the sending by post of poems-objects, or General Semantics, an illustrated alphabet, open onto an original territory extending between objects, action and poetry. In July 1962, he presented his Galerie Légitime in the streets of Paris, containing works by Ben Patterson in a cap. After a stay in New York in 1964, he held La Cédille qui smile with George Brecht in Villefranche-sur-mer, near Nice, between July 1965 and March 1968; For him, it is the first incarnation of an “International Center for Permanent Creation”. If his participation in Fluxus was limited, his subsequent work embodies its entire spirit. From Autism (“whatever you do, do something else”) to the Principle of equivalence (between “Good-done”, “Evil-done” and “Not-done”), from Permanent Creation to Territory of the Brilliant Republic, art is for him the instrument of a social utopia, promoting creation in daily life. In 1985, he retired to a Buddhist monastery in Dordogne."
(Source, website, Les Presses du Réel)

Work :

• Infraduction (1979)