Unfinished Filliou: On the Fluxus Ethos and the Origins of Relational Aesthetics Author(s): Martin Patrick Source: Art Journal, Vol. 69, No. 1/2 (SPRING-SUMMER 2010), pp. 44-61 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25676522 Accessed: 09-10-2016 18:22 UTC
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This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Robert Filliou, Man Carrying His Own Sun on a String, 1973, cardboard box in two parts with pastel and photograph, closed \73A x 13*A x 2Va in. (45.1 x 33.7 x 5.7 cm) (artwork ? Marianne Filliou; photograph by Florian Kleinefenn, Paris, provided by Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris)
This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms "Pure foolishness restores." ?Friedrich Nietzsche
"There is so little to do and so much time to do it in." ?George Brecht
The current essay comprises a discussion of the influential yet underrated work of the French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou (1926-1987) and aspects of his inter woven theory and practice, especially as recorded in his book Teaching and Learning as Martin Patrick Performing Arts and related video works. I intend also to examine the influence of Filliou's work on other contemporary artists and the corresponding use of the critical formulation "relational aesthetics" Unfinished Filliou: (as posited by the French curator and writer Nicolas Bourriaud). In Filliou's 1970 artists book Teaching and Learning as Performing On the Fluxus Ethos Arts, the layout designed by the artist leaves a blank section of each page for the reader to add her own comments, thereby participating and the Origins of interactively in the unfolding of the book itself, which includes Relational Aesthetics interviews with (among others) Joseph Beuys, John Cage, and Allan Kaprow Moreover, it has become increasingly evident that Filliou's methods can be linked by association to examples by several later artists, includ ing RirkritTiravanija, Pierre Huyghe, and Christine Hill, whose works have been cited as exemplary of the relational-aesthetics paradigm, insofar as the impor tance of social relations, relations of exchange, and broader relations with the Earlier drafts of this text were presented at surrounding context outweigh the direct consideration of the aesthetic proper "The Stephen Bann Effect" symposium, ties of the work in question. Significantly, Bourriaud has frequently cited Filliou's University of Bristol, United Kingdom, and at "MIS-PERFORMANCE," Performance Studies comment: "Art is that which makes life more interesting than art."1 International conference #15, Zagreb, Croatia The primary goal of this essay is to offer a provisional attempt to reconsider (both held in June 2009). Thanks also to Massey University's Strategic Research Fund, which Filliou's visionary approach to artmaking in the late 1960s and early 1970s and enabled my participation in those international what it portended for so much "relational" art yet to come. This radically inter events, to multiple audiences and readers for their generous feedback, and to the Belkin Art Gallery disciplinary creative model helped to usher in a drastic shift in the notions for allowing access to Filliou's video works, which underlying many younger artists' works in terms of both theory and practice. aided the development of this essay. With increased historical perspective, the model has become highly relevant to The epigraphs are from Friedrich Nietzsche, the current moment, as witnessed by the debates that have played out recently Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann in several international magazines and journals.2 (1895) in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 532, and Brecht quoted in While the first major museum retrospective of Filliou's work in over a The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental decade, entitled Genie sans talent, traveled across Europe in 2003-4, the artist Music, ed. James Saunders (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 71. remains a cult figure.3 Although recognized by many experimental artists for the compelling and innovative nature of his work, he is all too rarely discussed by 1. Robert Filliou, quoted in epigraph to Nicolas Bourriaud, Formes de vie: L'art moderne et I'invention the scholarly community.4 Meanwhile, relational aesthetics has become a topic de soi (Paris: Editions Denoel, 1999). My transla for global discussion. Closer examination of Filliou's life and work thus delin tion of the original: "L'art n'est qu'un moyen pour rendre la vie plus interessante que l'art." eates an important case study in the integrity of art practice as a holistic activity, 2. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, situated in an entirely different context and rooted in vastly different expecta trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with tions than those promulgated within today's art world/ Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les Presses du reel, 2004), and Claire Bishop's essays "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics" October I 10 (Fall 2004): 51-79, and "The Social Turn: Collaboration and Fil[l]liou's Background: A Sort of Introduction Its Discontents," Artforum, February 2006, 179 185, as well as Liam Gillick, "Contingent Factors: When does a work of art begin its existence? How can one evaluate its impor A Response to Claire Bishop's Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics'" October I 15 (Winter tance? How does a work of art made with peripheral and tangential relation 2006): 95-106. to the art market have determined worth? When is a "creative action" to be
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This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms considered a performance, a happening, or a simple life occurrence? When does simply "doing nothing" spawn creativity? When do the terms "art," "research," and "leisure" become equivalents? These are the sort of challenging questions that emerge from even a cursory acquaintance with the art of Filliou, later Fillliou, as he intentionally inserted an L between the two already present in his surname?likely a gesture that infuriated numerous copyeditors. The bilin gual artist who used "Franglish" puns especially in the context of his writings and performative works also became enamored of the near-rhyme word pairing "feel you [Filliou]." Contradictions played major roles in the artist's work, as in his life, which is not to treat them as mutually exclusive realms, however, because Filliou was an integral figure in blurring such boundary distinctions. Today, this has become a commonplace of (often altogether more lucrative) performative and interdisci plinary approaches. Yet from the 1960s to the 1980s Filliou's concepts, driven by a hyperactive, inquisitive intellect and the determining belief that art was the most genuine route to personal freedom, were extraordinarily provocative in their interrogation of contemporary art practice. Raised in France and the recipient of a scholarship to secondary school? though often less than a model student, due to his wandering interests?he was intellectually curious but according to one childhood friend, "with a pen, he was the king, but in manual tasks, he was a nothing," an interesting foreshadow ing of Filliou's dedication to the mere basic and skeletal rather than overly pol ished craftsmanship.6 Filliou became a young member of the French Resistance but later notably rejected any medals, accolades, and status as he became increas ingly dedicated throughout his life to pacifism. A onetime Communist, he also discarded specific ideological and political involvements, as time went on, in favor of a broader interest in social commitment via the apparatus of art and its 3. See Sylvie Jouval et al., Robert Filliou: Genie Sans surrounding dialogues. Talent, exh. cat. (Villeneuve d'Ascq: Musee d'art moderne Lille Metropole, 2003). The exhibition, We can see his views on nonviolence and pacifism evidenced on several organized by Sylvie Jouval, first traveled to occasions, such as in the multiple Optimistic Box no. 1, which carries the phrase: Barcelona and Dusseldorf. "Thank god for modern weapons/we don't throw stones at each other any 4. Major exceptions are the contributions of Fluxus scholars, including Hannah Higgins and more." On a larger scale, Seven Childlike Uses of Warlike Material (1970) is a sculptural Chris Thompson. See the final chapter of Higgins's installation of modest materials brought together with various textual inscrip book Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), which addresses Filliou's tions. Planks of wood state "Could be guns"; on a rectangular frame appears work as a pedagogical model, and Thompson's "Could be outer space"; on an overturned chair, "Could be Mountains"; on a essay "Responsible Idiocy and Fluxus Ethics: Robert Filliou and Emmanuel Levinas," a-r-c 5 (July bottle, "Could be a Bonfire"; on a coat, "Could be Uniforms"; on a bucket: 2001). "Could be stars"; and on several cards, "Could be Flags and Bureaucratic Docu 5. Premiers mouvements-fragile correspondences, ments." It is a subtle, yet terrifying piece, as it depicts "warlike materials" with the 2002 inaugural exhibition of the FRAC lle-de France gallery Le Plateau, enlisted contemporary great candor and simplicity as a bunch of grouped-together, ordinary object-toys works to pay homage to Filliou. According to the coupled with word-text juxtapositions one might more readily associate with curators Sylvie Jouval and Eric Corne, "The goal of the project was ... to offer up connections Rene Magritte or (Filliou's friend) Marcel Broodthaers. (either possible or impossible) between his work, Filliou gained training as an economist?earning a master's degree at UCLA its underlying thought process, and the work of other contemporary artists." Exhibition descrip in 1950?and spent several years in the "straight world" in a variety of seem tion, available online at www.fracidf-leplateau. ingly normal guises. He learned English while bottling soft drinks as a factory com/en/index.html (consulted October 30, 2009). laborer in the United States, and later he ironically referred to his job designa 6. The richest source of biographical information tion as "Coca-Cola Man." Filliou subsequently assisted in the production of a on Filliou is the French language biography by Pierre Tilman, Robert Filliou: Nationalite poete regular American television series on current political events, and acted as a key (Dijon: Les Presses du reel, 2006), 16. economic advisor and negotiator with the United Nations in Egypt, Japan, and
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This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Robert Filliou, Seven Childlike Uses of Korea. However, by 1954, an altogether dissatisfied and restless Filliou "dropped Warlike Material, 1970, installation, wood, out," thus commencing his artistic life at the ripe young age of thirty-seven. In metal, broken glass, various objects, tools, and clothing, 711/2 in. x 13 ft. 11/2 in. x 35/2 in. (182 so doing, he insinuated himself wholly into the most advanced and experimental x 400 x 90 cm). Collection of Musee national art of the time, his work taking the form of performances, assemblages, dia d'art moderne, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou (artwork ? Marianne Filliou/ADAGP, Paris; pho logues, artists' books, and concrete poetry. During the late 1950s, Filliou spent tograph by Philippe Migeat, ? Collection Centre much time in Spain and Denmark as well as in France; befriended many artists, Pompidou, dist. RMN) including Dieter Roth, Daniel Spoerri, and Emmett Williams; met and became inseparable from his life and art partner Marianne (Staffeldt); and began writing plays, which soon developed into street theater events. At first, and indeed for much of his career, he led a basic hand-to-mouth existence that depended on strategic, personalized economies and decision making, such as the use of charm and conversation, barter and exchange, intel ligence and foresight. Filliou, it is sure, held the bohemian lifestyle in high regard, perhaps romanticizing it to a fault, at the expense of his own comforts. Lack of money was a constant, but a wily attentiveness in how to maximize opportunities was also present. When Filliou exhibited at the Galerie Kopcke of Arthur "Addi" Kopcke in Copenhagen (circa 1961), he requested indirect payment in the form of much-needed everyday articles, such as cases of beer, furniture, bedding, and more. (Notably, Kopcke also exhibited Piero Manzoni, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Roth, Spoerri, and Williams.)
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This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms It is important to underline the international scope of Filliou's art activities throughout his artistic career, as he exhibited work and traveled widely, including to Hungary, where he collaborated with the artist Joachim Pfeufer on a Utopian creative project, the Poi'poi'drome installation (1976); his work was also included in both the Documenta s and 6 exhibitions in Kassel, Germany.7 Filliou visited Canada numerous times and became influential in the alternative scenes exemplified by groups and spaces such as Arton's andWO.R.K.S. (We. Ourselves. Roughly. Know. Something.) (Calgary ),Vehicule (Montreal), General Idea (Toronto), and the Western Front (Vancouver).8 His work initially was not as well received in France, largely owing to a broad antipathy toward conceptually oriented approaches. However, according to Anny De Decker, codirector of the gallery Wide White Space in Antwerp:
When I showed Filliou, for example, I sold five or six pieces very quickly. People didn't know his work, but they liked it and they were used to objects of that kind. I was amazed to see that it worked pretty well, even though Filliou was almost unknown. People knew that he existed, but they didn't really know his work. I think it was Ben Vautier who talked to us about him; we saw him often.9
Filliou's artworks often both convey his nomadic, playful spirit and involve the repeated use of the artists multiple, a format common to many Fluxus projects. The multiples would frequently manifest the artist's wry humor, as in the Frozen Exhibition, which offered documentation of various events and actions within a portfolio taking the shape of a bowler hat, referring to his Duchampian idea of a miniature exhibition transported on the artist's person. The godfather of Conceptual art equally gets his share in Filliou's Optimistic Box no. 3 adorned with this text: "so much the better if you can't play chess/you won't imitate Marcel Duchamp." Other works have a characteristically provisional and inten tionally rough appearance, in contrast with their tender and whimsical senti ments, such as Man Carrying His Own Sun on a String and Permanent Playfulness (both from 1973). Filliou in his early career could be compared to the "seeker" types described in Jack Kerouac's novel Dharma Bums, published in the same period:
I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy 7. The 2007 exhibition Fluxus East: Fluxus and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems Networks in Central Eastern Europe included valu that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind able information on this activity. See www.fluxus easteu/ (consulted October 31, 2009). and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom 8. For details of Filliou's Canadian sojourns, see to everybody and to all living creatures ...10 Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy, exh. cat. (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Filliou's interest in the "genius of the cafe" or the everyday gesture as a Gallery, 1995). 9. "Conversation with Anny De Decker, Antwerp, work of art is directly informed by the beat-hippie countercultural period November 16, 2004," in Sophie Richard, emerging in the late 1950s and 1960s. In a sense he was dropping out of main Unconcealed: The international Network of Conceptual Artists 1967-77; Dealers, Exhibitions stream society and into art, as many artists have chosen to do at the expense of and Public Collections, ed. Lynda Morris (London: material security, years before the members of Kerouac's rucksack revolution Ridinghouse, 2009), 407. 10. Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums (New York: were exhorted by Timothy Leary to "tune in, turn on, drop out." "Tune in" is Signet Press, 1959), 78. perhaps the pivotal term here, as Filliou over the course of the ensuing period
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Robert Filliou, Permanent Playfulness, 1973, until his death in 1987 fine-tuned his creative capacities to a precariously bal wood, hooks, steel wire, pastel on tracing paper, photograph, and pastel on cardboard box torn in anced yet idiosyncratically incorporative approach, often skeptical but spiritually two, 133/4 x 291/2 x I '/4 in. (35 x 75 x 3 cm) (art inclined, willfully naive but deeply informed. work ? Marianne Filliou; photograph by Florian Similarly, as evidenced in such seminal works as Kerouac's Dharma Bums and Kleinefenn, Paris, provided by Galerie Nelson Freeman, Paris) the contemporaneous poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, Zen Buddhism had radically impacted the context of American art of the postwar period. Mean while, in France, Zen notions also influenced the Nouveau Realiste group, with which Filliou had many contacts and close associations, most specifically with his sometime collaborator Spoerri." Notably,Yves Klein, a judo adept, had spent time in Japan and had read DaisetzT. Suzuki's works on Zen, major touchstones for such figures as the composer John Cage. For Cage and Klein, emptiness and nothingness were exemplified via sonic and pictorial representations, or their framing of the lack thereof.12 Filliou himself held out hope for art as an intimate form of subdued activ ity, although often carried out amid the general clutter and noise of contempo rary urban spaces. To embody this belief, he performed in New York City on February 8, 1965, a work entitled Le Filliou Ideal. The score of this "action poem" is as follows: "not deciding/not choosing/not wanting/not owning/aware of 11. See Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams, Dieter Roth, and Roland Topor, An self/wide awake/snriNG quietly/doing nothing."13 Filliou is one of a great many Anecdoted Topography of Chance (1966; London: experimental artists who emerged from a background in poetry, including Vito Atlas Press, 1995). Acconci, Dick Higgins, and Roth. In his final period before his death from can 12. See Helen Westgeest, Zen in the Fifties: Interaction in Art between East and West (Zwolle: cer in 1987, Filliou spent time in the setting of actual retreat into a Buddhist Waanders Publishers, 1996); and The Third Mind: monastery, enacting again an emphasis on actions over representations, and American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, ed. Alexandra Munroe, exh. cat. (New York: an artist known as a garrulous talker became ironically wrapped in quiet (and Guggenheim Museum, 2009). happy) solitude. The writer Jeff Kelley in his exhaustive recent study of Allan 13. Robert Filliou, Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts (Cologne and New York: Verlag Kaprow's work notes that although Kaprow was also influenced by Zen Bud Gebriider Konig, 1970), 95. dhism, among the experimental visual artists of this period it was only Filliou 14. Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), who managed to take the plunge of actually integrating Buddhist teachings 200. into his life as well as his art.14
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Teaching and Learning: The Book
Much documentation about the notions central to Filliou's artistic practice is found in his book Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts (published in a German-English bilingual edition in 1970). Here he launches an attack on what he perceives as the limitations of contemporary art, and accordingly its social context, from a variety of angles:
Why do artists specialize? Problem of time, of course. Problem of limits of everyone, of interests and aptitudes. But also, on the part of the artist, desire to maintain the image he has created, to impose it fully, and finally to make a living out of it. That is to say, after creating a big enough racket so that there is a demand for his work, to supply it.15
Here we have in summary form the anticareerist notions of Filliou, which were not the most helpful for him in terms of a stable and consistent livelihood. As the artist's biographer Pierre Tilman points out, "Filliou found himself in an incessant and difficult contradiction: on one hand, he didn't want to consider art as a career, on the other, he didn't want to do something else to make a living. He refused, and even when he tried, it must be said, it didn't work."16 The cover of Teaching and Learning describes the book as a "first draft" culmi nating from "off and on 3 years of work." Significantly, in both these qualifying notes Filliou makes clear the intermittent aspect of production, evidently not a rush-job, taking its time, its own course to emerge organically from serious discussions and concerns. To call it a first draft is to acknowledge its status as a work-in-progress, further emphasized by the comment?again placed on the front cover, for the reader not to miss it?"It is a Multi-book. The space provided for the reader's use is nearly the same as the author's own." That is, an ongoing process begins in which the reader is encouraged to use the book as less an art
15. Filliou, 75-76. work than a workbook. As Filliou notes on the back cover, "It is a long short 16. Tilman, 59 (my translation). book to keep writing at home." We could also say that this becomes a book that
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performs, and later it metamorphoses into video artworks made in response to the book, performing it yet again. The use of "performing" as a term in the book's title should also not be taken as the now-academicized interpretation of "performance art" as a discrete, circumscribed category, but as the performative aspect of "creation"?the term Filliou preferred to "artmaking." Filliou noted elsewhere, "Instead of using the word 'art' most of the time in trying to invent new concepts I have thought of our activity as one that involves Permanent Creation. It is not surprising of course the problems that people were tackling?like the Dadaists started to say that life is more interesting than art. Of course art is only one activity."17 As Filliou wrote in Teaching and Learning, "Writing also is a performing art."18 Filliou states (in all-caps): "whatever i say is irrelevant if it does not incite you to add up your voice to mine." This democratizing impulse toward dialogue and interaction is on the one hand clearly a characteristic prod uct of the 1960s countercultural and Fluxus ethos, and on the other, it prefigures "interactive" or "dialogue"-based projects of some thirty years later, such as those of the artists RirkritTiravanija and Phillipe Parreno, or the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist's do it (2002), a virtual exhibition of artists' instructions.19 In describing his chosen method of leaving blank space on one half of the page for the reader to fill in?the reader thus becoming an author-participant as well?Filliou adds an aside in a footnote: "There must be better ones. I have thought of loose cards in a box, even postcards. You might want to start our collaboration by suggesting some on this first page." In 196^ Filliou had in fact published a book in the form of ninety-three boxed cards entitled .Ample Food for 17. Quoted in Robert Filliou, exh. cat. (Hanover, Germany: Sprengel-Museum, 1984). Stupid Thought, each one bearing a question, such as How are you and why? Isn't art a 18. Filliou, 14. remarkable thing? What s the big idea? No kidding? Moreover, one might think of other 19. See the exhibition website at www.e-flux. com/projects/do_it/homepage/do_it_home. nonlinear experiments in literature, exhibition catalogues, art projects, and other html (consulted October 31, 2009). publishing ventures in the 1960s and 1970s: a book of separate signatures to
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This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Dmger of Lecturing... B Intermedia Danger Music Number Seven K e?atjrrfordonovaii i$ no reason for us to go into history (for I sou) B _ 4i_Kj?l* . . in any detail. Part of the reason that Mifthk Kopwnu vyecr nusjyekosj hue. m ?*?nl in the life Of peregrine dare Duchamp's objects are fascinating (February 196a) K while Picasso's voice is fading is that H: peregrine date the Duchamp pieces are truly be Dartger Music Number Eight B had a smile that was square tween media, between sculpture and Play it safe. (February 196a) which a mummy had learned from an something else, while a Picasso is K eagle readily classifiable as a painted orna (for NJP) displayed eskimo Danger lore Music between Number Nine collage mk the shoes and that photography, he wore mem. Similarly, by invading the land Volunteer to have your spine removed. J| and were made from the hide of a beagle die German John Heartfield pro (February tofe) "shiver my whiskers!" ^ duced what are probably the great Smallish SUSir^Ten(f0rPK) cowbtrds. I "afabu^fan^J m^m into ? g^^^^my head! , , r , 1 (FebruaryDo they get1962) along make with noodles gol
Dick Higgins, foew&ombwhnw, 1969, pp. be read in any order the reader wishes by the British author B. S. Johnson; two 26-27, pub. Something Else Press, New Yhork [sic], edition of 4,000 (artwork ? Estate of Dick exhibitions (in Seattle and Vancouver) curated by Lucy Lippard with catalogues Higgins) printed as envelopes of index cards; Water Yam, George Brecht s set of cards with performative instructions; or even Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattaris 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus, in which the authors urge the reader to treat the book s sec tions as if dropping a needle at points on a phonograph record. During several artist residencies in Canada and in collaboration with a vari ety of experimental artists, Filliou made a number of videos that unfold from the themes presented in the earlier book project. Filliou discusses a number of his key ideas while directly addressing the camera: over tea; newspaper classifieds, and a cigarette at the breakfast table, or onstage, his face covered with shaving cream, creating a kind of satirical burlesque before the audience. In these videos,
20. On viewing an excerpt of this material, the his conversational and informal style significantly incorporates and records his New Zealand artist David Cauchi compared dialogue with off-camera members of the audience, usually other artists.20 The Filliou's didactic manner to that of Sesame Street, videos are improvised, technically basic to the point of being skeletal, rough, an interesting parallel in that the TV program began in the same era as the Teaching and Learning careless, and above all adamantly against polish or finish. As the artist Give book, and Filliou prided himself on making "child Robertson notes, "He was quite satisfied and prepared, as he said during one of like" works, creating several artist's books of this type. They include To/' par lui et moi (Brussels: our evenings around the kitchen table, to make do with the mundane material Lebeer Hossmann and Yellow Now, 1998), and technology of a pencil."21 Filliou never valorized technology for its own sake, Mister Blue from Day-to-Day (Hamburg: Lebeer Hossmann, 1983). although he was an early participant in a multitude of dispersed artistic commu 21. Clive Robertson, "Meeting a Mentor in the nities: "The artist must realize also that he is part of a wider network, la Fete Making of Porta Filliou," in Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy, 57. Permanente (Eternal Network) going on around him all the time in all parts of 22. Filliou, 204. the world."22 His skepticism toward high tech arises also in his assemblage work
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Video Jour?Video Nuit (1980-82), a charming concoction of cardboard, mirror, pencil, and other basic materials. Filliou's Teaching and Learning book also compares intriguingly with that of his close friend Dick Higgins s from roughly the same time, which bears the unwieldy title foew&ombwhnw: a grammar of the mind and a phenomenology of love and a science of the arts as seen by a stalker of the wild mushroom, an abbreviated title revealed in the artist s introduction to stand for?in full?"Freaked Out Electronic Wizards & Other Marvelous Bartenders Who Have No Wings." The title, according to Higgins s text, had initially been amusing, but Higgins then abandoned it except for the codelike letters he refers to as a "shell," much like the cover of the book itself, which with disarming accuracy resembles a Bible?embossed gold letter ing on a black binding, replete with fragile, crackling paper and a bookmark of fabric. This ironic nod to religion is a kind of proto-postmodern gesture, as is the arrangement of its text, the element most germane to our comparison here. Higgins divides each page into two vertical columns, running four differing nar ratives, essays, art pieces, or poems at once. Depending on the length of each, typography, and other graphic elements, some of the columns are packed with textual intricacies, while others are emptied out, leaving entirely white space. Quite appropriately, the book commences with Higgins s seminal essay on his notion of "intermedia," with its prescient opening gambit: "Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media." Higgins contin ues to skewer what he perceives as the irrelevance of many media-specific modes of practice, condemning the mercantile aspects of Pop art. He satirizes the move 23. Dick Higgins, foew&ombwhnw. a grammar of ment with his conflation of three integral figures, Ivan Karp (dealer), Henry the mind and a phenomenology of love and a science of the arts as seen by a stalker of the wild mush Geldzahler (curator), and Lawrence Alloway (critic) into one mythical beast, a room (New York: Something Else Press, 1969), 11, "Mr. Ivan Geldoway," who cannot prevent Pop from being "colossally boring 15, 27. Hannah Higgins recently told me, "When I asked Dick a year or so before his death if he ever and irrelevant"; Higgins supports instead Happenings and other performative declined a book for the press and then regretted actions. Higgins also cites Filliou in his remark that "the constructed poems it, the one book he mentioned was Teaching and Learning, which he loved and admired." E-mail to of Emmett Williams and Robert Filliou certainly constitute an intermedium the author, October 30, 2009. between poetry and sculpture."23
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This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms On Playing Games and Researching Nothing
Another essential book published by Higgins s Something Else Press, George Brecht's Games at the Cedilla (1969), collates an eclectic array of bits and pieces, the remnants of an experimental gallery/shop/collaboration?"a free city of the arts, a center of research, of ideas"?operated by George Brecht and Filliou inVillefranche-sur-Mer in the south of France in the late 1960s.24 Brecht and Filliou's motto was: "La Cedille qui Sourit [the Cedilla that Smiles] invents everything that has or has not been invented."25 Filliou states in the introduc tory passages of his Teaching and Learning, "Since the end of world war 1 invention has tended to replace composition as the standard of excellence in avantgarde circles."26 Browsing through Games suggests that this brand of "invention" mani fests itself as a proclivity toward verbal instructions and comic rejoinders. The poet-artists urge their correspondents, friends, and readers to engage in collab orative activities.
The art historian Steven Harris notes that "Brecht and Filliou shared a great many ideas and values with the surrealists, yet Filliou, despite his friendship with the surrealist painter Victor Brauner, never referred to surrealism, and Brecht only did so to make his differences with it clear."27 Notably, we can also recall the introductory line of Bourriaud's "Relational Form," the first chapter of Relational Aesthetics: "Artistic activity is a game, whose forms, patterns and func tions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence."28 Filliou's voice wraps itself around other material seem ingly unrelated to art in order to perpetually reenact the unsteady realization that all experiences are basically tenuous and unstable. The best tools for navigating this uncertain landscape emanate from a bemused, conscious awareness of human connections and the problems that befall us. Such projects as the Cedilla but also Research at the Stedelijk (1973) distinguish themselves by the realization that art has to involve the social, other disciplines, reciprocal discussions, and the notion that the museum might be an appropriate site to house some of this activity. In residence at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum from November c to December 5, 1971, Filliou instituted the "Genial Republic" in which he carried out a series of interdisciplinary discussions. He used the notion of "research" frequently in his work. The term itself becomes malleable, bent and shaped according to the artist's specific plans of the moment. He
24. George Brecht, Games at the Cedilla; or, The remarked, "Research is not the privilege of people who know?on the contrary, Cedilla Takes Off (New York: Something Else Press, it is the domain of people who do not know. Every time we are turning our 1967). See Anthony Huberman's comparison of La Cedille's activities with those of current reces attention to something we don't know we are doing research."29 To use the sion-era initiatives, "Talent Is Overrated," term "research" also creates an aura of significance simply through a nominal Artforum, November 2009, 109-10. 25. "Appendices, I. The Propositions and sleight-of-hand. In writing of one of his conceptual proposals, "The Speed of Principles of Robert Filliou," in Robert Filliou: From Art," Filliou stated, "O.K. I leave it open, it's research in progress. I can only go Political to Poetical Economy, 77-78. 26. Filliou, 14. so far?nobody so far has helped me carry out this type of research. That's the 27. Steven Harris, "The Art of Losing Oneself fate of most artistic propositions?we must do them ourselves."30 without Getting Lost: Brecht and Filliou at the It's perhaps too easy to discount Filliou as a "major" artist, since in his prac Palais Ideal," Papers of Surrealism 2 (Summer 2004), I. tice he questioned the inflated claims and posturing of "major" art and operated 28. Bourriaud, I I. in ways that are often considered minor: using humor and parodic strategies, 29. "Appendices, I," in Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy, 82. and thereby preserving an ironic distance from mainstream thinking. At the 30. Ibid., 83. Cologne Happening und Fluxus exhibition in 1970, when assigned a small area in
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This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms which to perform, Filliou "created something I called the 'Wishing and Joking Room,' there was a bowl full of water and a micfrophone]. On the bowl was written, 'Toss a coin and make an innocent wish' and on the mic was written, 'Now come to the mic and tell a joke."3' One of the proposed projects of Filliou with Brecht at the Cedilla was to compile an anthology of jokes, and in the early 1990s, a portrait of Filliou adorned a catalogue of a group exhibition at the Venice Biennale entitled Infamie, which devoted itself to the notion of the failed and unrealized.
Perhaps a central notion for consideration here is failure, the incomplete, the open-ended, the undone?in essence, to mount a defense for that which simulta neously remains unrealized but has been planned, pondered, and initiated. Filliou's career was defined and highlighted by a series of such acts. Completion was not a measure of their success. Any finality escaped them in their era. Today we can return to and revise our assessment of Filliou's actions with remarkable (and artifi cial, convenient) hindsight. Turning toward Filliou's legacy now, as it has affected more recent art, is a significant outcome of this particular revised vantage point.
Relational Aesthetics as a Stepchild of Fluxus
One could argue that the artists associated with relational aesthetics take superfi cial and selective attributes of past works and statements by Fluxus practitioners and emphasize their (re-)presentation, production, and dissemination, rather than the offhandedness, ephemerality, and small-scale virtues evidenced in their first instance(s). Relational-aesthetics artists are often the gleaners, scavenging for the bits and pieces of conceptual and performative gamesmanship that now can once again coalesce into the appearance of novelty. Some examples: Christine Hill may breathe an exhausted sigh when her German Volksboutique shop of the early 1990s is compared with Claes Oldenburg's 1961 Store, but the comparison is there and relevant; when Philippe Parreno projects films onto a multipanel white canvas at 4' 33" intervals (the duration and title of Cage's watershed "silent" composition of 19^2), a certain brand of historicization verges on becoming wearisome itself; the blankness of RirkritTiravanija's emptied walls, spaces, and slide shows is all too reminiscent of Nam June Paik's Zen for Film or Yoko Ono's "nonexistent" but nonetheless sublime instruction paintings of the early 1960s.32 We arrive then at the crux of the matter: in our postmodern era such instances sample the past, so to speak. The subjectivity and intentionality of these artists become altogether irreconcilable with those of their 1960s forebears, but a strange series of reverberations occurs, a temporal dislocation; many in the con temporary art audience are in a certain sense caught by our own postmodern self-consciousness. While the incisive sting of Filliou's work, particularly his vid eos with all their attendant awkwardnesses, emerges from its amateur approach, that of the researcher who "knows nothing," today we know all too much how the game is played. Playing "games at the Cedilla" seems like a lost world of pos
31. Robert Filliou, exh. cat. (Hanover), 182. sibilities that we are incapable of accessing in all but a very limited though more 32. For a relevant example of intergenerational detailed fashion?endnotes in place of the experiential. Artists are historians, artistic dialogue, see "In Another Country: Yoko Ono in Conversation with Rirkrit Tiravanija," revising past approaches; curators are reenacting crucial exhibitions; and critics Artforum, Summer 2009, 280-83. are channeling voices we've heard again and again.
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This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Carsten Holler, Kinder demonstrieren fiir We can also assess the reception of relational aesthetics as a notion in terms die Zukunft (Children Demonstrate for the Future), from Exhibitions project, 1991, of an American-Continental European divide. That is to say, in discussions in the performance, Reichstag, Berlin, 1991 (artwork former locale, relational aesthetics often elicits a climate of unease, likely owing ? Carsten Holler; photograph provided by Esther Schipper, Berlin) to its lack of pragmatism, materiality, and medium-specificity. The more paradig matic relational-aesthetics work is more geared to Europe, a bringing-to-bear of the social body not set apart in atomized alienation, but existing in convivial for mations, often exclusive, occasionally flirtatious, and reminiscent of the lively and haphazard groupings in cafes, bars, and restaurants, the private sphere spill ing out on fine days into the public space. A revealing exchange is captured in a 2004 interview with Pierre Huyghe published in October. The interviewer, George Baker, inquires as to the dematerial ized aspects of relational aesthetics, and Huyghe replies in seemingly abrupt fashion, "We're not returning to that old trap."33 The artist thus asserts that in whatever provisional form it might appear, his work stands as a material entity. Whereas if we return by comparison to the example of Filliou, the genius who inhabited the cafe across from the Cedilla at Villefranche left residual traces such as documents, photos, and posters, but the rent still came due, the landlord came calling, and the artist's actions in that particular context ceased. If Huyghe
33. George Baker, "An Interview with Pierre argues for the tangible primacy of his works, even as they are formally dispersed, Huyghe," October 110 (Fall 2004): 89. Filliou spent his time assisting in the fabrication of works by others, living in
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This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Liam Gillick, How are you going to behave? modest accommodations, and seeking intellectual connection with others while A kitchen cat speaks, 2009, installation view, German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2009 (artwork maintaining a lightness and mobility which is in turn revealed in the lightness ? Liam Gillick; photograph ? Natasa Radovic, of his practice, characterized by its sound, philosophically complex, and rich provided by Casey Kaplan, New York, and Esther patterns of thought. Such a practice interrupts received ideas and constructs and Schipper, Berlin) does not touch down for very long at any one time. There is also an argument that by contrast, despite the jet-setting mobility of a few renowned artists, a heaviness and predictability has attached itself (one might say inevitably) to certain relational-style practices more recently If dema terialization is a trap, we can see Filliou's practice as falling into it by virtue of its disregard and disinterest in the object-world except as primarily feeding fur ther discussions, "ample food for stupid thought," to repeat the artist's phrase. In the best relational-aesthetics works today, the discursive is not only present but enacted, as in: Huyghe's engagements with cinematically staged vs. actual reality, Liam Gillick's idiosyncratic narrative tableaus, and Carsten Holler's hybrid works also located somewhere between fact and fiction. This discursiveness may take the form of the suburban celebratory festival recorded in Huyghe's video Streamside Day (2003); of Gillick's 2009 A Kitchen Cat Speaks, housed in the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale and featuring a "talking cat" perched over an interior landscape of Ikea-style minimalism; or of Holler's earlier staged events such as Children Demonstrate for the Future (1991-92).
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This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day, 2003, stills In another crucial point in the aforementioned Huyghe interview, Baker asks, from digital video projection of film and video transfers, color, sound, 26 min. (artwork ? Pierre GB: But your work's idea of the relational seems to focus upon ideas of the Huyghe; photograph provided by'Marian Goodman Gallery, New York) open work, the link between practices, the permanent construction site. . . . Why is it important to work in this way now? Is it a political gesture? A linkage, like Pasolini's, between poetics and politics?
PH: It is an expanded field. The more tools, the more one can expand the game. The more one can play. The tools themselves are not important in comparison to the ability to play.Think about Robert Filliou.34
After that point there is no further mention of Filliou or discussion of his ideas or practice, at a point in which his example could have become a dramatic and compelling one to insert into the discussion. Huyghe, a French artist, is well acquainted with Filliou's work, but my suspicion is that Baker, an American writer, is not, as Filliou is generally treated in the United States?if at all?as only a peripheral figure in the Fluxus movement, an arguably still-underhistoricized and peripheral movement itself. Thus Filliou, in the context of this interview, plainly disappears, serving as a spectral referent not included and incorporated in the exchange. This absence and act of elision, as I have emphasized, is not unusual, 34. Ibid., 99. but simply is yet another instance of Filliou's historical "invisibility."
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This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms However it is significant to note Huyghe's response to a lengthy interrogation immediately after the Filliou "nonexchange." Baker contrasts what he describes as a displacement of
a model of politics and critique that was central to advanced art in the 1980s. ... Is it a kind of pragmatism or realism that we face here?a realization that false political claims for artistic practices were made in the 1980s, and one must not falsely claim immediate political functions for cultural or aesthetic projects?
PH: Your last point is key. And it should apply as well to critics and histori ans. It is obviously difficult to define oneself after a postmodern period where we all became extremely self-conscious and aware about the conse quences of our actions. This is why conclusions should be suspended but the tension should remain. There is a complexity that should be recognized and that produces a fragile object. ... It is a huge problem when the "political" becomes a subject for art. For me Buren is a political artist. It is a practice that is political, not the sub ject or content of art.35
Of additional relevance in this context is the fact that Huyghe has called his work a "chantier permanent" or "permanent construction site"; the term is also the title of a 1993 Huyghe work, and an interesting parallel to Filliou's earlier interest in "permanent creation." It is not surprising that in Bourriaud's follow-up to Relational Aesthetics, he characterizes recent art as involved in acts of "postproduction," and that the representative examples of this are the DJ and the computer programmer: both reorient, reconfigure, and revise existing materials, transforming them, with their constituent parts "readymades" in turn shifted by the voice of the new art ist as instigator-editor-producer. To a degree, Filliou was still engaged in the act of making new patterns of discourse, arguably a proto-postmodernist, but still involved in the notion of the originary, as in his ideas of perpetual creation. As the artist recounted in a conversation with Cage:
What I had in mind was a kind of pioneer world that should be in the hands of artists, where we will create, and by creating, make claims upon this part of the world. I call this the idea of permanent creation. There would be no difference between students and teachers. It might be just as a kind of availability or responsibility that the artist is willing to take, but anybody might make suggestions about what kind of things might be inves tigated or looked at and I think it might be in a spirit of fun at times, but many problems may be solved by the way.36
If Filliou casts less of a judgmental eye on finished products, it is because for him the experiential process is paramount. To create is to make anew, and Bourriaud's postproduction is in some part a reheated broth of postmodernism, the "it's-all-been-done-what-do-we-do-then-with-all-this-accumulated-baggage?" line of inquiry. Furthermore, Filliou's optimistic interest in the challenge of dis course was still invested in potential meanings that could be liberatory. Such an outlook can only be put into its specific historical setting. If we conjure such 35. Ibid, (emphasis added). 36. Filliou, "John Cage," in Teaching and Learning, utopianism today, it is in ironic fashion, in acts of quotation, citation, and repeti 116. tion to reiterate our distance.
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This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms To return to my title and the unfinished Filliou, my intention as an act of in-conclusion is to emphasize the unfinished, ongoing, incomplete nature of Filliou's visionary praxis. If originary traces of relational aesthetics, a dominant model for certain contemporary artists, are clearly manifest in Filliou's work, we must quickly assert in addition that Filliou, along with Higgins (or even Beuys for that matter), was just as engaged in dialogue with the premodern and mod ern as the postmodern. Filliou was a highly self-aware and self-critical artist who realized that he was entering art in the middle, that the games had begun and the party had commenced long before his particular arrival, thereby beginning in the middle, in the midst, in-between. In addressing Filliou's approaches to media, location, and temporality, it is virtually impossible to effectively histori cize such a shifting set of variable components except by presenting an array of correspondingly associative, allusive fragments. I hope some poetic qualities have still managed to emerge from this extended series of observations.
Martin Patrick is an art critic and historian whose writings have appeared in many international publica tions, including Afterimage, Art Monthly, and Third Text. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Illinois State University, and the Savannah College of Art and Design. He is working on a book that examines contemporary artists who engage with the art/life divide. He is currently senior lecturer of critical studies at Massey University's School of Fine Arts in Wellington, New Zealand.
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This content downloaded from 154.59.124.101 on Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:22:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms