Dr Steven Harris The Theory and Practice of Filliou and Giacometti 22 May 2013

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Dr Steven Harris The Theory and Practice of Filliou and Giacometti

Thank you everyone for coming out this evening, and thank you to Jon Wood of the Henry Moore Institute for inviting me, and to Kirstie Gregory for making the arrangements. I have been asked to speak about the work of Robert Filliou and Alberto Giacometti together. It’s great to see the work of both of these artists at the Institute; in particular, you can see the lightness as well as the seriousness of Filliou’s work in this exhibition. I will focus my talk this evening on how each of these artists explored representation as a space of possibility in their works.

To me, this suggests two things: the first is that art was, for each of them, a means of expressing or conveying thought, rather than a way to depict an external model. This was always true for Filliou, who came to art from economics and from theatre, and who had no training in the visual arts; it is most true for Giacometti between 1925 and 1935, the period in his work on which I will focus this evening. The second thing that an exploration of representation as a space of possibility suggests is that this thought must be made manifest in some material way, as a physical object. This material expression of thought is for each artist a way of relating to the world, and not just to art; this is why Filliou names the space of possibility that he conceptualises as ‘the mimetic territory of the genial republic.’ The mimetic territory resembles the world outside its boundaries, so as to make a difference in it; it is not purely conceptual, in other words, but is, rather, a sensible embodiment of thought. The work as an expression of thought must appear in the world as a material object, to show that it can and does exist, and cannot be discounted. A similar logic informs the production of surrealist objects, concerning whose invention Giacometti played such an important role. They too are objectifications of mental processes that assume physical shape, and they therefore have a greater presence than do virtual images or written texts, because they exist in the same way that a stone or a pot or a bird exists. Filliou and Giacometti belong to different generations, of course, and while Giacometti came of age in the 1920s, and was the son of an artist, Filliou only came to art later in his life, when he was in his 30s, from 1960 on. The formation of the two artists and the nature of the art system at the time they worked were very different. Nonetheless, their working processes are related in that each conceives of art as the result of a conceptual process, and this is what I will focus on here, one artist at a time.

The work by Giacometti that I will talk about this evening was made between 1925 and 1935, the period in which he worked more conceptually. Before this and after this, he worked primarily from the model. Beginning in 1925, though, he moved away from a reliance on the external model, at first in relation to modernist, African and Oceanic systems of representation, and then to surrealist ones. 2

My main example of this kind of work is his ‘Man’, (1929), a linear figure with a scoop for a head in which the body is schematised rather than depicted naturalistically. The sculpture was conceived and crafted based upon an understanding of how the human body has been represented in African and Oceanic works, for instance in an Iatmul figure from Papua-New Guinea that was once owned by fellow surrealist Roland Tual, or a Mbole figure from what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Giacometti’s sculpture, like the Iatmul and Mbole figures, and like most sculpture from cultures around the world, is a human figure, but unlike the post-Renaissance European tradition before cubism, it has been conceived as a set of signs that can be construed as a human figure. It does not represent the body as a volume with an interior cavity and organs, but as an open lattice within a grid, in which the torso is represented by a line no thicker than its neighbours. As Giacometti wrote to his dealer Pierre Matisse in 1948, concerning such works, ‘for me, the figures were never a compact mass, but rather a transparent structure.’ (In the same letter, he also called such structures ‘a kind of skeleton in space.’) Giacometti learned from the alternative systems of representation he found in African and Oceanic art, which he could see in private collections and in ethnographic museums in France and Switzerland, to produce a more conceptual, less naturalistic representation of the body, and he continued to work in this way during the time, from 1930 to 1935, when he was an active member of the surrealist group in Paris. I will turn now to one of the works on display here at the Institute, the bust of Flora Mayo and to the drawing ‘Still Life in the Studio’, both of which were made in 1927, and which are important transitional works between an art that focuses on the model, and an art that is more conceptual in orientation.

The bust is one of a small series of portrait busts that Giacometti made in 1927, including portraits of his father and mother, and this one portrays a fellow student at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, with whom he was romantically involved at the time. It bears a formal resemblance to Giacometti’s contemporary portraits of his father, and of course Giacometti has an affective relation to both of the sitters. (Note that the bust of Flora Mayo is a bronze cast of a plaster sculpture which was painted in places.) These busts, though solidly material and mimetic to some degree, are made at the moment when he is shifting from perception to the representation of a mental image, and this is registered in the flattened surface of the busts and in the graphic quality of the depiction, as if these were etching plates rather than volumetric sculptures. (In fact, the subtitle of the father’s bust is ‘flat and engraved’.) This makes them pictorial as well as sculptural, and they are somewhat grotesque and cartoonish but also much less naturalistic than traditional portrait busts, or than Giacometti’s work had been in the recent past. There is a pictorial logic that leads from these flattened busts to the flattened plaque sculptures of 1927 and the years immediately following, such as ‘Gazing Head’, or ‘Head (Self-Portrait)’, both 1927. Both of these sculptures were included in an exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in June 1929 that brought Giacometti’s work to the attention of André Masson, and the second one is featured in the ‘Still Life in the Studio’ drawing. These heads are still busts in some 3

way, though highly abstracted ones, but they have been flattened into planes that emphasise a pictorial surface more than they do the volume and mass of more traditional sculpture. They are concave and convex, so they still have some of the properties of relief sculpture, but Giacometti has moved sculpture closer to painting here, as works like ‘Man’ are closer to drawing.

‘Still Life in the Studio’ is much more naturalistic in its style than are these flattened busts, but we can read it as depicting a set of interests and possibilities consistent with the tradition of the Dutch still life to which it refers. Jonathan Wood has written about this drawing before me, in a recent collection of critical essays on Giacometti, so I will only describe it briefly here. There are four principal elements of this still life, which are arranged on a shelf against a wall, each of which overlaps with at least one other object in the arrangement: a paperback book, which has been tentatively identified as the surrealist writer Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, published by Gallimard in 1926; an alarm clock; Giacometti’s own sculpture ‘Head (Self-Portrait)’; and a second portrait bust, a plaster replica of a Sumerian bust of Gudea, the ancient ruler of Lagash, which Giacometti had recently bought from the Louvre when it sold off plaster replicas of works in its collection. Therefore the self-portrait, the book and the head of Gudea were all newly made or acquired in 1926 or 1927, and represent a range of Giacometti’s interests at the time. Let’s put aside the mechanical and regulated aspects of time connoted by the alarm clock, which is one of the three self-consciously modern components of the still life’s subject matter, though it is no doubt important in the overall conceptualisation of the drawing. There is also a compelling juxtaposition of an ancient and a modern portrait, the modern, non-mimetic self-portrait taking its permission, in a sense, from the ancient one, in that neither subject is depicted in the naturalistic mode of representation used for the drawing itself. The head of Gudea can be taken for a primitive model of the kind that Giacometti and other modern artists had been looking to for alternatives to the naturalism taught in the academies. I noted the Iatmul and Mbole figures earlier, and Sumerian art is another example of a more ancient primitivism attractive to modern artists, despite its radical difference from the planar bust behind it.

The book, if it is indeed Aragon’s Paysan de Paris, represents a third option to the formal and the primitive, which Giacometti will realise on joining the surrealist group in the spring of 1930. If it is this book (and I’m showing that I have some doubts about this, since the title in the drawing is indecipherable, and does not quite fit the design on the cover of the book), if it is this book, Giacometti shows himself to be aware of and interested in this way of thinking and representing in 1927, several years before he accepts the invitation by André Breton to join the group. He will certainly be close to Aragon while in the group, leaving it for a few months in 1932 when Aragon, Georges Sadoul, Maxime Alexandre, Pierre Unik and Luis Buñuel separate from it on instructions from the Communist International, and making a similar gesture of solidarity with Aragon when he leaves the group permanently in 1935. 4

Surrealism too relates to the external model in the sense that it is nearly always a figurative art, but it relates to the external model indirectly rather than directly, by representing a mental image rather than a perceived one. In Breton’s understanding of the relation between perception and mental representation, the mind takes in perceptions, which are the raw material for mental representations that emerge in dreams or through automatic processes. Such mental images are never identical, however, to the original perceptions, since they have been reworked by largely unconscious mental processes. There is thus an indirect relation to the external world due to the original perception, but art is no longer dependent on the external model since it is always a mental image that is depicted. This is not, of course, how ‘Still Life in the Studio’ was produced, since it depicts what has been observed, but through its choice of motifs, it indicates an interest in, and an attraction to, this process, which is the path that Giacometti will follow in the years to come.

A glance at Le Paysan de Paris may indicate the possible reasons for Giacometti’s interest in this book. In it, Aragon declares a preference for touch and the sensible over abstract reason, in other words, for experiential modes of knowing over purely conceptual or theoretical ones. Aragon writes, towards the end of the book:

The property of the poetic image…is to incarnate this quality of materialisation, one that exercises a tremendous power over man and is quite capable of making him believe in a logical impossibility in the name of logic. The poetic image presents itself in the form of fact, adorned with all fact’s necessities (p. 214).

While there’s no actual proof that Giacometti read this book, as opposed to using it as a prop in a still life drawing (if it is indeed Le Paysan de Paris, even), one can imagine the sculptor being excited by the possibilities of such passages, in which a thought is made concrete, and his drawing is in a way a juxtaposition of distant realities with their secret affinities, in spite of its naturalistic mode of representation.

In any case, Giacometti will move away from the depiction of the external model such as we see in this drawing, and toward the depiction of the mental image after this key moment of transition in 1927. He will concentrate on works like ‘The Palace at 4 a.m.’ of 1932, with their mises-en-scène of encounters that are understood, by Giacometti himself and by his surrealist comrades, to be poetic ones. We can note, as we already did with ‘Man’, the dematerialised, linear quality of such a work, as a drawing in space rather than a sculpture of mass and volume, which is nonetheless realised physically. Here, quite literally, are the ‘skeletons in space’ that Giacometti remembered in his letter to Pierre Matisse in 1948. The sculpture is not a single object, but a stage set for an encounter 5

between different objects. Many (though not all) of Giacometti’s sculptures in his surrealist period use space to set images and/or objects in relation to one another, on the model of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings, which had such a powerful effect on so many surrealist artists and writers. That there is a relation between the different elements of the sculpture is clear, though it’s not a linear or logical relation that can be easily explained. In writing of this particular piece in 1933, in the journal Minotaure, Giacometti stated:

For years I have only made the sculptures that presented themselves to my mind in a finished state, merely reproducing them in space without changing any aspect of them or wondering what they could mean… (p. 46).

To this end, Giacometti assigned the execution of his works to his brother Diego or to craftsmen, although he would make the initial models himself. This was to distance his works from the hand of the artist; the mental image may be personal, but the materialisation of it would focus on the image itself and not on its maker, nor on the process through which it came to be.

It’s significant that Giacometti returns to overt signs of an object’s making when he breaks with the surrealist group and returns to the model in 1935, as if craft and perception, making and matching, are linked, and as if, therefore, a more objective depiction of a more subjective mental image is also necessary. Process is not suppressed in principle in surrealist theory and practice, but a concern for craft is; the emphasis is on the transcription of a process rather than on the hand of the artist, since attention is focused on the image itself and what it might mean for both maker and viewer, rather than on the artist as producer.

Although Filliou was twenty-five years younger than Giacometti, he began working as an artist about forty years after Giacometti did, after being introduced to the future Fluxus artists by Daniel Spoerri, whom he had met by chance in a Paris bar. Filliou’s work takes the form of propositions, and is thus, like Giacometti’s, a materialisation of thought, even if Filliou’s thought is more focused on the social than on the psychical, to the extent that it is not an externalisation of unconscious or preconscious thought processes, but is addressed rather to problems of living. Nonetheless, like Giacometti’s sculpture, it too is analogical more than it is discursive. For Filliou, as for Giacometti, it is extremely important that the thought is made material, rather than remaining as a verbal proposition, and the nature and quality of Filliou’s materials is important to how and to what they may mean.

I will focus on a number of these linked propositions, and think about how they were realised as works of art. One proposition is the idea of permanent creation, which coincidentally is the name of one of the works in the exhibition. Filliou has adapted this term from Leon Trotsky’s concept of 6

‘permanent revolution’, which has a similar political valence in that it demands that creativity be a permanent component of daily living, in the same way that, for Trotsky, revolution is an ongoing process, rather than a singular event that ends someday. Although Filliou rejected the notion of an avant-garde, and thus of a vanguard party that is ahead of the others, in thinking, rather, that we are all in this together, he retained a concern for alienated labour from the days of his youth, when he had been a Communist during and shortly after the Second World War. (He gave up his membership of the French Communist Party when Yugoslavia was excluded from the Cominform in 1948). Filliou was deeply concerned about the division of labour, including that division in which some people specialised in creative endeavours while others worked at menial tasks; the work called ‘Mona Lisa Is on the Stairs’ (1969), in this exhibition, is a nod in this direction. It is interesting to note as well that the names of fruit trees are on the music stands in the print entitled ‘Musical Economy No. 1’(1980), while those on the stands of ‘Musical Economy No. 2’ (1983), are the names of occupations: cook, plumber, mason, farmworker, etc. Filliou is critical of the kind of work which is not play, which is most work, and in keeping with the philosophy of the utopian socialist thinker Charles Fourier, which was highly valued by Filliou, as it was by the surrealists and the situationists, he thought that if work could become more playful, it would be more creative and cease to be so onerous. One of the consequences of the end of the division of labour in the society that Filliou envisaged, would be the end of the artist as a specialist in creativity, and this is the implication of the concept of ‘permanent creation’; the surrealists, incidentally, thought the same way, and their mantra was the slogan invented by the Comte de Lautréamont: ‘Poetry must be made by all. Not by one.’

The end of specialised creative activity is signalled in Filliou’s work by its casual nature; he was not trained in any art school, and his work, with its stick figures and assembling of humble materials, could be made by anyone in a technical sense. It’s the concepts that differ from conventional thought, but these too Filliou would like to make available to all. This is one of the principal connotations of the poor and ephemeral materials that the artist uses. Another is the imperative to live more simply on less, which Filliou and his family chose to do, sometimes suffering for it.

A third connotation of the works’ casual appearance is a wish to counter the trade in expensive artworks – in other words, the commodification of artworks – with works that were the antithesis of luxury, as other artists like Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth and Marcel Broodthaers also did in the 1960s and 1970s. So there is a set of related connotations to these works, which need to be as they are if they are going to be able to provoke speculation along these lines.

‘Permanent creation’ is closely related to the celebration of art’s birthday, whose 1,000,010th anniversary was commemorated for the first time at the Neue Galerie in Aachen on 17 January 1973 – which happens to be Filliou’s own birthday – and ten years after he first wrote about how art was a 7

million years old in his 1963 poem, ‘Whispered Art History’. In this long view, art has been practised since people came down from the trees – since people were people – and long before art became the province of specialists. Filliou asked the officials of the Neue Galerie to clear out all of the art from the building for the celebration (which they did), the better to emphasise that what he really meant to celebrate on art’s birthday was permanent creation rather than art in the contemporary sense of the word.

The principle of equivalence is closely related to this notion of permanent creation, in its division into the categories of the ‘well made’, the ‘badly made’ and the ‘not made’. This is how Filliou’s biographer Pierre Tilman understands these terms, in his book Robert Filliou, Nationality Poet:

The Well Made is of the order of talent. The Badly Made of the order of genius, for it introduces and marks a difference. The Not Made is the idea, the concept, the statement of the problem, the imagination, creativity, the desire for the possibilities to come (p. 183).

The ‘Permanent Creation’ piece is conceived along these lines, in that there are two socks, one in each box, and an empty box with a written description that says: ‘Put red sock in orange box’, that is clearly ‘not made’. A tiny red sock is ‘well made’ and a larger red sock is ‘poorly made’, though why this is so is unclear. Nevertheless, the boxes are ticked for these categories on the stamp that accompanies each of them. This is the principle of equivalence as Filliou presents it, since he understands these categories to be interchangeable, or that they ought to be interchangeable in any just society. ‘Well made’ belongs to the category of the talented individual, product of the division of labour who perfects his or her craft; this category is most closely aligned with the traditional conception of art and artist. ‘Badly made’ is assigned to the category of genius, and more particularly to the category of the genius without talent, who can invent or imagine things, but who has no particular talent for realising them. Filliou’s democratic proposition is that we are all geniuses without knowing it, who could realise ourselves if we were able to live creatively. His own works are quite deliberately the products of genius without talent in this sense; they are exemplary. Nevertheless, the principle of equivalence does not privilege the badly made over the other categories, but sees them as equivalent, since this principle of equivalence is in a critical relation to the exchange- value that reigns in the art market and everywhere else, in which some works have always been worth more than others. The third category is the ‘not made’, which is the pure potential of something not yet realised, as Tilman observes.

All of these categories are put on the same plane, in order to think of equivalence in another way than the market does. Alhough I won’t discuss Filliou’s background to any great extent, he was trained as an economist and worked in this profession for a time, co-authoring the UN report on the 8

reconstruction of Korea after the Korean War. Leaving this profession in 1954, and with Fourier in mind, he frequently stated that he wished to replace the notion of political economy with that of poetic economy; his rethinking of equivalence is undertaken with this goal in mind. A good number of the works in this exhibition exemplify this notion. The works called ‘Poussière de poussière’, or ‘The Dust of Dust’, which include a chamois which the artist has presumably used to carefully wipe the dust from the surface of paintings by Titian and Velázquez, as well as from their frames, supplements these ‘well-made’ works with other artworks produced through subaltern or menial labour similar to the kind of labour highlighted in ‘Mona Lisa Is on the Stairs’; these modest works indicate that the paintings, made to last a long time, are no less ephemeral than those produced through his own gesture. The works are equivalent in this sense, despite the apparent absurdity of this claim. This recalls a passage from a book I was reading last night, Enrique Vila-Matas’ 2010 novel Dublinesque: ‘It’s as if – just like in that Coldplay song – after having ruled the world and experienced great heights, all literature could do was sweep the streets it used to own.’ But I don’t think this is Filliou’s sentiment.

There are three works in the current exhibition with the title of ‘Sans objet’, or ‘Without Object’, which bear this title despite their overt materiality. One is even called ‘Sans objet sans prix’, which is translated as ‘Without Object and Priceless’, if we think of the double meaning that both of these phrases have: that one is not an object and does not have an object or goal; and that the other is priceless or is not for sale. These works are of course barely made, with a minimum of talent, and bear a paradoxical relation to the idea that they are objectless, when they are quite explicitly objects. On one hand they counter the notion that art consists of luxury products, and on another they reject the notion of having objectives or goals that divert one from experiencing such insistent materiality in all its actuality. While such objects might be construed as ‘badly made’, they are presented as being of equal value to those which are well made or not made, according to the principle of equivalence.

‘Eins. Un. One…’, which consists of 16,000 dice made for Filliou’s first retrospective exhibition in 1984, The Eternal Network Presents Robert Fillliou, at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, incorporates the notion of equivalence in several ways, since each face of the die has a single dot on it. Value is equalled out, especially where games of chance are concerned, and the work also surely embodies the democratic aspirations of his notion of permanent creation, in which individuals are together singly, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense, on equal terms, rather than imagined as an undifferentiated mass. He once described the ideal organisation of society as enabling ‘a happy solitude for every human being’, rather than an unhappy or alienated one. Although the title of this piece makes sense for a new work that would circulate to German, Swiss and French museums (though not to any British institutions, so far as I am aware, until now), the title also announces the principle of equivalence in different languages, with the implication that it will continue on in others. 9

The photograph shows the Filliou family tossing dice in the air outside the Sprengel Museum. That’s Robert on the right, Marianne in the middle, and their daughter Marcelline on the left.

In 1971, Filliou invented the ‘Territory of the Genial Republic’ in order to realise his ideas in space in a way similar to what he had been able to realise as material works of art. The genial republic is, of course, the republic of geniuses, on whose territory Filliou’s ideas about permanent creation could be realised, and through which they would become more than a utopian notion, even if badly made. For some time in the early 1970s, the Volkswagen van in which Filliou lived with his family was this territory, lifted a little off the ground of other jurisdictions by its wheels. A little later, its territory encompassed the Filliou property in Flayosc, in Provence, and later near Les Eyzies in the Dordogne. The territory of the genial republic was also realised temporarily during exhibitions, when Filliou would lay claim to museum or gallery space for a period of time, as Beuys and Broodthaers did in exhibitions around the same time. The first of these was his exhibition Research at the Stedelijk, in Amsterdam, in November 1971. Filliou did not present any works in this exhibition, but made himself available during opening hours to engage in dialogue with visitors on whatever questions they wished to pursue, on the principle that ‘research is the domain of those who do not know’, rather than the privilege of those who know. So this exhibition was dialogic, like that of Beuys a few months later at Documenta V in 1972, and well ahead of the relational art that has been so prominent in recent years. This collaborative dialogue was understood to be a problem as well as a solution, and the catalogue for the exhibition, published after it concluded, and incorporating commentary by himself and others, included this statement by a visitor: ‘I have no difficulty in believing in my genius when alone, or in the genius of others – but together, there lies the difficulty. For they keep insisting they are not when I am and vice versa.’ The catalogue also includes negative comments rejecting the premise of the exhibition, and unhappy with the lack of art on view. This was of course a decision that was deliberately made, of taking over the space of a museum for a period of time, to repurpose the space away from the display of art, even his own, and towards making it a space for dialogue that would inch us closer to the goal of permanent creation. As Filliou wrote in the catalogue:

My proposition was also horizontal. I invited everybody to join in the research. It involves on my part a certain conception of ‘culture’, which I’d like to see given back to the people as a whole by those who have been its custodians, and will remain as its activists. ‘You’re your own territory’, that’s what I tried to say, ‘you don’t have to appeal to high authority.’

The spaces of art, insofar as they are removed from everyday life and enjoy a relative autonomy, are temporarily relinquished by the custodians of culture to the territory of the genial republic, where the division of labour between artists and others, or the difference between the producers and consumers 10

of culture, is abolished for a set period of time, in this case a month. The quality of the specific research into this or that question that was accomplished during this period of time was negligible, although some of the questions that visitors researched are recorded in the catalogue. What was more important to Filliou, however, as a cultural activist, was how visitors might handle the reconsideration of art as creative research, which they too could undertake.

Allied to this notion of a genial republic, but conceived earlier in 1963, was the structure that Filliou and the expatriate American architect Joachim Pfeufer designed together as a space of permanent creation, the ‘Poïpoïdrome’. I show a photograph of the version installed at the Musée d’art contemporain in Lyon in 1975, but the ‘Poïpoïdrome’ was realised on several occasions in the 1970s in Brussels, Lyon, Budapest and Paris. The last of these realisations was at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1978, just a year after the building opened. Pfeufer and Filliou built the ‘Poïpoïdrome’ as an annex to the main building on the parvis in front of it – that is, as a separate structure – which was reached through a security door. This arrangement was premised on the notion that the installation was the result of an agreement between two sovereign institutions, the Centre Pompidou and the Genial Republic. The Genial Republic also had little enclaves of republican territory within the Pompidou building, in the bookstore and in vitrines. The catalogue for the exhibition, though paid for by the Pompidou, was designed without the Pompidou logo, which was added as a hand stamp, as if by kind permission of the Genial Republic. Such gestures were made to underscore the difference between an institution dedicated to professional art practice, whose officers, Pontus Hultén and Jean- Hubert Martin, were liberal enough to invite Pfeufer and Filliou to exhibit there, and a territory devoted to permanent creation, which was an actual if temporary space and not just a utopia.

Filliou and George Brecht had operated the shop they called La Cédille qui sourit, in the southern French town of Villefranche-sur-mer between 1965 and 1968. This was similar to the fluxshops that Willem de Ridder and George Maciunas operated in Amsterdam and New York. It too was called a centre for permanent creation, and maintained an ironic relation to commerce, since it was never open for business other than by appointment. Like the fluxshops and Maciunas’ mail-order catalogues, however, there was a hope expressed by its co-managers that the shop would be able to provide a livelihood for themselves and for the artists whose works they displayed, through sales of artists’ multiples and book works. When La Cédille qui sourit closed in 1968, Filliou and Brecht produced a poster announcing the bankruptcy of the shop and the advent of what they called ‘the Eternal Network’, which they translated by the non-equivalent term ‘la fête permanente’, or ‘the permanent holiday’, a term which is clearly analogous to ‘la création permanente’, ‘la révolution permanente’, and to ‘la grève permanente’ or the ‘unlimited strike’; the term ‘fête permanente’ shares the critique of alienated labour that we have already countered, and declares it obsolete.

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While ‘la fête permanente’ is by no means a literal translation of ‘the Eternal Network’, as a translation, it plays with the equivalence of non-equivalent terms, as do the categories of ‘well made’, ‘badly made’ and ‘not made’. The logic of the operation is the same, but it’s not based on difference. The ‘Eternal Network’ was an already-existing alternative to the theory and practice of the avant- garde, for Brecht and Filliou; Fluxus was an example of such a network, along with the unnamed network of relations between themselves, Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Dorothy Iannone, Beuys, Broodthaers and others, which allowed them to survive if not to flourish in the 1960s and 1970s. Such networks existed between poets, musicians, dancers and other artists before, during and after this time, as communities of interest that organised events and activities in a society that viewed them with indifference, if it noticed them at all. Filliou came to see the rise of artist-run galleries in the 1970s as the realisation of the Eternal Network – of artists running things themselves – and he spent quite a lot of time in Canada during that decade in residence at artist-run galleries across the country; he made most of his video work in these spaces. The galleries, in turn, and the artists associated with them, adopted the term ‘eternal network’ as a description of what they were up to. The Eternal Network is imagined as an extension of the territory of the Genial Republic, though with the passage of time artist-run galleries have become professionalised and accountable to the state agencies that fund them, and with a few exceptions are now ‘artist-run’ in name only.

By a ruse of history, art has become more conceptual in recent years, even as it has become more professionalised, with successful artists often enacting a division of labour within art, between assistants employed to execute projects and their own more managerial or executive functions. This is a division of labour that we have seen in Giacometti’s work from the late 1920s and early 1930s. It runs counter to Filliou’s values, for him a work made by a genius without talent was instigation to permanent creation. Filliou recognised that the goal of a ‘poetry made by all’ was only possible within a socialised economy, but the redistribution of wealth was not for him an end in itself, but the means by which the goal of permanent creation could be achieved. The appearance of institutions like the Centre Pompidou, which focused on contemporary art as well as more broadly on art of the twentieth century, was a sign for Filliou that such a shift may be a long time coming. He certainly felt that the opening of the Pompidou was a setback, which helps explain the carefully considered relation that he and Pfeufer established with the Pompidou for the Poïpoïdrome exhibition in 1978. In light of this, I will introduce the last of Filliou’s propositions that will be mentioned tonight: the ‘speed of art’, in which art is conceived as ‘a function of life plus fiction, with fiction tending towards zero.’ If there is no fiction, art will be identical to life, but until that time arrives, there will always be a fictive dimension to art, in so far as it is not yet realised as permanent creation. Filliou’s artworks, in so far as they are propositions, develop at the speed of art, which may move more slowly or more quickly depending on historical possibility.

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What I have tried to do in tonight’s talk is to describe a theory and practice in which each artist uses art to invent a space of possibility where something may occur (and where something does occur), since the work or the territory is realised in a physical way. By bringing a thought into existence, it makes it a concrete possibility and something actually existing, rather than something intangible or imaginary. So in each case, the way the work is made and the way it appears are extremely important to its possible significance, for although it is a thought or an image that is realised, rather than a person or an object that is depicted (and in saying this, I’m thinking more of ‘The Palace at 4 a.m’ than I am of the bust of Flora Mayo), the detached way it is represented, as if it came into being of its own accord, or the poverty of skill and materials with which it is made, affect our understanding of its import. In each case, there is a focus on the thought to be expressed, rather than on the hand or style of the artist, yet this is intimately related to the way in which that thought is expressed.

List of Figures

Fig. 0 Robert Filliou, ‘A Proposition, a Problem, a Danger and a Hunch’, Manifestos (New York: Something Else Press, 1966), p. 14.

Fig. 1 Mimi Parent, ‘Masculin/Féminin’, 1959. Jacket, shirt, hair and tie pin, 47.5 x 38 x 12 cm. Private collection.

Fig. 2 Albert Giacometti, ‘Homme’, 1929. Bronze, 40 x 30 x 9.5 cm. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.

Fig. 3 ‘Figure’. Iatmul. East Sepik Province, Papua-New Guinea. Wood and paint, 138 cm high. Private collection.

Fig. 4 ‘Figure’. Mbole. Democratic Republic of the Congo. Wood, 94 cm high. Private collection.

Fig. 5 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Tête de femme (Flora Mayo)’, 1927. Bronze, 30 x 23 x 7.5 cm. Private collection.

Fig. 6 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Nature morte dans l’atelier’, 1927. Pencil on paper, 49 x 32 cm. Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich.

Fig. 7 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Le Père de l’artiste (plat et gravé)’, 1927. Plaster, 27.5 x 21 x 14 cm.

Fig. 8 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Tête qui regarde’, 1927. Plaster, 40.5 x 37.5 x 7 cm. Private collection.

Fig. 9 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Tête (Autoportrait)’, 1927. Plaster, 42.5 x 15.5 x 12.5 cm. Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris.

Fig. 10 Photograph of Alberto Giacometti in his studio, 1927.

Fig. 11 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Nature morte dans l’atelier’, 1927. Pencil on paper, 49 x 32 cm. Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich.

Fig. 12 Cover, Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1926).

Fig. 13 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Le Palais à quatre heures du matin’, 1932. Wood, glass, wire and string, 63.5 x 72 x 40 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fig. 14 Robert Filliou, ‘Création permanente’, 1969. Three wooden boxes mounted on a board with eyelets and hooks, 22 x 60 x 5.5 cm. Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, 1

Mönchengladbach.

Fig. 15 Robert Filliou, ‘La Joconde est dans l’escalier’, 1969. Mop, bucket and sign, 153 x 32.5 cm. Musée d’art moderne, Saint-Étienne.

Fig. 16 Robert Filliou lighting the cake for art’s 1,000,010th birthday, Neue Galerie im alten Kurhaus, Aachen, 17 January 1973.

Fig. 17 Robert Filliou, ‘Création permanente’, 1969. Three wooden boxes mounted on a board with eyelets and hooks, 22 x 60 x 5.5 cm. Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach.

Fig. 18 Robert Filliou, ‘Poussière de poussière de l’effet Le Titien (L’Homme au gant)’, 1977. Cardboard box, polaroid, rag, 12 x 17 x 6 cm. Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris.

Fig. 19 Robert Filliou, ‘Sans objet’, 1970. Wood, nails, and stamp on paper, 61 x 19.5 x 16.5 cm. Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris.

Fig. 20 Robert Filliou, ‘Sans objet’, 1973. Wood, string, peg and stamp, 10 x 60.5 x 9 cm. Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris.

Fig. 21 Robert Filliou, ‘Sans objet sans prix’, 1970. Pastel and pencil on wood with hooks, 6.5 x 41 x 2.5 cm. Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris.

Fig. 22 Robert Filliou, ‘Eins. Un. One…’, 1984. 16,000 wooden cubes. Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Genève.

Fig. 23 Page from the catalogue of Research at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam, 5 November–5 December 1971.

Fig. 24 Robert Filliou and Joachim Pfeufer, Poïpoïdrome à espace-temps réel prototype 00, 1975. Installation, Musée d’art contemporain, Lyon.

Fig. 25 Michou Strauch-Barelli, interior view of the Cédille qui sourit, 1966.

Fig. 26 Robert Filliou and George Brecht, ‘Banqueroute’, 1968. Offset lithography on paper, 50 x 32 cm.

Fig. 27 Art’s Birthday. Newspaper, Los Angeles, 2 February 1974.

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