Robert
Filliou

Robert Filliou (b. 1926 in Sauve; d. 1987 in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil) was a fellow of the Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP) in 1974. As a teenager in 1943 he joined the French Resistance, and he also became a member of the French Communist Party during the war. Filliou is regarded as one of the leading figures in the Fluxus movement; the evolution of his artistic practice is also connected to his lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism. Filliou showed his first works of “poésie visuelle” (visual poetry) at the festival of avantgarde art in Paris in 1960. He declared January 17, 1963 to be the millionth birthday of art, and this date has been celebrated annually ever since. In Paris, in the winter of 1963, Filliou and Joachim Pfeufer, an architect and painter, developed the collaborative project POIPOIDROM, a language-based combination of object, installation, and performance that asks a series of questions of meaning in the context of a dialogue. Filliou and Pfeufer exhibited POIPOIDROM at documenta 5 in 1972, where it was included in the “Individual Mythologies” section.

Filliou, who had moved from New York to Düsseldorf in 1969, made his first appearance as an artist in Berlin a few years prior to receiving his BKP Award Grant: in 1971 he had a solo exhibition at Galerie René Block, and in 1973 he took part in the legendary festival ADA: Aktionen der Avantgarde, where he created an environment of music stands “for telepathic music” in the roof garden of the Akademie der Künste in West Berlin. One of the first projects Filliou planned for Berlin was the celebration of the 1,000,011th birthday of art on January 17, 1974. Under the heading “Happy Birthday to Art!”, a barrel of beer was to be tapped at the exhibition opening at Kunsthaus Bethanien and a public fair was to be held outside on Mariannenplatz. Similar events were to take place in parallel at the Akademie der Künste (West), the Literarisches Colloquium, the DAAD office, Haus am Waldsee, etc.

In September 1974, Filliou’s solo exhibition Erforschung des Ursprungs opened at the Städtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, with support from the Artists-in-Berlin Program. His monumental installation of the same name consisted of three long panels, hung like chains of pearls and measuring eighty-five meters in total, with symbols, icons, and text in three languages that represented the principles “gut gemacht” (well made), “schlecht gemacht” (badly made), and “nicht gemacht” (not made), according to his individual interpretation of Taoist philosophy. The first showing of this work in Berlin was in January 1975, as part of the exhibition Duane Hanson, Franz Gertsch, Robert Filliou, organized by the Artists-in-Berlin Program at the Akademie der Künste (West), and it was subsequently included in Filliou’s solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Luzern. In 1975, he exhibited A World of False Fingerprints at Galerie René Block; the small wooden boxes contained pencil drawings and fake fingerprints of “leading international figures” as “A Contribution to the Dynamism of the Eternal Network.” In 1985, on Robert Filliou’s initiative, the “Woche der bildenden Kunst” (Art Week) in Hamburg was renamed the “Artists in Space and Peace Biennale.” This peace biennial took place at the Kunstverein and the Kunsthaus in Hamburg in December 1985 under the heading Dem Frieden eine Form geben. Zugehend auf eine Biennale des Friedens/For an Art-of-Peace Biennale; it was organized by René Block, who had been the Director of the Artists-in-Berlin Program since 1982, and the participants included other former and current fellows.

Robert Filliou participated in documenta 5 and 6 (1972 and 1977) and in Skulptur Projekte in Münster in 1987.

Text: Eva Scharrer

Translation: Jacqueline Todd