L'Immortelle Morte de Monde | Harvard Art Museums

Identification and Creation

Object Number: 2006.284
People: Robert Filliou, French (Sauve (Gard), France 1926 - 1986 Dordogne, France)
Published by Something Else Press
Title: L'Immortelle Morte de Monde
Other Titles: Alternate Title: The Deathless Dying of the World
Classification: Prints
Work Type: print
Date: 1967
Culture: French
Persistent Link: https://hvrd.art/o/317619

Physical Descriptions

Medium: Poster; offset photolithographic poster, hand-colored with markers
Technique: Photolithograph
Dimensions: Sheet: 72.6 x 55.6 cm (28 9/16 x 21 7/8 in.)

Acquisition and Rights

Credit Line: Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift in honor of Charles Irvin Westheimer, Harvard '34 by his five children Tom, John, William, Mary, and Duffie Westheimer
Copyright: © Robert Filliou Estate
Accession Year: 2006
Object Number: 2006.284
Division: Modern and Contemporary Art
Contact: am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu
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Descriptions

Description: "Auto-theater" poster published in 1967 by Something Else Press. Directly relates to an earlier work by the artist from 1960: "Le collage de l'immortelle mort du monde".
Commentary: This "auto-theater" poster, published in 1967 by Dick Higgins's seminal Something Else Press, serves as a visual and textual score for a performance first conceived by Robert Filliou in 1960. That 1960 work, "Le collage de l'immortelle mort du monde," was among Filliou's first specifically visual works. Like its collaged antecedent, the published poster lays out, like a chessboard, a series of statements, color-coded and indexed both to emotional states and to performance directives.
Its relative complexity and overt theatricality-both in terms of staging and diction-differentiates Filliou's "event score" from the extraordinarily distilled examples produced by such peers as George Brecht (with whom he co-founded the gallery "La Cedille qui Sourit" in Villefranche-sur-Mer in 1965), La Monte Young, Dick Higgins, and other veterans of John Cage's famous "Experimental Composition" classes at New York's New School for Social Research in the late 1950s. By incorporating aleatory procedures into the temporal structure of the composition, Filliou creates a work that is, in Cage's terms, "indeterminate with respect to performance." But in its curious combination of the emotional, the philosophical, and the banal, Filliou's work attests not only to the impact of Cagean compositional models, but also to the continuing relevance of Existentialism in French intellectual and artistic culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In such "scripted" (the score allows performers the freedom to improvise) statements such as "It is meaningless to say that…," "Should I commit suicide because…," "I'm here because I'm a man. Man is good." and "OK! OK! '…..'" and in the absurdist rationality that governs the work's unfolding, Filliou enters into dialogue with the philosophical concerns of Samuel Beckett, and one can imagine Vladimir, Estragon, or Molloy among the cast of nine players performing Filliou's piece of "auto-theater."
In addition to its individual worth, this work will add an important voice to HUAM's collection. Filliou was a major figure in Fluxus as well as in the French Nouveau Réalisme during the 1960s and 1970s. This work's 1960 date of conception gives it a "proto-Fluxus" status, while its publication by Something Else Press attests to the heterogeneity of the field of voices and approaches often conflated under the blanket term "Fluxus." Dick Higgins, who was one of the earliest Fluxus artists, founded Something Else Press as an alternative to Maciunas's Fluxus publications. And while they published works by many of the same artists, Higgins did not share Maciunas's uncompromising dedication to the replacement of the fine arts with the applied.

Exhibition History

32Q: 3620 University Study Gallery, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 01/07/2016 - 05/08/2016

Verification Level

This record has been reviewed by the curatorial staff but may be incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. For more information please contact the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu

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