Harvard Art Museums > 2006.284: L'Immortelle Morte de Monde Prints Collections Search Exit Deep Zoom Mode Zoom Out Zoom In Reset Zoom Full Screen Add to Collection Order Image Copy Link Copy Citation Citation"L'Immortelle Morte de Monde (Robert Filliou)(Published by Something Else Press) , 2006.284,” Harvard Art Museums collections online, Dec 24, 2024, https://hvrd.art/o/317619. This object does not yet have a description. 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 Permissions The Harvard Art Museums encourage the use of images found on this website for personal, noncommercial use, including educational and scholarly purposes. To request a higher resolution file of this image, please submit an online request. 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
