Paleolithic hand negatives in Lascaux, France, circa 23,000 BCE
Robert Filliou, Main d'artiste, 1967, three photographs on wood By Daniel Solecki
Humor, ready-mades, and whimsically playful art historical references abound at a fantastic new show of the work of Franco-American Fluxus artist Robert Filliou (1926-1987) at the Peter Freeman Gallery. Filliou worked in an array of eclectic mediums, some of which are on display here—crayon on cardboard, assemblages of found objects, photography, and collage. Like his Dadaist forbearers and collaborators in the Fluxus program, Filliou sought a union of art and life that tended towards childlike “anti-art.” His work presents the classic 20th century sardonic mockery of so-called “high art” and industrial capitalism from a truly distinctive and ingenious approach.
Filliou is different from other Fluxus artists in that his work directly engages the art historical canon, a facet contradictory to the ideas of a group whose manifesto explicitly states, “purge the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art.” Filliou’s peculiarity comes in part from spending the last years of his life near Lascaux, France, the town nearest of one most famous Paleolithic painted caves. His work in this show has the naïve feel of art that a cave-painter would make if he were, by some miracle of time-travel, lost in the modern world. Filliou’s caveman character is set upon trying to use art to find mystical meaning in modern objects. His whimsically nonsensical attempts to make sense of the modern world are endearing as they are humorous.
The exhibition is anchored by a set of three photographs of the artist’s hand, a modern play on the hand-negatives that appear as “signatures” on the walls of paleolithic cave-paintings. The images cement the “narrator” of the art as the caveman character and give clues about how this character sees the world he is lost in. Western Mandala, a set of haphazardly arranged broken clay bricks connected with wire and plugged into a brick port on the wall, shows Filliou’s caveman humorously misinterpreting modern technology as a harbinger of spiritual power. Pour pêcher à deux la lune (“Two to catch the moon”), a set of two fishing rods ostensibly to be used to capture the moon, reflects a similar play on naivety in the face of modern technology.
Most of the other works in the show are crayon or pastel on paper or on diptychs of found-cardboard. Most are spare, heightening the brown cardboard and dented edges of the boxes, much like the Lascaux bull outline paintings that emphasize the limestone cave wall. The imagery varies—in some diptychs there are inklings of formal composition—a childishly drawn man appearing in landscapes or with objects—others are seemingly random arrays of collaged found papers and written words.
One of the most interesting of these is The Sun Book Inside the Music Box and the Glory and the Loss—a cardboard diptych whose two sides are two independent compositions. On the left is a drawing of a music box covered in abstracted, multicolored suns and on the right is an abstracted sun with an arrow pointing upward. Below the arrow is written, “fin de poeme,” or, in English, “end of the poem.” The music trope and the rising motion of the poem call to mind art historical representations of the apotheoses of artists. Filliou here is playing on an artistic idea that the Fluxus project and its related movements deemed bourgeois and decadent—the deification of the artist.
Robert Filliou, The Sun Book inside the Music Box and the Glory and the Loss, 1973, cardboard box in two parts, glued paper and pastel
Unknown, Apotheosis of the Poet (Homer?), circa 500 BCE, red-figure vase
Instead of outright mocking this tradition, as would be expected when such a weighty theme appears in a crayon-on-cardboard composition, Filliou is strangely accepting of it. Through the guise of his cave-painter character, Filliou suggests that the idea of art-apotheosis is a timeless and essential facet of our understanding of art. The idea behind this one image is the idea behind the whole show: that we are all wired to make meaning of the world around us; that maybe we are all just like cave-painters lost in modernity, ever-hopeful that we may import our spiritual underpinnings unto the incomprehensible modern world. We do this, Filliou suggests, even if all we are given are crayons, broken bricks, a Xerox machine, and bent pieces of cardboard.
This show of the sculpture, photography, drawing, and collage of Robert Filliou runs until July 15 at Peter Freeman Gallery, 560 Broadway, Suite 602/603, New York
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