%0 Journal Article
%T Life as Art, or Art as Life: Robert Filliou and the Eternal Network
%A Laurel Jean Fredrickson
%J Theory, Culture & Society
%@ 1460-3616
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0263276418796563
%X This essay focuses on the Portraits Not Made (1970) by Robert Filliou, a French artist of the postwar neo-avant-garde and a founding member of the international transdisciplinary art movement Fluxus. Interrogating originality and authorship, these ¡®Intermedia¡¯ works ¡®depict¡¯ artists: George Brecht, Dieter Rot, Dorothy Iannone, Irmeline Lebeer, Josef Beuys, Andy Warhol, John Cage, Arman, and Toi (you). Though virtually blank, they translate between binaries: visual/textual, material/immaterial, made/not made, artist/viewer. Inherently performative, Filliou¡¯s portraits draw the viewer into a ¡®poetic economy¡¯ based on three systems: Permanent Creation, the Eternal Network, and the Principle of Equivalence (well made, badly made, not made). Drawing on economic theory shaped by Fluxian absurdity and a Zen-like understanding of reality as at once empty and full, Filliou¡¯s works undermine hierarchies ¨C artistic and political ¨C that privilege individual genius and art as capital exchange. His works propose alternative systems of value by acknowledging the viewer as co-creator
%K Eternal Network
%K Filliou
%K Fluxus
%K performance art
%K portrait
%K Zen Buddhism
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263276418796563