Robert Filliou

This book showcases Eins. Un. One... (1984), one of the last major works of French American artist Robert Filliou (1926–87), which consists of 5,000 blue, red, yellow, black, white and wood-colored dice of various sizes, each with a single dot on its face, randomly distributed over a surface of nine meters in diameter. This new volume of the MAMCO Collection series contains an introductory text by Michel Collet, who explains the conceptual power of Filliou's practice, while Sophie Costes carefully surveys all the artist's works in the museum's collection. She shows how Filliou used play, action, philosophy and language to question the foundations of artistic creation with humor and benevolence. While Filliou rubbed shoulders with Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, John Cage, Allan Kaprow and Daniel Spoerri, he remained a discrete figure who wanted to abolish the arbitrary hierarchies established by art history.

With illustrations of nearly 192 works, it also features the transcript of an extensive conversation between Filliou and the Brussels-based art critic Irmeline Lebeer, recorded on seven cassette tapes in August 1976 in Flayosc in southern France. This conversation is structured as an abécédaire and touches on a variety of topics pertaining to Filliou’s art and thinking, from amitié (friendship) to zen. This conversation was intended to form the backbone of an extensive monograph but was never published—until now. Robert Filliou: The Secret of Permanent Creation illuminates the mind and the practice of this massively underpublished artist, whose influence on subsequent generations has been both clandestine and colossal.