Through the corridors of art: the domesticated utopia of the Lyon Biennale
The quote recovers the notion of "poetic economy" by Robert Filliou, French artist and theorist linked to Fluxus, in an edition that talks about work, exchange and value. Nine Spanish names participate in it.
A one-hundredth anniversary for an artist who spent his life mocking fixed dates and monuments might be hard to imagine. Yet, had it been Robert Filliou (1926-1987), it would have been perfectly fitting. Born in the medieval village of Sauve, near Nîmes, Filliou set out to assign an origin date to art in 1963. According to his own mythology, human creativity was born on a day a million years ago when someone let a dry sponge fall into a water basin. That moment, he said, occurred on January 17, the same day Filliou himself had chosen.
After the war, Filliou worked as a Coca-Cola employee in Los Angeles, earned a master's degree in economics, and spent 1952-1954 in Seoul for the UN's Korea Reconstruction Agency. He was part of the Fluxus community and in 1966 formulated his Principles of Poetic Economics: imagination, barter, and permanent party, instead of profitability. His favorite phrase was: "Art is what makes life more interesting than art itself."
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