Essay.
Robert Filliou's Recherche sur l'origine is regarded as an exemplary overview of the artist's practice by specialists in the field. Paradoxically, nothing, or virtually nothing, of note has been written about Filliou's work, outside of the published words of the artist himself. This essay seeks to go some way towards filling this historical void, and to do justice to the depth and scope of Robert Filliou's “research”.
Cyrille Bret (born 1977) is a professor of art history at HEAR, Strasbourg. He has been working on event-based art forms since 1959, notably on
Fluxus and the work of
George Brecht. His historical approach is nourished by anthropology and the sciences of cognition. His research focuses mainly on forms of aesthetic rationality, the ontological pluralism of artworks, and questions of artistic globalization. He is also a poet and/or performer, and has been a member of the journal BoXoN (Lyon) since 1998.
