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As if the oceans were lemonade : the performative vision of Robert Filliou and the Western Front

University of British Columbia

This thesis examines a cultural community in Vancouver during the 1970s, focussing on the group of artists, poets and musicians active in the formation of the Western Front. While the Front is still active today my research is focussed around the initial formation of the Front community, from its inception in 1 973. The Utopian and countercultural artistic practice which developed there during the early seventies has made a significant contribution to recent Canadian art. I examine the Western Front through the presence of French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, as he figures prominently in the written history of that period and provides a critical point of entry into its activities. In the Vancouver scene Filliou operated as an emblem of Utopian possibility, representing art as an imaginary space in which to develop ideas about social transformation. The pivotal concept of this thesis relies on what Filliou referred to as "la Fete Permanente" or, alternately, as "the Eternal Network". I use this dual term as a means of comparing emergent cultural politics, examining the implications carried by the French usage of la fete versus the North American usage of the network. In the first section of the text Filliou's ludic artistic strategies are situated within the performative praxis of the Fluxus movement, which had become active in New York and Europe in the early sixties. I also try to show the way in which his commitment to la fete relates to the widespread counterestablishment protests which, in France, were to culminate in the Events of May, 1968. In 1973, when Filliou made his first visit to Canada, the Western Front was being promoted by its members as an important "node" on an emergent "network" of global artist connections. I examine how the idea of "network consciousness" was seized by members of the Western Front as a means of speaking within the dominant logic of media culture. The distance which separated the Front from the Fluxus generation was, so to speak, a ricochet through the "new" space of orbiting communications satellites. While my consideration of la fete versus thenetwork stresses the contrast between oppositional strategies as they were articulated in Europe and North America, the thesis also draws attention to the strong alignments between Filliou and the artists at the Western Front. I argue that the prominent position given to Filliou by its members was a signal of their collective resistance to the technological imperative which guides media culture. One sees, through Filliou, that during the early seventies the Western Front made a valiant attempt to construct a network which would align the banal sophistication and glamour of Hollywood with the intimacy of a bohemian community. These artists, including Filliou, integrated decadence and festive abandon into their artistic practice as a means of asserting their difference from the conventional middle class values being advanced through the mass media. In the final section of the thesis I use the building of the Pompidou Center in Paris as a symbol of the international shift which announced the dispersal of these counter-cultural, bohemian ideals. By the late seventies, both in Canada and in France, the visionary promise upheld by "the Eternal Network/La Fete Permanente" was compelled to assume a new and more resilient configuration.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-03-14

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6039

Fine Arts

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace