PRECEDENTS
Marcel Duchamp, Boite-en-valise, 1935-1941 (version 1941)
Assemblage, variable dimensions
1935 was the year in which Marcel Duchamp began to create his own museum without walls. Boite-in-valise starts in 1935 as a great retrospective of the work of Duchamp until that date carried out by means of 69 reproductions, including small duplicates of several readymades. Miniaturising the exhibition of the museum until the size of a portable box, this "art book" establishes in a unmistakable way a familiar similarity with the sample board of the traveler.
Robert Filliou, Galerie légitime, ca. 1962-1963
Assemblage, 4 x 26,5 x 26,5 cm Locating its entire production in the sphere of the consumption culture, Fluxus defined the mercantile goods as the unique object and the unique way of distribution from which the art could take place and be perceived. In many occasions, this departure point took them to simulate" institutional" and “business” frameworks of presentation and distribution: the Fluxushop, the Implosions, the Cédille qui sourit, were "companies" that tried to work like artistic projects of production and distribution of diverse objects and radically democratised tools.
The Galerie légitime (Legitimate gallery) of Filliou was another early example of the institutional critic of Fluxus. "Founded" in 1966, the "galery" was in fact the bowler hat of the artist (when not its Japanese variant or cap), that contained many manufactured objects, notes and photographic images of their own works or from other artists who had chosen (or they had been chosen by Filliou) to "show" in one of his travelling "exhibition".
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchl?
Art since 1900 modernism, antimodernism, postmodernism,
2004, Thames & Hudson, London, pp.275, pp. 459.