virtual museum of modernism nrw

Robert Filliou
Hand Show, 1967
Object
Wooden slipcase covered with Plexiglas, offset prints inside
H. 30 cm x W. 24 cm x D. 4 cm

The hand, like the eye, has been ascribed various expressive capacities and its own, individual 'facial expression'. Many kinds of language and communication are associated with the language of the hands, the hand-shake, the hand-sign, as well as with the fingerprint. As Meyer's Encyclopedia of 1888 has it, chiromantics claims to detect the ways of life and the character qualities of a human being, his or her past or even future, in the individual forms and the lineaments of the hand. And "Chirurgie," surgery, added the medical art, created through 'hand-impact'.

The metaphor of the 'hand of the artist' emphasizes the individuality of the hand, its specific appearance and thus also the specificity, individualness, and authenticity of those things the hand has created. 'Hand' here does not stand for the part of the body in the literal sense, the part that has shaped an object, but for the genesis of an artwork and includes all kinds of associations with the artistic genius, with ingenuity, uniqueness, and immediacy. Most probably, there is no other oeuvre and no other artist that corresponds as much to these notions as Auguste Rodin. The hands he sculpted, but also his own 'creative hand' became the artist's hand par excellence. "You walk around among thousands of his things, overwhelmed by the fullness of the findings and inventions this includes, and you immediately look for the two hands out of which this world grew. You remember how small human hands are, how soon they get tired, and how little time they have to busy themselves. And you want to see the hands that have lived like hundreds of hands, like a nation of hands that rose at sunlight on the long way to create this work. You ask for the one who commands these hands. Who is this man?" (R.M. Rilke, Rodin, 1902)

Robert Filliou's Hand Show, a wooden slip-case done in an edition of 150 copies with a Plexiglas cover that can be pulled out, entirely focuses on the 'hand of the artist.' A chiromantic scheme is printed on the cover, i.e. an instruction for hand-reading. The slip-case contains a series of 22 pictures of hands in offset-print. "Thanks to uncertain interpretations and hints picked up here and there, one will be able to have one's own opinion, without having to resort to those in-between instances one calls art critics." With pointed irony, Fluxus-colleague George Maciunas commented on the series. Maciunas had designed invitation and layout for the first exhibition of Hand Show, displayed in the shop-window of Tiffany's

The work presents a Show, a whole spectrum of taut, of firm, of sensitive and thin-fingered or crooked hands that belong to artists. The photographs of Scott Hyde capture imprints of the palm of the left hand of Arman, Ayo, Marc Brusse, Pol Burry, John Cage, Christo, Jasper Johns, Dick Higgins, Red Grooms, Alain Jaquet, Robert Breer, Ray Johnson, Alison Knowles, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Mac Low, Emmet Williams, Marisol, Claes Oldenburg, Benjamin Patterson, Takis, Andy Warhol, Robert Watts, and Rober Filliou himself. (Picture) At first the photographs draw attention towards the wide variation of the palms' lineaments through their strong contrasts. Filliou indirectly refers to these lines with the title photograph, which is covered with a chiromantic scheme printed in red: This mapping of the hand, the painstaking designations of single lines and realms that may cause the real expert to come up with all kinds of analyses, puts the viewer in the mood to decipher the hand, but leaves him or her alone with the reading. Filliou's interest in exploring astrology, in the future, and in a groping understanding seems to manifest itself in this work of art, albeit in an undecided, open way.

The artist's hand – shown here in a series of named imprints of the hands of colleagues and friends, of artists from the world of Fluxus to that of Pop Art – is the center of Hand Show. Possible ways of reading are vaguely suggested, readings that might refer to specific hand lineaments, a kind of hand-reading, a language of the hand, Filliou also deals with in later works (Towards an International Sign Language, 1978). Yet at the same time the collectively created Show of the hands that appear to be part of a series as well as standardized, subvert any notions of the individual artist's hand, shaped by the cult of the genius and claims to autonomy. Filliou does not base his work on his own photographs. And since he chooses the hands of different artists as his object, and, moreover, leaves the image to a medium that cannot communicate hand-writing, he indeed counteracts in multiple, playful as well as language-focused ways the traditional investments in the 'hand of the artist.' The series of hands that are of equal size also points towards Filliou's understanding of creative capacities that – notwithstanding the respective profession – have the potential to level the hierarchies of social difference, if only they are carried out with passion. The playful dealing with his own works also becomes evident in his Show of the hands which Filliou presents in Clock Work (1972) in the circular arrangement of the face of a watch. He now entirely relies on the serial character of the hands that form an ornamental circle of ciphers, an absurd 'watch.'

A.S.