Robert Filliou (17 January 1926 – 2 December 1987) was a French artist associated with Fluxus, who produced works as a filmmaker, "action poet," sculptor, and happenings maestro. Life In 1943, Filliou became a member of the French Communist Party. After the war in 1947, he travelled to the United States where he worked as a laborer for Coca-Cola in Los Angeles while gaining a master's degree in economics. In 1951, he took dual French-American nationality and worked as a United Nations adviser and was sent to Korea for three years where he met his first wife Joanna. In 1955, his son Bruce was born. He lived in Egypt, Spain, Denmark, Canada, and France. Filliou met his second wife, Marianne Staffels, in Denmark. Filliou died on 2 December 1987 in a monastery in Les Eyzies, France. Career In 1960, Filliou designed his first visual work, Le Collage de l'immortelle mort du monde (Collage of the Immortal Death of the World), a transcription of a random theater play comparable to a chessboard where individual experiences are expressed. Filliou first proposed "Art's Birthday" in 1963. He suggested that 1,000,000 years ago, there was no art. But one day, on January 17 to be precise, Art was born. Filliou says it happened when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. He also proposed a public holiday to celebrate the presence of art in our lives. Art's Birthday was first publicly celebrated in 1973 in Aachen (i.e., Aix-la-Chapelle), Germany and at the same time in Paris, France. In 1971, Filliou created la République géniale (the Republic of Genius) where people enter its territory to develop their genius rather than their talent and research is no longer the privileged domain of the person who knows, but of the person who does not know. In his work Le Petit Robert Filliou, Filliou defined the principles of Poetic Economics and its scale of values. This work served as the script for a Super 8 film that he made in 1972 with Bob Guiny. In 1974, Filliou produced Recherche sur l'origine, a work made of cloth 90 meters long and 3 meters high where spectators could walk around inside. Video works by Filliou include: 14 Songs and 1 Riddle (1977, document of a performance), And So on, End So Soon: Done 3 times (1977), Porta Filliou (1977), Telepathic Music Nø7 - The Principle of Equivalence