George Brecht | Cedille Uhr

George Brecht

Cedille Uhr

Mönchengladbach, Germany: Kunstverein Mönchengladbach, 1973

4 x 4.5 x 0.75 cm. [men's], 3 x 3 x 1 cm. [women's]

Edition of 90 [+5 A.P.] signed and numbered copies

A wrist watch containing a variety of tiny objects. Produced in an edition of 90 copies: 45 men's size and 45 women's.

In 1969, George Brecht and Robert Filliou organized an exhibition titled "La Cédille qui Sourit" at the Municipal Museum in Mönchengladbach. The exhibition referred to their three year stay in France, in a house called "La Cédille qui Sourit" in Villefranche.

In the summer of 1965, Brecht and Filliou placed a yellow awning and chalkboard sign in the window of the house that had previously housed a television repair store and candy shop. They called it La Cédille qui Sourit, or "The cedilla that smiles”, after the diacritical mark added under certain letters to modify their pronunciation (suggesting an S sound rather than a K, under the letter C, for example). The proprietors claimed the store would offer for sale "anything that contained a cedilla, and anything that did not".

The store carried materials from a number of artist affiliated with Fluxus, including titled published by the Something Else Press, Fluxus, and MAT Editions, though it was difficult to discern which items were completed and which were "in-progress”, as the space mostly served as the pair’s studio. 

Filliou later recounted “[It was] a sort of workshop and of shop, of nonshop would we say now, for we were never commercially registered, and the Cédille was always shut, opening only upon request of visitors to our homes.” They viewed it as a "Center of Permanent Creation”, using it to conduct research, write letters, jokes, songs, poems, scores and recipes,  and produce puzzles, games, drawings, and events.

Even as a studio space, its use was questionable, with the artists reportedly more likely to be working in nearby cafes.

In the third year of the store's operation, the Something Else Press published Games at the Cedilla [see below] as their 14th title (it was immediately followed by Store Days, by Claes Oldenburg, whose similar venture operated in New York City a few years prior). The charming book is a compendium of ideas, notations, journal records, correspondence, games, "One Minute Scenarios" and other writings made while Brecht and Filliou tended store.

This watch was produced at La Cédille qui Sourit, and - like most objects created in the three-year span  - bears its name.