Jean Dupuy

Related EAI Public Programs

 
 
Jean Dupuy and DeeDee Halleck's Self Portrait
Emily Harvey Foundation
537 Broadway #2
New York, NY 10012

Friday, April 7th to Sunday, April 9th, 2023

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and the Emily Harvey Foundation are pleased to present a weekend-long engagement celebrating the life and work of Jean Dupuy (1925-2021), a trailblazing figure in art and technology and a fundamental node connecting the fields of conceptual, performance, and video art in 1970s downtown New York.

Friday, April 7th
7 pm

Screening of DeeDee Halleck and Jean Dupuy's Self Portait, followed by conversation with Halleck, Barbara Moore, and Carlota Schoolman
RSVP here.

Saturday, April 8th to Sunday, April 9th
1 pm to 6 pm
Selected works by Dupuy on view

On the evening of Friday, April 7th, DeeDee Halleck will present a recent transfer of her and Dupuy’s Self Portrait (1974), which captures the duo making art and cooking tarts at his loft and studio at 405 East 13th Street. Following the screening, Halleck, Barbara Moore, and Carlota Schoolman will reflect on the artist’s activities and impact. On Saturday and Sunday, April 8 to 9 from 1 pm to 6 pm, a selection of Dupuy’s drawings, collages, and sculptural interventions either featured in the film or made around the same time as Self Portrait will be on display.

Originally trained as a painter in Paris, Dupuy disavowed his earliest medium by throwing his artworks into the Seine, and soon immersed himself in the city’s growing performance and sound poetry scenes, eventually relocating to New York in 1967. Within a year, the artist generated significant attention for his sculpture Cone Pyramid (Heart Beats Dust), a glass box outfitted with a stethoscope that vibrated a cloud of red particles to the rhythm of a viewer’s heartbeat. The piece won a competition held by Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) directed by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, and was soon featured in the landmark exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age organized by Pontus Hultén at the Museum of Modern Art. Dupuy joined the Sonnabend Gallery, with whom he exhibited widely until his departure from the gallery in 1973.

From 1973 to 1979, Dupuy was a prolific organizer of group shows and collective happenings, engaging many of the key performers, musicians, and conceptual artists of the era with events organized at his loft, the Whitney Museum, the Kitchen and the Judson Church. Among these are the storied Soup and Tart (1974), a multimedia dinner party pairing home-cooked soup, bread, apple tarts and wine with two-minute performances by Yvonne Rainer, Charles Atlas, Philip Glass, Gordon Matta-Clark, Joan Jonas, Hannah Wilke, and many others; his video performances Chant A Capella (1977, with Davidson Gigliotti) and Artists Propaganda (1978, with Kit Fitzgerald and John Sanborn); and hosting a wedding and Fluxus cabaret celebrating the marriage of George Maciunas and Billie Hutching (1978). From 1976 to 1979, Dupuy presented many performance concerts at his Grommet Studio, ran in one of Maciunas’s artist co-ops in the loft that is now known as the Emily Harvey Foundation.

In the early ‘80s, Dupuy relocated to Pierrefeu, a commune in southeastern France. He again shifted his focus to anagram and wordplay-based art, publishing over twenty books on the subject and exhibiting across Europe and the United States until his death in April 2021.

DeeDee Halleck is a media activist, founder of Paper Tiger Television and co-founder of the Deep Dish Satellite Network, the first grass roots community television network. She founded the television version of Democracy Now!, the first truly alternative daily newscast. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Communication at the University of California at San Diego. Her first film, Children Make Movies (1961), was about a film-making project at the Lillian Wald Settlement in Lower Manhattan. Her documentary, Mural on Our Street was nominated for an Academy Award in 1965. She founded film workshops at Otisville School for Boys in 1968, a NY State Division for Youth Facility. She has served as a trustee of the American Film Institute, Women Make Movies and the Instructional Telecommunications Foundation. Her book, Hand Held Visions is published by Fordham University Press. She co-edited Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest (M.E. Sharpe) and has written essays for a number of collections of independent media. Halleck has collaborated with many artists: she was cinematographer and editor for Richard Serra’s Railroad Turnbridge, edited Nancy Holt’s Pine Barrens and Sun Tunnels, and was a principal member of Shirley Clarke’s Tee Pee Video Space Troupe for two years. She has worked with others including Joan Jonas, Jean Dupuy, David Tudor, Liza Béar, David Behrman, Roberta Neiman, the Videofreex, Mary Frank, Reverend Billy, Morag Benepe, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and more.

Barbara Moore is an independent scholar of late 20th-century avant-garde art such as artists’ books and performance. She was the first editor at Dick Higgins’s legendary Something Else Press, became a rare book dealer specializing in printed manifestations of alternative mediums, and has written and lectured extensively on these subjects. Throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ’80s she simultaneously worked alongside photographer Peter Moore (1932-1993), in creating an archive containing several hundred thousand of his images plus related documents chronicling the development of what came to be known as Performance Art, including Fluxus, Happenings, Judson Dance Theater, multimedia, and intermedia. She is currently writing a memoir and visual history of performance in the 1960s and ‘70s as experienced in the Moores’ joint discovery of these seminal events.

Carlota Schoolman became interested in producing video made by artists in 1970. She began inviting artists to make videotapes and created Fifi Corday Productions to produce their work and screen it on the newly established public-access cable stations in NYC. She also worked with Experiments in Art and Technology, organizing their public-access cable broadcast of artist video and films. After producing and exhibiting work by Trisha Brown, Joan Jonas, Richard Landry, Richard Serra and many others, she joined the staff of The Kitchen. As Video Curator and TV Producer (1974-86), she produced exhibitions, screenings and performances. Works for television included Revolve by Nancy Holt (1977), broadcast on WNET Channel 13; Perfect Lives, an opera for television by Robert Ashley (1983), premiered on Great Britain’s Channel Four; and Two Moon July (1986) by Tom Bowes, broadcast on WNET Channel 13. Along with Mary Griffin she founded Providence Productions International, commissioning, producing and presenting exhibitions and several operas with musicians and artists including Griffin, Leroy Jenkins, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Joe Hannan and others. In 2009, Schoolman had a traumatic brain injury which resulted in aphasia, a communication disorder. After 6 years of speech therapy with the International Aphasia Movement (IAM) she became the President of that organization. IAM offers free speech and language therapy in small group settings to anyone with aphasia, both on Zoom and in-person. For more information, e-mail carlota@iamaphasia.org or visit https://iamaphasia.org.
 
"Edited at EAI": 45th Anniversary Series

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) 535 West 22nd St. 5th Fl.
New York, NY 10011

April–September, 2016

April 27: "Edited at EAI": 1972-77
June 16: "Edited at EAI": Artist to Artist
June 22: "Edited at EAI": Videos by Tom Rubnitz
July 27: "Edited at EAI": Restless Generation
Aug 16: "Edited at EAI": Video Interference
Sept 22: "Edited at EAI": Dara Birnbaum

As part of EAI's ongoing 45th anniversary celebrations, we launched a series of screenings that highlight a less well-known but historically important and creatively fertile area of our programs: EAI's Editing Facility for artists. Established in 1972 with early 1/2" open reel editing equipment, EAI's facility was one of the first such post-production workspaces for artists in the U.S. Over five decades, an extraordinary group of artists has used EAI's facility to create some of the most significant works in media art's diverse histories. Many of these artists and works will be featured in screenings throughout our 45th anniversary year.

The first screening on April 27, "Edited at EAI": 1972-77 featured an eclectic selection of works from the 1970s, charted the alternative artistic, political, and cultural expressions of artists experimenting with emergent video editing technologies and strategies. The program included early works from the 1970s by Ant Farm, Juan Downey, Jean Dupuy, Shigeko Kubota, Mary Lucier, Raindance, Anthony Ramos, Ira Schneider, and Hannah Wilke, among others.

On June 16 Artist to Artist featured the rich collaborative process and the creative relationships between artists and the artists/editors with whom they worked, through the lens of EAI's editing facility. Video works by Cheryl Donegan, Ursula Hodel, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, and Michael Smith—all edited at EAI—were shown together with works by Robert Beck, Seth Price and Trevor Shimizu, three internationally recognized artists who spent formative years as EAI editors. Artists Robert Buck and Cheryl Donegan were in conversation following the screening.

On June 22 EAI celebrated the video work of Tom Rubnitz (1956-1992), whose deliriously camp genre parodies and music videos capture the anarchic spirit and talents of the 1980s East Village scene of Club 57 and the Pyramid Club. The rich body of work that Rubnitz edited at EAI includes TV spoofs, music videos, and the musical parody Psykho III The Musical (1985). Artist John Kelly participated in a conversation following the screening.

On July 27 Restless Generation focused on a group of conceptually driven performance videos by women artists who reenergized and redefined the genre in the 1990s, as seen through the lens of EAI's editing facility. These lo-fi performances staged for the camera­—by artists such as Vanessa Beecroft, Alix Lambert, Kirsten Mosher, Alix Pearlstein, and Beverly Semmes, among others—evoke the strategies of the first generation of artists working with video in the early 1970s, even as their bold stylizations, ironic sensibility, and explicit nods to consumer culture announced a fresh approach to representations of female identity and the body that spoke emphatically to its time.

On August 16 the series continued with an evening of activist video work from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Shot largely on low-end consumer equipment and edited, often off-hours, at EAI, these works use video as an activist tool, confronting urgent issues around the AIDS crisis, race, gender, and sexuality. Videos by ACT UP affinity groups DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activist Television) and House of Color, as well as art collective X-PRZ, were screened along with work by artists Robert Beck and Tom Kalin. Although rooted in the specific political and cultural contexts of that moment, these powerful activist voices
 
"Edited at EAI": 1972-77
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) 535 W. 22nd St. 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011

Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Noon - 8pm

As part of EAI's ongoing 45th anniversary celebrations, we launched a series of screenings that highlight an under-recognized but historically important and creatively fertile area of our programs: EAI's Editing Facility for artists. Established in 1972 with early 1/2" open reel editing equipment, EAI's facility was one of the first such post-production workspaces for artists in the U.S. Over five decades, an extraordinary group of artists has used EAI's facility to create some of the most significant works in media art's diverse histories. The first screening, which featured an eclectic selection of works from the 1970s, charted the alternative artistic, political, and cultural expressions of artists experimenting with emergent video editing technologies and strategies.
 
Participation
Daylong Screenings at EAI
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) 535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor
New York, NY 10011

Friday, May 10 & Saturday, May 11, 2013
Noon-6pm

Please join EAI for Participation, a special three-hour video program that will be screened continuously from noon-6pm on Friday, May 10th and Saturday, May 11th. Featuring works by Steina and Woody Vasulka, Ant Farm, Charlotte Moorman and Jud Yalkut, Carolee Schneemann, and Jean Dupuy, Participation looks to a period during the late 1960s and early 1970s that saw a profusion of artist-initiated projects, collaborative experimentation, and an inclusive, improvisational ethos. The screening features rare footage of performances and happenings, pioneering video documents, and experimental participatory works, capturing a community of young artists responding to the countercultural sensibility and social transformations of that era. Using newly available portable video technology as well as 16mm film, these artists created extraordinary documents that allow viewers in 2013 to experience something of the multi-disciplinary, interactive and process-based spirit that defined the alternative artistic and cultural scenes of that time.