Jean Dupuy and DeeDee Halleck's Self Portrait
537 Broadway #2
New York, NY 10012
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
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 noon to 6 pm, a selection of Dupuy’s drawings, collages, and sculptural interventions will be on display.
Originally trained as a painter in Paris, Jean Dupuy found himself immersed in the city’s growing performance and sound poetry scenes, an interest that influenced his decision to throw his artworks into the Seine and relocate 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 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 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 Roquestéron, 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.
