Jean Dupuy and DeeDee Halleck's Self Portrait

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.