Art review of Jean Dupuy at Galerie Loevenbruck

8/11/2019 Art review of Jean Dupuy at Galerie Loevenbruck

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Jean Dupuy

Lon musicien

Galerie Loevenbruck

6, rue Jacques Callot 75006 Paris

19.09.2014 - 18.10.2014

Published at Hyperallergic.com as

On the Left Bank, a Pioneering Conceptualist Gets His Due

on September 24, 2014

http://hyperallergic.com/151172/on-the-left-bank-a-pioneering-conceptualist-gets-his-

due/

The Rive Gauche arrondissement galleries opened their doors to a new season of shows,

including the highly anticipated Jean Dupuy mini-retrospectiveLon musicienat Galerie

Loevenbruck. Dupuy, a distinguished yet still intriguing French conceptual artist (and

legendary performance art organizer), began as a lyrical abstractionist painter but soon

became a poetic pioneer of the experimental art and technology movement with his

virtuoso work Cone Pyramid (Heart beats dust) (1968) (not in the show). It consists of

a glass cube in which a rubber membrane vibrates to the rhythm of the recorded sound of

a human heartbeat, thrusting red dust (Lithol Rubine BK) up and down in a cone of light.


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Cone Pyramid (Heart beats dust) (1968) Stethoscope, spotlight, amplifier, wood, glass, light, red pigment, Courtesy

galerie Loevenbruck, Paris. Tous droits rservs / Photo Fabrice Gousset (dtail)


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Cone Pyramid (Heart beats dust) (1968) Stethoscope, spotlight, amplifier, wood, glass, light, red pigment,

77x224/9x224/9"Courtesy galerie Loevenbruck, Paris Tous droits rservs / Photo Fabrice Gousset

The engineer behind the piece was Ralph Martel, working in conjunction with

Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) the collaborative group led by Robert

Rauschenberg and Billy Klvert. It was shown widely as part of the famous The Machine

as Seen as the End of the Mechanical Age exhibition organized by Pontus Hultn.

Moreover, in 1971 Dupuy participated in theArt & Technologyexhibition at the County

Museum of Art in Los Angeles, a show that notably also involved Rauschenberg, Andy

Warhol, Tony Smith and Robert Whitman, among others.


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Renaud Monfournys photograph of Jean Dupuy


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Dupuys name was familiar to me from a long way back, the mid-70s New York, when

he organized an evening of performances called Soup & Tart(1974) at The Kitchen and

the celebrated 3 Evenings on a Revolving Stage(1976) that he presented at the Judson

Church. Indeed in the 70s he curated many performance art events, involving artists from

the Fluxus neo-dada scene. 1976 on, he worked in New York in close collaboration with

George Maciunas, but he is not officially considered a part of the Fluxus artistic

collective. Yet many of his works fall within the meaning of the artistic process that is

essentially Fluxus and he has worked in collaboration with Nam June Paik, Yvonne

Rainer, Charlemagne Palestine, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matta-Clark,

Robert Filliou, Philip Glass and Charlotte Moorman.

But Dupuy started his career in France, as a rather lovely minimalist lyrical painter, with

such works as N 3 0 ( 19 65) and N 2 9 (1 965 ). The show highlights this work with

several large canvases.


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N 29 (1965) Acrylic on canvas, 1 13 x 146 c m Courtesy gale rie Loevenbruck, Paris. ADAGP, Paris, 2014


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N 30 (1965) Acrylic on canvas, 200x142 cm, Courte sy galerie Loevenbruck, Paris. ADAGP, Paris, 2014

These repetitive delicately whipped post-Pollock white paint drops on black canvases

simultaneously reminded me of drawings by Henri Michaux, of repeated male

ejaculations, and of some mysterious musical score. I thought them rather good, but in

the late 60s Dupuy destroyed most of these paintings by rather dramatically throwing

them into the Seine.

So the show starts with some of the saved paintings, and a few similar drawings, but

quickly turns conceptual, literary and musical. There is a strong tendency for

anagrammatic texts. I was particularly fond of those texts that were paired with found

stones, as they played pithily with visual propositions of deep reflection (one might even

say brooding) concerning such things as John Cage and his inspiration, Erik Satie. Like

the poet/critic Remy de Gourmont once said of the major French symbolist poet Stphane


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Mallarm, Dupuys anagrammatic/stone work is a pretext for reveries.

In this installation at large, Dupuy displays a mordantly witty obsession with the

language of Fluxus. Immediately one feels his sense of light humor. A peripatetic mind is

clearly sensed behind such diverse, but linked, work - even while sensing an overall

conveyance of longing connected to an acute awareness of the death of the avant-garde.

If I may presume to decode such a wide range of ideas and styles used here, I would say

that Dupuy is attempting to give us a visual free verse that tests the limits of form and

stretches the bounds of meaning by recasting our art experiences as play. Taken whole,

Dupuys work delivers delight by tying together methods of insouciant informality with

light irony: at turns hip and flamboyant and commendable.

For example, with Cage (2012), Dupuy tweaks John Cages deviant logic of chance-

based freedom confining it to a pen of elegiac repetition. Cage now hoist on his own

petard.


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Cage (2012) Birdcage, stamp, motors, springs; gouache and graphite on paper paired with anagrammatic text 93 x 76

x 45,5 cm; 40 x 30 cm; Courtesy galerie Loevenbruck, Paris. Photo Brasille-Petrova ADAGP, Paris, 2014


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Cage (2012) detail showing two portraits of John Cage in perpetual motorized flight

With Paris-Bordeaux #4 (Satierik) (1980), I needed to work devotedly to solve the

riddle of the noisy circling toy train and musical conundrums supplied here - a spinning

record of Saties piano music - and to supply my own mental transitions between the


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diverse elements. Definitely I had to fabricate a complicated forensic account out of

Dupuys mlange, which kept slipping me into an idiosyncratic but light poetic

sensibility. To be sure, Paris-Bordeaux #4 (Satierik) provided me a sense of being

suspended in a compound of joy and insight, brought to a certain sense of circular

pliability.

"Satierik (1980) Turntable, scratched Erik Satie record, electric train,wooden board, anagrammatic text. SATIERIK is


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also written on the wall. Courtesy galerie Loevenbruck, Paris. Photo Fabrice Gousset ADAGP Paris 2014

In my view, Dupuy creates exhilarating unconventional connectionist sense. His is a

poets reading of our milieu, as Dupuy makes use of the abstract potential of the

connected, all-encompassing sign-field. Thus his work is demonstrative of the real

arbitrary nature of all representation. As such, Dupuys conceptual lyricism is most

appealing.

If what I have said sounds metaphoric, it is metaphoric only in so far as it is memory,

concentration, and stratagem - all working together in making up an internal model of the

self. Indeed Dupuys conceptual visual poetry can be seen as a self-meaningful symbolic

language laden with conjuration, for those who understand its ocular tongue.

Joseph Nechvatal

Documents

Art review of Jean Dupuy at Galerie Loevenbruck