Jean Dupuy — artist-engineer collaborations

1969

Artists: Jean Dupuy, Ralph Martel (engineer-collaborator) · Year: 1969 · Medium: Electronic-kinetic sculpture — sensor-responsive artworks translating viewer body signals into visible effect · Substrate: Custom electronics, often galvanic-skin-response sensors; red-and-green color transitions and particle-display systems; E.A.T. engineering collaboration · Place: New York / Paris · Institution: Independent; extensive E.A.T. participation Jean Dupuy, a French artist who moved to New York in 1967, organized the 1969 Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) exhibition Homage to Jean Tinguely at the Walker Art Center and subsequently the 1970 Some More Beginnings exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum — one of the earliest and largest American museum exhibitions of collaborative artist-engineer works. His 1969 Cone Pyramid, produced with the engineer Ralph Martel, was a sensor-driven kinetic sculpture that responded to ambient electromagnetic fields in the room where it was installed. The piece's movement was emergent: it was driven by the specific electrical environment of the gallery. Dupuy was an unusual figure in the New York 1960s-70s art world. He had been a painter in Paris before his move to New York; he quickly shifted into performance, conceptual, and collaborative practice once embedded in the downtown scene. His Washington Street loft became, during the 1970s, one of the most important unofficial performance venues in Manhattan: a specifically participatory space where Dupuy hosted long-running series of small-group performance evenings that included Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman, and dozens of others across the 1970s. What Dupuy contributed to this archive specifically is his role as an organizer of artist-engineer collaboration during the formative years of E.A.T. His Cone Pyramid (the piece that marked his 1969 entry into E.A.T.'s programming) was not especially consequential on its own terms, but it marked the point at which Dupuy became a central node in the collaborative network that produced the 9 Evenings Festival, the various Osaka Expo '70 E.A.T. pavilions, and the broader infrastructure of American artist-engineer collaboration through the 1970s. Dupuy returned to France in 1983 and spent the last three decades of his life in Pierrefeu, a small town in Provence, where he continued to make work and host performance-art gatherings. His archive is at the Centre Pompidou. Lore Dupuy's Washington Street loft in the 1970s had a rotating roster of perhaps a hundred artists who passed through as performers, collaborators, or audience over the decade. He charged no admission and provided no production budget; participants brought their own props, and Dupuy served wine. The loft's physical space — three thousand square feet on lower Manhattan — was purchased outright by Dupuy in the early 1970s when SoHo real estate was essentially free and has since been sold; the proceeds supported his decades in Pierrefeu. A peculiarity of his career is that his early collaborative performance-art work has been documented almost entirely through Polaroid photographs he took himself during the evenings, preserved in shoeboxes in his Pierrefeu studio and only partially accessioned into the Pompidou archive. Sources • Centre Pompidou, Paris — Jean Dupuy archive. • Dupuy, Jean — Collective Consciousness: Art Performances in the Seventies (Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1980). • Walker Art Center — Homage to Jean Tinguely (exh. cat. 1969).