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Jean Dupuy at Emily Harvey
Art in America, Sept, 2003 by Eleanor Heartney
This engaging exhibition was art and technology pioneer Jean Dupuy's first New York show in 15 years. Never one to be bound by signature style or medium, Dupuy was associated with experimental movements such as performance, machine art and Fluxus while living in New York in the 1960s and '70s. Since 1984, he has lived in Europe, most recently in rural France.
At first glance, Dupuy's current work--the show reprises various projects from the last 10 years--could not seem further in spirit from his early embrace of the machine. Here, instead of gears and motors, he valorizes river stones and handwritten texts.
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What unites Dupuy's older and more recent work is a spirit of play and a fascination with structure. This show presented an engaging mix of found and manipulated elements. The wall was studded with anagrammatic texts handwritten in a variety of colors, each of which seemed to comment on the drawing, photograph or object installed next to it. Reading like free verse, with descriptive phrases, self-reflexive comments and collections of apparently random letters, each text is grouped into two sections, one set above the other. It turns out that top and bottom passages are anagrams of each other in which the same letters in the same colors are rearranged to make different commentaries. The "random" letters are meant to be recited in French, where-by they are heard as intelligible phrases.
The same playful attitude pervades a group of works based on smallish, irregular stones. On one table, found stones are accompanied by magnifying glasses that allow the viewer to zero in on the detail of each that fascinated Dupuy. One stone, viewed close up, looks like a skull, while another opens into a deep fossil-lined cavern. Others are the basis for drawings--with the addition of a few lines in pencil, several rounded stones with white markings become part of the phrase "Oh! Bah!" Another has a C-shaped indentation, which a circle surrounds to make a copyright symbol.
The one work with moving parts is a simply constructed wood and cardboard carousel whose three tiers revolve like opposing turntables and reveal the charm of found images most fully. Each of the animals hero among them an elephant, a dog, a crocodile, even a human figure on all fours--is composed of a pencil-on-cardboard body with a suggestive stone for a head. Dupuy insists that no stones have been altered, making their resemblance to various beasts all the more remarkable.
As the creator (in 1976) of a machine designed to make electric current visible, Dupuy clearly remains a man in love with hidden patterns, serendipitous coincidences, mental gymnastics and visual games. The exhibition revealed that the best machine for transforming the world is a supple mind.
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