Jean Dupuy

Jean Dupuy (November 22, 1925 – April 4, 2021) was a French-born American artist and pioneer of work combining art and technology. He worked in the fields of conceptual art, performance art, painting, installations, sculptures, and video art. In the 1970s he curated many performance art events involving different artists from Fluxus, the New York's avant-garde and neo-dada scene. Many of his works are part of important collections, such as Centre Pompidou in Paris and the MAMAC of Nice.

Works Dupuy started his career as a painter, but in 1967 he destroyed most of his paintings by throwing them into the Seine. On moving to New York he exhibited his dust sculpture Heart Beats Dust (later renamed Cone Pyramid) at the Museum of Modern Art, as part of the 1968 exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, and at the Brooklyn Museum as part of the 1968 exhibition Some More Beginnings. The work, consisting of red dust set in motion by the viewer's heartbeat, inside a box, and made visible by a beam of light, won a competition arranged by Experiments in Art and Technology for collaborative work between artists and engineers.

His 1970 work FEWAFUEL was made in collaboration with engineers at Cummins and exhibited in the Art & Technology show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1971. In 1974 he organised the Soup & Tart performance event, at The Kitchen, in New York, which included contributions from Philip Glass, Gordon Matta-Clark, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra and Yvonne Rainer.

From 1976 he worked in close collaboration with George Maciunas. His works for Judson Church, Artists Space, P.S.1 and the Musée du Louvre were created in collaboration with artists such as Nam June Paik, Claes Oldenburg, Charlemagne Palestine, George Maciunas, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Filliou, Jacques Monory, Charles Dreyfus Pechkoff, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and Charlotte Moorman.

In 1978 he invited 40 artists to contribute One Minute Performances in front of different artworks at the Louvre.

In 2003 he had a solo exhibition at the Emily Harvey Foundation, where he exhibited anagrammatic texts and works made out of found stones.