In New York in the 1970s, Jean Dupuy became one of the principal organisers of collective artistic events. While these initially took the form of exhibitions, they were soon transformed into evenings that brought together a number of artist “performers”. Dupuy sometimes organised video recordings of these – at his request, Babette Mangolt filmed Soup and Tart. In 1976 and 1977, he invited around twenty artists to express the usual operating mode of these evening performances into a video, letting them film in any way they wished, within a predetermined time.

While the resulting works of the different artists were particularly disparate, some trends were nevertheless visible. Many of the artists’ productions were more or less based directly on word play – whether through repetition (John Giorno, Les Levine), invented language (Lucio Pozzi), or through the use of pre-linguistic language, i.e. with sounds or basic onomatopoeia (Tony Moscatello, Jana Haimsohn). Many of the productions also seem to be directly influenced by feminism, in particular Lil Picard’s playing of a vibrator like a flute, but especially Martha Wilson’s work, where she put on lipstick while testimonies from victims of sexual abuse are presented in voiceover. And finally, some artists made the most of the potential for surprise and gags that video offers – Michael Smith played with framing at leg-height to give the impression that an act of exhibitionism was to occur, only to finish with a twist at the end, while Kit Fitzgerald and John Sanborn put their hands behind a television set, giving the illusion through this simple trick that they were appearing in the set, and inserting objects, or lighting a candle. As for Jean Dupuy, he seems to have played the “mise-en-abyme” card, evoking a much older viewpoint device in front of the camera (Albrecht Dürer's perspectograph) by reproducing, with the help of Olga Adorno, an engraving of the artist showing the device in action.

Philippe Bettinelli