Jean Dupuy

Analogies
09.04–10.11.2003
Room 2

French artist Jean Dupuy first made himself known in the ‘70s for his experimentation and for his contributions to the spread, in New York – where he lived from 1968 to the beginning of the ‘80s – of collective practices and performance, as well as technology-based and conceptual art. Dupuy, who also worked closely with the Fluxus group, has, for the last twenty years, applied himself to the making of anagrams. At once ingenious and disconcerting, this game of literary skill consists of rearranging the elementary figures of a text – the letters – with an eye to producing an equally significant second text. In the case of Jean Dupuy, alias JA/NE, alias YPUDU anagrammist, the result of this procedure is a text in two parts in which the content of the first segment describes itself, offering the reader the premises of the anagrammatical equation: number of letters, colour codes etc. In adding a number of constraints to the rules of language, the anagram takes the form of a veritable enigma whose resolution coincides with the desire to find what is not given immediately to the senses and consciousness, to make the unexpected appear in the habitual.

Paired with a series of photographs depicting the more the less visible traces of what is there, in Gallery 2, but which normally passes unnoticed – like a small pile of dust or a rough patch on the floor – the artist, on a large canvas, presents an anagrammatical equation (340 words x 2). On the basis of this, he asked 13 artists to “construct,” in their turn, analogical texts, also displayed, the constraints of which the viewer is invited to discover. Pushing the possibilities of sense authorized by the process (that of rearranging letters), Dupuy invites us too to pursue – once the agreed upon constraints have been discovered – this mad acrobatics.

NdeB, translation PduB

Thursday, September 4, from 21:00, for the pleasure of play, Jean Dupuy’s guests will give a reading of their analogical texts.

Collaborators: Sylvette Babin, Anne Bérubé, Mylène Bilodeau, Carl Bouchard, Sylvie Cotton, Martin Dufrasne, Anne-Sophie Émard, Emmanuel Galland, Massimo Guerrera, Charles Guilbert, Corine Lemieux, Éric L’Étourneau, Angéline Neveu, Martin Renaud.