Who is Parisian artist Michel Journiac (1935–1995), whose Fluxus-adjacent performances were as crucial to their avant-garde impositions on his own body as they were for their documentary value? Or French painter-turned-conceptual-artist Jean Dupuy (1925-2021), whose later sculptural works, which he termed Lazy Art, required physical activation to be realized? Or Belgian artist Stéphane Mandelbaum (1961-1986) – born much later than Dupuy and Journiac – whose transgressive works on paper combined literary, cinematographic, and pictorial conventions, but who met with a tragic early demise?
With solo presentations in Art Basel in Basel’s Features sector, all three artists are still relatively obscure within mainstream, mid-to-late 20th-century art-historical discourses. But each is significant, their techniques and methods now widespread in contemporary art in a reification of the importance of their groundbreaking work in their respective eras.
Understanding Journiac, who performed wearing women’s clothing and embodying ‘women’s roles,’ means seeing how queer and feminist performance of the 1960s and 1970s departed from his happenings. Reaching the heart of Dupuy’s oeuvre means reviewing his methods of refusal and interruption as they now manifest across contemporary installation work. And in Mandelbaum’s case, collage and juxtaposition have developed to characterize today’s racialist absurdities, as the artist, too, witnessed in his time.
Born in Paris in 1935, Journiac is most remembered for his inappropriate, at times morbid, body art, rather than for its contribution to the burgeoning critical discourse on the politics of the gendered body. The tension between the artist’s seemingly unassailable description of the body as a ‘socialized, conscious meat’ and his further claim that ‘there is no such thing as an absolute body…it is linked to a whole series of contexts, objects, clothing, et cetera’ sets up an oppositional framework in which to understand his body as an object, model, and identity marker.
Galerie Christophe Gaillard presents photographic documentation of Journiac’s performative actions with 24 Heures de la vie d’une femme ordinaire. Réalités / Fantasmes (1974), allowing for a sweeping retrospective viewing of images of the artist performing works such as La Femme travestie en homme (1974) and La Lessive (1974). In the latter, Journiac, clothed as a woman, hangs pieces of washing labeled with artists’ names he deemed worthy of attention, throwing the others into a laundry bin, making clear his method of imposing gender on his body through clothing and gesture to the point where social references become unintelligible. Though comparable to the work of fellow performance artist Vito Acconci, for whom controversy and transgression were endemic, Journiac’s happenings are now notable for their more intelligent critiques of gender representation.
When Journiac’s work involved harming himself, it was calculated and ritualistic, unlike the chaotic orgiastics of the Viennese Actionists who preceded him. Drastic works such as Messe pour un corps (1969), a mock communion in which the artist serves spectators pieces of grilled blood sausage made using his own blood, and Initiation Ritual (1986), which called for the artist to brand himself with a hot iron rod, the scars forming neat circles and triangles, speak to the extreme nature of Journiac’s rituals. Beyond their gruesomeness, these are not dissimilar from the installations of fellow French artist Dupuy, whose assemblages also functioned according to deliberate programming and corporal interfaces.
Shown in Basel by Galerie Loevenbruck, Dupuy was born in Moulins in 1925 and began his career as an abstract painter. In 1967, he destroyed most of his works by throwing them into the River Seine, shortly after which he moved to New York City. There, he pursued technological abstraction, devising complex geometric and physical processes activated by human interaction in order to complete his sculptural installations. Think of the short chain reaction in The Ways Things Go (1987) by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, but far more intricate. ‘I use technology only to show the things that are invisible,’ Dupuy once said.
The paradox of this Lazy Art (‘an art which consists of having the work done by a tool or by others,’ Dupuy claimed, but in reality it was anything but lazy) is epitomized by Cone Pyramid (Heart beats dust) (1968–69), first shown at the Brooklyn Museum, then at ‘The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age’ at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. This post-Duchampian piece is activated with a stethoscope being placed on the spectator’s temple, neck, or heart. This person’s ‘organic vibrations,’ i.e. pulse, are then electronically amplified through a speaker hidden beneath a latex membrane, causing a blood-like pigment to move across the surface. Through a pane of glass, the spectator can watch as a half-conical/half-pyramidal shaft of light highlights plumes of dust in the air that have been agitated by the rhythm of their own circulation.
Extending on the assemblage and collage of contemporaries like Robert Rauschenberg and Jean Tinguely, in Cone Pyramid Dupuy activated a series of processes, each seemingly more unrelated to the next, culminating in a moment of sublime cohesion. Technological abstraction remains an element of contemporary installation, as it was during London- and Amsterdam-based artist Ima-Abasi Okon’s 2019 solo presentation at Chisenhale Gallery, London, in which she deftly gutted industrial air conditioners for all but their fans, which she reconfigured to whir at specific speeds and intervals, creating a robotic rendition of Miguel’s 2012 hit song ‘Adorn’.
By the time Dupuy moved back to France in 1984, he had produced more Lazy Art works; by the 1990s, he had returned to painting and was making anagrammatic pieces based on a self-devised intermedial, chromatic-linguistic system. Whereas experimentations with the potential of typography and language became crucial only to Dupuy’s later work, these form the crux of Mandelbaum’s much shorter career.
Born in Brussels in 1961, Mandelbaum produced a number of arresting works on paper in pen, charcoal, and colored pencils in a short period, some of which will be on view at Galerie Zlotowski. Among them were self-portraits, feigning caricature while occupying the previously untapped territory between portraiture, collage, and linguistic conjecture. Though he didn’t achieve financial or critical acclaim before, or even long after his murder in 1986 (his first real recognition came in 2019, when his work was shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris), Mandelbaum was nurtured from an early age regarding his drawing skills, including during his time at an alternative school to accommodate his severe dyslexia and at evening courses at the Academy of Drawing and Decorative Arts of Watermael-Boitsfort between 1976 and 1979. Mandelbaum was firmly situated within a formal artistic context but would be enticed by the aesthetics and lifestyle of Brussels’ gritty underworld, which informed his later practice (incidentally, he was fatally shot after stealing a fake Amedeo Modigliani painting from a private collector).
He was fascinated with the brilliance and tragedy of his cultural forebears – Francis Bacon, Arthur Rimbaud, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luis Buñuel – all of whom he limned in expressive pen strokes on pages strewn with typographic interruptions: sardonic scribbles, names, slogans, and Yiddish graffiti. There’s a semi-pornographic, Egon Schiele-like quality to his work, too: The artist imbued his figures with a languorous sensuality that at times would appear at odds with the true nature of their sometimes controversial real-life nature, as was the case with his tender ballpoint portrait of Japanese nationalist author, poet, and failed militia founder Yukio Mishima. Even more fraught were Mandelbaum’s many drawings informed by Nazi imagery. Deeply influenced by the fate of his paternal grandfather, Szulim, a Polish Jew who escaped the pogroms and the Holocaust, Mandelbaum is best known for works that foreground the image of evil as he knew it, as seen in Der Goebbels (c. 1980), which depicts the eponymous Nazi politician shrieking rabidly.
These three artists’ undeserved underrepresentation in 20th-century art history means that their work can mainly be evaluated with a contemporary gaze. Gained through retrospect – understanding Journiac’s critique of the body, Dupuy’s technological experimentations, and Mandelbaum’s aesthetic contradictions – is an entirely new art history that traces lines of inquiry previously unfathomed in their respective movements, and connecting to current culture with astonishing relevance.
At Art Basel in Basel’s Features sector, Galerie Christophe Gaillard will present Michel Journiac, Galerie Loevenbruck will feature Jean Dupuy, and Galerie Zlotowski will present work by Stéphane Mandelbaum.
Olamiju Fajemisin is an independent art writer, curator, and editor based between London, Berlin, and Zurich. She writes for publications such as Artforum, frieze, and Contemporary &.
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Captions for full-bleed images: 1. Jean Dupuy, Cone Pyramid (Heart beats dust) (detail), 1968–1969. Courtesy of Loevenbruck, Paris © ADAGP, Paris 2021. Photo by Fabrice Gousset, courtesy Loevenbruck, Paris. 2. Michel Journiac, Le Raccord (detail), 1974. Courtesy of Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris. 3. Stéphane Mandelbaum, Portrait der Menschen japonais (detail), 1983. Courtesy of galerie zlotowski, Paris.