In January 1978, Jean Dupuy invited about twenty artists to try their hand at making a video in the new audiovisual studios at the Centre Pompidou. The rules were simple – each participant had to make three videos with set durations of thirty, sixty, and ninety seconds respectively. No themes were imposed, and throughout the production process, the artists had access to the Centre Pompidou’s technical department.

Dupuy also participated in the exercise, but mostly took on the role of editor, by choosing the order in which the clips were shown – sometimes presenting all of an artist’s productions at a time, sometimes interspersing them. While these contributions are now divided into three videotapes of thirty minutes each, in the mind of Dupuy, they nevertheless constitute one whole work. And yet, among the artists invited to participate in this collective experiment were such varied figures as Ben, Annette Messager, Christian Boltanski, and Jacqueline Daurac. While Artist Propaganda II was a group artwork in the style of an exquisite corpse or an encyclopaedia where each author makes a contribution, it nevertheless seems possible to identify some larger trends amid this disparate ensemble, regarding the artists’ relationship to the medium of video.

Some of the artists seemed to view the video as simply a period of time to fill in, as a mere restriction on time. Several artists thus made the most of the timeframe that Dupuy imposed by giving a framework to performances, sometimes going as far as considering it a time trial. Roy Adzac thus attempted to cut an apple into as many pieces as possible depending on whether he had thirty, sixty, or ninety seconds. Joël Hubaut followed the instructions of a voice that challenged him to “put his shoe into his sock” by cutting it frantically with a razor. Jean Dupuy, in reference to Marcel Duchamp’s work Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy, tried to remain impassive after having taken sneezing powder.

While the works that most closely resembled performance often expressed particularly marked formal sobriety (a simple static shot), others illustrated a more varied use of video’s capabilities. Dupuy gave us the impression that a fake arrow – represented by a simple shaft on a piece of cardboard, with a few pencil strokes and a feather – was really moving, by doing a quick side-to-side panorama shot. While some artists arrange special effects by their approach to production and use of simple tricks, others pushed the boundaries of the medium by extreme modifications of image and sound – Rougemont plays with chromatic alterations, Martial Thomas plays on loss of clarity and audio saturation, while Nil Yalter uses de-synchronisation of sound and image, among other strategies.

While many of the artists created their work within the context of Dupuy’s time constraints, Bruno de Lard and Charles Dreyfus were the only ones to immediately play with the location they were given to film their work in, as they sought to show parts of the recording studio not normally filmed. Bruno de Lard’s camera meanders from the entrance of the recording room to a clapperboard with his name on it, while Charles Dreyfus illustrated sound-altering games by taking shots of the faders on the studio mixing table. And finally, through questioning of the medium of video, others addressed television, and viewers’ relationship to it. While it can be tempting to thus interpret one of Ben’s works in which he is immobile, facing the camera with a sign reading “regardez moi cela suffit” [look at me, that’s enough], it is above all Robert Filliou who seems to address this issue in his three videos called L’Esclave [The Slave]. They present a television set showing an image of Robert Filliou giving orders that are carried out by Robert Filliou himself, watching the television set from where his double gives the orders.

By further developing the protocol established one year earlier in the first version of Artist Propaganda, for the first time in France, Jean Dupuy assumes the mantle of a conductor whose reputation was made in Soho in the 1970s – from the group exhibition About 405 East 13th Street to performance evenings like Soup and Tart or Three Evenings on a Revolving Stage. A few months after Artist Propaganda II, Dupuy returned to his first experiments by organising Art Performances / Minute, a series of performances held at the Louvre, thanks to the support of Pontus Hulten, the then director of the Centre Pompidou.

Philippe Bettinelli