Edizioni Conz

Jean Dupuy, Heinz Gappmayr, Bernard Heidsieck, Arrigo Lora-Totino, Various artists, La Livre II, La Livre, 1988, Paint, marker, canvas, paperboard, stamps on paper, print on paper, 35 × 25 × 9.2 cm, Edition of 14

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Jean Dupuy, Heinz Gappmayr, Bernard Heidsieck, Arrigo Lora-Totino, La Livre II, La Livre, 1988, Edition of 10 "La Livre II" comprises 9 works by Arrigo Lora-Totino, 2 works by Bernard Heidsieck, 11 works by Heinz Gappmayr, and 11 works by Jean Dupuy. All works are signed and dated. Paint, marker, canvas, paperboard, stamps on paper, print on paper 35 × 25 cm (13 ¾ × 9 ⅞ inches) Box dimensions : 37,9 x 28,8 x 13,9 cm The edition was made in 1988 in Brunnenburg Castle, Merano, Italy. Courtesy of Archivio Conz, Berlin 2024

Paint, marker, canvas, paperboard, stamps on paper, print on paper
35 × 25 × 9.2 cm
(13 ¾ × 9 ⅞ × 3 ⅝ inches)
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Jean Dupuy was a French artist, an experimenter in art and technology, and a bold affiliate of Fluxus. He began his career in Paris, training as an architect at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts but soon shifted to painting, approaching the visual research of abstrait lyrique. Sensitive to the French orientations of poetry and performance art of François Dufrêne, Brion Gysin, Bernard Heidsieck, and Robert Filliou, as well as to the expressive tonalities of Yves Klein and Georges Mathieu, Dupuy’s career as a painter was particularly successful but, in his own eyes, unsatisfactory. In 1967, he destroyed his canvases and left Paris to move to New York. The following year, Dupuy realized Cone Pyramid (Heart Beats Dust), a parallelepiped of wood and glass, inside which a small cluster of red pigment is deposited over an elastic membrane, illuminated by a cone of light. Using a stethoscope, the viewer’s heartbeat activates the column of red dust, causing it to convulse rhythmically in the air. In 1968, the sculpture won the Experiments in Art and Technology competition and was presented that same year as part of the landmark exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and simultaneously in the exhibition Some More Beginnings at the Brooklyn Museum. In the early 1970s, Dupuy began performing collectively with numerous New York-based artists. He organized performances at the Judson Memorial Church, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, and the Louvre. Events such as “Soup & Tart” at The Kitchen included contributions by Philip Glass, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Joan Jonas. In his Grommet Studio in New York, he hosted a series of performances and concerts, documented in the catalog Collective Consciousness: Art Performances in the Seventies (1980). On the occasion of a group exhibition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1976, he met George Maciunas and became involved in Fluxus, participating in numerous related events. Dupuy returned to France in 1984, settling in the hinterland of Nice. His book Ypudu, Anagrammiste, published that same year, is his first collection of anagrams and word games. Between 1988 and 1991, Dupuy spent six months in Verona with Francesco Conz. Together, they produced a series of editions entirely dedicated to wordplay and phonograms. Dupuy’s works are included in some of the most prestigious institutional collections, such as those of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Musée d’art contemporain in Lyon. His works have been shown in exhibitions at the Fondazione Mudima in Milan (1990), the Frac Bretagne (2014), the Frac Bourgogne (2016), and the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain de Nice (2007, 2015, 2016).
Bernard Heidsieck was a French sound poet who experimented with spoken word and magnetic recording techniques. Parallel to his position as vice president of the Banque Française du Commerce Extérieur in Paris, his artistic career spanned a variety of movements such as Beat, Fluxus, and Minimalism. Heidsieck began performing his Poèmes-Partitions pieces in the mid-1950s, using typographical spacing to direct his performances. Subsequently, he began using a tape recorder as a supplementary device for writing and retransmitting, expanding his experimental horizons. Since he was an opponent of passive reading and an advocate of active and participatory poetry, Heidsick’s performances often included expressive features, such as physical gestures or the use of props. Like Henri Chopin, Heidsick is recognized as one of the leading innovators of sound poetry in France. From the juxtaposition of phonetic experiments and magnetophonic technologies with tape recording and cut-up techniques, the exploration of a new artistic language was pursued through the rapid development of electronic technology. Heidsieck regularly worked on poems and recording series, such as Trois Biopsies (1967–70), Passe-Partouts (1969–80), and Derviche/Le Robert (1982–86), a collection of twenty-six sound poems. Later works include the Respirations et Brèves Rencontres series (1988–1995), which use recordings of the breathing of famous authors to create the illusion of interaction or dialogue with the deceased writers. Another milestone is Vaduz, originally composed in 1974 for the inauguration of the Vaduz Art Foundation and reissued by Edizioni Conz in 1998 in a fine boxed set. For this, Heidsieck placed Lichtenstein’s capital city at the center of a lengthy anthropological and ethnographic description of the mingling of cultures around the world. A former president of the Commission Poésie at the Centre National du Livre, Heisick also co-founded the “Rencontres internationales de poésie sonore,” which took place in Rennes, Havre, and at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1980. Heidsieck additionally spent several years assisting in the organization of the Polyphonix festival, which he presided after Jean-Jacques Lebel. In total, Bernard Heidsieck staged over 540 public readings of his works in twenty-four countries. Beginning in 2017, the Centre Pompidou has awarded an annual non-book literary prize in honor of and named after Bernard Heidsieck. Since 2022, the Archivio Conz has partnered with the prize.
Arrigo Lora-Totino was among the most prominent interpreters of Italian concrete and sound poetry. After initially focusing on painting in the late 1950s, he then turned to phonetic experimentation affiliated with poetry, visual art, and electronic music. Lora-Totino was committed to promoting the circulation of international poetic experimentation by patronizing many projects and activities. He was founder and editor of the journal Antipiugiù, published in four issues in Turin between 1961 and 1966. Initially devoted to traditional linear writing, the periodical opened progressively to concrete poetry. Collaborating with international authors such as Franz Mon and Ugo Carrera, the magazine published collective poems created through the intermingling of the writings of all correspondents. In 1966, he founded the monographic magazine Modulo, which featured painting, photography, and theater. A single issue was devoted to poerty, now acknowledged as the first anthology of international concrete poetry printed in Italy. With the composer Enore Zaffiri and the analytical painter Sandro de Alexandris, Lora-Totino co-founded Studio di Informazioni Estetica, which operated between 1966 and 1975. The association promoted conferences, events, and artists close to the field of poetry and electronic music. Works such as the book-object Logogrammi (1966) and the curious Liquimophone, an innovative tool used to compose “liquid poems,” are known for onomatopoeic play blended with sounds, movements, gestures, words, and typography. With the collaboration of the German curator Dietrich Mahlow, he presented the first exhibition of experimental poetry at the Biennale di Venezia in 1967. In 1978, he published Futura, a comprehensive historical anthology of phonetic and sound texts recorded on seven LPs, for Cramp Records. The collection includes recordings of pieces ranging from Futurism to Dada, from Lettrism to concretism. Similarly, in 1980, he edited a series of radiophonic episodes devoted to the history of sound poetry, broadcast weekly by Rai Radio 1, Italy’s first public radio station. Throughout his artistic career, Lora-Totino has taken part in numerous international exhibitions and published countless limited-edition books. Major retrospectives were held in 1996 at the Circolo degli Artisti and in 2015 at the Associazione Barriera, both in Turin. His works are included in numerous private and public collections, including the Donna Regina Museum in Naples and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Artworks (43)