Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Guy de Cointet
French (1940-1983)
UNTITLED from Cizeghoh Tur NDJMB (1973)
4 serigraphs
each 30" x 22.25"

STYLE: TOTAL ART

 


Guy de Cointet was born in France, but settled in California in 1968. In the early seventies, he began presenting installations and performances in a number of galleries, including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Otis institute, the Whitney Museum, Franklin Furnace, and other venues.

De Cointet's works are texts broken down into their visual components. He was keenly aware of the imprecision of language, and intrigued by the ability of people to quickly gain meaning from ambiguous uses of language, open to many interpretations. Through his books, and printmaking projects, the artist attempted to transform the language experience into a visual experience. He also turned to performance as a way of presenting different relationships between the textual images. In 1974, de Cointet created a play, TSNX C24VA7ME, a play of Dr. Hun, which included props of license plates, phone numbers, movie ratings, and words.

Like other books by de Cointet, this print series is an actual narrative, written in a unique code invented by the artist. De Cointet's groundbreaking work in using language in visual art is considered as greatly influential to artists of the era and afterwards, including Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Allen Ruppersberg, and Larry Bell.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

David Pagel, Los Angeles Times, 1/29/99
"Art world memories are notoriously short, so it's refreshing to see the exhibition at Cirrus Gallery of works on paper by Guy de Cointet. A Frenchman who moved to Los Angeles in 1970, this first-generation Conceptual artist published provocatively incomprehensible books, hired professional actors for his equally enigmatic performances and made language-based works that influenced a generation of L.A.-based artists, whose careers met with more widespread success than his own.
In 1983, de Cointet died of hepatitis and his often ephemeral works all but disappeared from public view. The fact that the artist is gone adds another level of mystery to his already riddle-wrapped art. A deep streak of secrecy runs through all of de Cointet's playfully impenetrable works, which consistently resemble complex codes and encrypted symbols, some of which can be deciphered by amateur cryptologists and others that appear to require the time, patience and passion of professionals.
In either case, de Cointet's series of drawings made up of fragmented letter-like symbols, zigzagging lines and abstract logos suggest that the world abounds with so many multiple meanings that the very idea of meaninglessness is ridiculous. Given this state of affairs, art cannot possibly mean too little--provided, of course, that a viewer's methods of 'reading' it are sufficiently adept and flexible."
Colin Gardner, Los Angeles Times, 7/27/85
"If Franz Kafka wrote soap operas, or all playwrights were trained on Madison Avenue, the result would closely approximate the work of Guy de Cointet. The late French-born artist (he died in 1983) was a master of post-modernist performance, a practitioner of that particularly Gallic brand of Surreal theater that fuses elements of farce, the absurd, and structural linguistics.
Cointet draws from a variety of sources: the 19th-Century novel, television soaps, scientific journals, overheard conversations and advertising. This material is filtered through French post-structural philosophy, in particular the writings of critic/semiologist Roland Barthes."