reviews guy de cointet
Guy de Cointet
overduin and kite, los angeles
19 decem ber – 26 January
Much in the way that Bas Jan Ader became a posthumous artworld demand, “Don’t touch that dial”) and acting like a slogan for the frenetic
favourite almost overnight, the late French-Californian artist Guy de condition of the mass media.
Cointet is having a ‘moment’ in contemporary art; institutions worldwide Cointet often turned to television and Hollywood as source material
are restaging his performances from the 1970s, scholarly biographical texts for his drawings (which often recount soap opera-like scraps of narrative)
are being written and his few artworks are being hauled out of storage and for performances like Tell Me (1979), in which three actresses conduct
and returned to the spotlight. While in his lifetime Cointet’s abstract monologues alongside cryptic little objects – two of which are displayed on
theatrical productions occurred largely at the margins of Los Angeles’s Overduin and Kite’s office coffee table much like the domestic set dressing
hip West Coast performance art scene (too calculated for pedestrian art they were created as. Even the meaningless cipher of the six red-stencilled
happenings and too oblique for traditional theatre), his work now takes paintings on view – works that served as a backdrop for Viva in the 1974
centre-stage in Overduin and Kite’s methodical presentation of drawing, performance The Paintings of Sophie Rummel – were taken from licence
painting, sculptural props and performance documentation from the early plates, phone numbers and signage scavenged from LA. Performances
1970s right up until Cointet’s death, in 1983. like this and the 1976 work At Sunrise… A Cry Was Heard (which the gallery
At first glance, the show’s eight drawings on white paper threaten restaged prior to the exhibition’s opening) take the form of art interpretation
to disappear entirely on the gallery’s white walls. Yet these airy surfaces – that is, an actress explaining a painting to her audience. Yet Cointet’s
reveal different and meticulously graphic renderings of lines, each an situations quickly become farcical, and in the end, the ‘reading’ of his artwork
invented system for diagramming language. Through the Night (1972), remains unclear. Similarly, this exhibition’s particular mix of documentation,
for example, moves a single line along an invisible alphabetical axis, objects and drawing makes plain that Cointet’s work is less about trying to
transforming the words of the work’s title into a lightning-like zip. Deep in decode the language of art than it is about the unpretentious pleasure of
the Vast Heart of Africa (1978) translates these very words into a kind of just looking at art, an assertion that makes the undertakings of criticality
new-wave semaphore in which each letter becomes a square divided by and art history seem delightfully immaterial. Catherine Taft
bold, black diagonal streaks. The earliest of these pieces, Twist That Dial
(1971), is perhaps the most legible of Cointet’s textual drawings; in felt-tip
marker, the phrase ‘Twist that dial. Turn that knob’ is spelled out using only
fragments of vertical and horizontal outlines from each letter. Although the
words are economically reduced to a basic array of hatchings, its message
Guy de Cointet, 2007 (installation view). Photo: Joshua White.
reads clearly, reminding the viewer of TV-land (where the talking heads courtesy overduin and kite, los angeles
169 Artreview
march_REVIEWS.indd 169 5/2/08 14:03:29
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