Art Review - February Issue - (Page 135)
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/mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 10 REVIEWS
MAKING WORDS GUY DE COINTET: MAKING WORDS WITH THINGS C E N T R E R E G I
O N A L D ’A R T C O N T E M P O R A I N , S E T E 17 N O V E M B E R
– 4 F E B R U A R Y Guy de Cointet, Ethiopia, 1976, installation with
Robert Wilhite, MAMCO collection, Geneva. Photo: Marc Domage. © CRAC-LR,
Sète Guy de Cointet’s work is full of the aura specific to rarely
shown, underappreciated artists, and remains complex to exhibit. If the
ideal contextualisation of his textual and sculptural pieces is the
performance, a cryptic nostalgia prevails when encountering the drawings,
books, props and stage sets by the artist, and it is reinforced by the
displays editions under windows, objects on platforms, video recordings
with their dated textures used to give an account of this seminal work.
This specific relation to time and museum is not just a side e ect of the
French artist’s premature death, in 1983, in Los Angeles; it is also a
deliberate aspect of his work. The space between his primary, nearly
primitive, brightly coloured sculptures and the kind of
hyper-sophisticated protolanguage of his texts and dialogues is in many
ways filled by de Cointet’s claim for an independent and eccentric
position. Uneasy with connecting to an epoch or a movement, his artworks
seem to stem from contradictory time flux. They distinguish themselves
from minimal art by the ambiguous superficiality and lightness of the
easily disposable abstract sculptures; from conceptual art by their
surrealist poetry imbued with American vernacular pop references; and from
performance art by the exaggerated theatricality of the acts. On the day of
the opening at CRAC Sète, two performances, Tell Me and My Father’s
Diary both 1978 , were re-enacted by the original actresses. This subtle
historical masquerade, and the peculiarity of its exactitude, made
tangible the oblique fetishism of the original staging. The actresses
seemed to be wearing a mask, allegorical altogether of time and camp
beauty, their dialogues sounding alternatively archaic and contemporary:
the sculptures and paintings they manipulated, freshly covered with a coat
of paint de Cointet used to paint them over and over again , functioned as
overly made-up props charged with spiritual power. But beyond this
esoteric conglomerate of elements and levels, there is genuine playfulness
and freedom. In one of the drawings from the series My Marriage, one can
read, handwritten on top of a delicately coloured trapezoidal shape:
‘When I got divorced, it hit me bad.’ Of course, like the rest of de
Cointet’s works, this drawing is encrypted: behind the abstract shape is
a letter, behind the sentence is a symbol, behind their association is a
subconscious meaning. But this cryptic quality doesn’t rest on any
opaque intellectualism. Rather, it unveils the mechanisms of language with
the help of raw material, such as TV slogans, ads and heard conversation,
and demystifies abstraction and formalism through this direct technique
of collaging elements together to borrow a neologism from General Idea ,
treating them on an equal level, as no more or less than signs. With this
particular blend of abruptness and refinement in his method, Guy de
Cointet was a major influence on the artists present in this show:
Catherine Sullivan, Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, whose installation
Performance Related Objects 1977–9 functions well here, as if mirroring
and allowing Ethiopia 1976 , another performance ensemble by de Cointet,
to fully exist – without, however, being ‘re-activated’. Ophélie
Reynaud-Dewar ARTREVIEW p123-138 Reviews AR Feb07.indd 135 3/1/07 03:15:30
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Art Review - February Issue
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