What is in the Text? Guy de Cointet and Big Dance Theater

By Tim Griffin

Jan 18, 2024

Walker Publishing Filed to Performing Arts · Part of Performance as Healing

Big Dance Theater, The Mood Room. Photo: Maria Baranova.

For decades, it seems, a common question in Los Angeles has revolved around how the city’s different artistic cultural spheres—from art and performance to film, television, and music—might ever truly come together. Yes, they are always flirting with one another. Gallery scenes are depicted time and again on both the silver screen and streaming devices. And it’s not unusual for artists to collaborate today with music producers, or to be courted by Hollywood agencies for reality shows—all while still other artists hire special-effects or robotics teams to fabricate their work, or they take meetings with Netflix and Hulu in the hopes of creating a series or film of their own.

Aside from such one-off crisscrossing, however, rarely do these communities commingle or coalesce in a project that’s true to each sphere yet observant of their unique differences. When one surveys this landscape in Los Angeles, more familiar is the feeling of different cultures, customs, and codes residing alongside one another—so that the meaning and role of a given project never quite settles into anything that feels wholly natural or fixed. Especially for those working in fine art circles, there’s always another world turning on a different axis in one’s peripheral vision, creating the lurking sense that whatever one makes, or does, is also partly just a prop or performance appearing on a very specific stage.

Of course, precisely such ambiguity has provided uniquely fertile ground for an incredible artistic legacy in the City of Angels. It may even be a defining characteristic of art here. Consider John Baldessari’s appropriations of film stills, whose blocking out of different sections in dramatic scenes makes apparent how structures inform meaning. Or look at Mike Kelley’s sculptural staging of the pedagogical arts institutions as the table-top Educational Complex, 1995, to say nothing of how his photographs and videos in Day is Done, 2005/2006, recast pictures of “extracurricular activities” from high school yearbooks in a manner often recalling low-budget, after-school specials. Among more recent, perhaps more nuanced examples, think of Martine Syms’s turns on the popular tropes of music video in multimedia gallery installations, even while pursuing film and music projects for audiences outside the art world; or Lauren Halsey’s sculptures designed to function as a Parliament Funkadelic-honoring stage set—a throne, actually—for live performances by George Clinton.

But for me, a singular, even archetypal figure in this hybrid conversation is someone a bit less familiar, and not native to this soil: Guy de Cointet, a French artist born in 1934, who resided in Los Angeles from 1968 until his death in 1983. In many ways, Cointet seems mysterious even decades later—regardless of his quietly sustained popularity among artists—in no small part because his work possesses an elusiveness germane to that peripheral vision defining his adopted home.

Certainly, during his life, Cointet never fit neatly into any world of which he was a part. When still a relative newcomer to the city, he was invited by Baldessari to speak in classes “as an alternative to the Finish Fetish artists.” (This was somewhat ironic, given that Cointet first traveled to L.A. as an assistant to artist Larry Bell, part of the Finish Fetish movement, characterized by sleek surfaces and use of new, industrial materials inspired by or envoking the popular culture of Southern California. And, as described by Kelley, who was a fan, Cointet created theatrical performance works whose affection for fashion and popular media ran deeply against the grain of the time’s anti-aesthetic and commercial ethos that prevailed in performance circles. He clearly reveled in lyrical passages lifted from televised soap operas, advertising, and Spanish-speaking radio, which were as apt as poetry by Baudelaire to appear in his scripts—performances of which, moreover, typically featured stylishly attired actresses in dialogue.

The artist is sometimes associated with a style of art known as Finish/Fetish. This movement, also known as the "LA Look," is characterized by immaculate surfaces, use of fabrication techniques, and use of new materials (industrial paints, resins, plastics) inspired by Southern California popular culture (i.e., cars, surf and sun) and the aerospace industry. Bell's use of metallic vacuum-coating technologies serves a prime example of this inclination.

Instead, as Kelley himself observed when accounting for Cointet’s elusiveness, Cointet could rightly be called structuralist in approach: The significance of words, objects, and people appearing and uttered in the gallery or onstage was always in dialogue with their contexts, whose continual shifts in Cointet’s work created time and again a gently vertiginous feeling of everything—whether a sculpture or a spoken sentence—also (or only) being a representation of itself.

For example, even today, if you visit the permanent collection exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, you’ll come across Cointet’s Halved Painting, 1974. And, certainly, it’s a painting. This large canvas hangs among so many others, albeit featuring bold, uppercased lettering that seems intended for an eye chart examination (if not for a blank strip running diagonally across its surface). Yet this painting originally appeared in an eponymous performance, whose entire plot consists of a single actress seeking to interpret the work, calling it an “extremely intricate cryptograph.” Describing the history of the painting based on what she sees in its patterns, the actress says the piece was cut in half centuries ago during an earthquake, before being restored and subsequently emitting an unintelligible sound every dawn. Onstage, the painting, even if recognized as such, is also a prop. And a similar doubling happens with her spoken words: Just as the actress’s interpretation is the stuff of fiction, so our own interpretations as audience members—of both the object and the performance itself—begin to feel somewhat ungrounded, and slightly unreal.

Such a floating sense of play imbues so many of Cointet’s performances. Indeed, the same could be said of his esoteric yet gorgeous drawings, which employ a kind of typoésie: textual and cursive formations that reside on the line of pattern and intelligibility, seeming at once mere image and semiotic sign, prompting an awareness in the would-be reader of their own interpretative projections onto the material. Among his performances like The Paintings of Sophie Rummel, 1974, these valences could entail Janet Susan Mary Hoffman—better known as the Warhol superstar Viva, with whom Cointet roomed when first arriving on these shores from France—speaking aloud the numbers and letters appearing on the canvases onstage. When spoken by Viva with variously quizzical tones and urgent enunciations, these characters would suddenly seem freighted with narrative meaning, however opaque they might have been as texts appearing on canvas or found on the page. And in Tell Me, 1979, the words spoken by actresses describe paintings around them, even while their behavior implies that they are—incongruously—just preparing for dinner. Within the scene, their words seem like stand-ins or placeholders, no longer correlating with their conventional meanings.

The high-wire–like magic of these visual and verbal passages, the sense of surface sometimes eclipsing depth—as well as of each moment’s strangeness within a performance that never has a firm narrative arc heading toward a resolution—is often attributed to Cointet’s love of literature. Specifically, the artist’s admiration for Raymond Roussel, whose rule-based, hyper-stylized writings inspired writers from the Surrealists to New York School poets like John Ashbery, is often underlined by critics. Especially significant here is the writer’s technique of “pairing of two words taken in different senses,” giving strangeness to familiar language—in a manner resembling puns and slips of the tongue—and suddenly turning narratives in unanticipated, fantastical directions.

But Cointet’s biography, which can make him seem a figure out of literature in his own right, also provides some insight. Born in 1934 into a military family, Cointet moved throughout his youth from country to country, including a pivotal stay in Algeria, where he became fast high school friends with photographer Jérôme Ducrot and Yves Saint Laurent. Their shared interest in art, design, and fashion would, among other things, foster an early appreciation of how objects are always inevitably coded: things necessarily enmeshed in the grammar of their specific system within culture. And yet this understanding would also dovetail with Cointet’s later embrace of cryptology when fulfilling his own mandatory military service in France. If everything was encoded, it could also be deciphered, or encrypted: Nothing passing before the eye could be considered a settled matter; meaning was always fugitive, always at once concrete and abstract in nature.

Such was the substance of Cointet’s work across media in art, as well as a sensibility rumored to have been reinforced by recollections of a childhood listening to resistance radio during World War II, when the airwaves harbored communications regularly employing poetic phrases that were, in fact, rich with veiled strategic information. Yet one imagines that it was the city of Los Angeles that provided Cointet with a most perfect landscape. Settling in Little Tokyo when he arrived, hearing multiple languages when listening to the radio and when walking the streets, and with the Hollywood system sometimes residing just behind the next hedge or palm tree, Cointet finally dwelled in a world described by Roussel. If Cointet’s scripts linger in the space between line and language, they still harbor some realism, mirroring a realm where experience is doubled by the city’s entertainment industry, where people are actors, and objects are also, in fact, commonly representations of themselves. His performances became about this dizzying play in a gap in-between. As Cointet would write of his own work, one could never quite tell when one conversation had ended and another had begun. 

For my part, I came across Guy de Cointet very late, in 2007, when I was editor of Artforum. I’d invited Allen Ruppersberg to curate an exhibition of sorts in our pages, asking him to consider how poetry might function in art and, in another vein, how it could speak to changes in our experience of public, political space. (Some discussions of Rimbaud’s verse in recent books had compared his use of language to the piled-up stones of the barricades during the Paris Commune, and, for me, an awareness of our own public sphere’s erosion was already palpable.) It was there that Ruppersberg included an image of Tell Me by Cointet—who had been his friend—which sent me running to the library. Cointet’s formalist geometry of the objects, the language-lesson–like signage, the furnishings that seemed like conceptual images of themselves, the colors that evoked landscapes even while being entirely abstract, the humor and pleasure: All of it was immediately seductive for me, at once conjuring Roussel and, in a potentially critical vein, Marcel Broodthaers.

At the same time, and maybe more provocatively, Cointet’s language seemed uniquely resonant as the first decade of the 2000s was coming to a close. His use of product names like Vidal Sassoon, and free usage of soap operas’ mundane but melodramatic language—paired with, say, the use of saturated color in the lighting of Five Sisters, 1982, so that the designed environment itself seems to shape and determine the actors’ actions and moods—seemed perfectly attuned to the height of an experience-based economy.

And, for me, if his artwork also seemed like a prop, that sometimes simulacral quality spoke to my preoccupation with the question of whether art more generally was by now seeming like a representation of itself. Where was the there there, in a highly commercialized field? And what did it imply that in Cointet’s work, such potential inauthenticity didn’t make it any less moving? Or that it was by sensing the distance, and/or the gap, that it was moving? Just because an emotion had been produced, or supplied, didn’t make it any less real. A better question to ask revolved around whatever one might do with that emotion, or with an awareness of the distance, in turn. (Placing Cointet on the cover, with one sculpture/prop asking, “Are you confused?,” felt at once playful and rightly skeptical—if also a nearly redemptive prompt as a result.)

Soon, many artists and institutions were restaging works by Cointet—including performances by some of Cointet’s original collaborators, like the brilliant Mary Ann Duganne. But I rarely felt like many were breathing the same air as Cointet. And in the back of my mind I always found myself wondering what Annie-B Parson, Paul Lazar, Molly Hickok, and Big Dance Theater might think of the artist’s work. Partly, I’m sure, this feeling arose as I was aware of their expansive knowledge of literature, particularly those veins that once inspired Cointet himself. In their works, I was always continually aware of their sense of play, both in language and in settings. The languages of theater, dance, performance, and so-called visual art communities were always unfolding in a kind of kaleidoscopic interplay, asking to be read from different vantages, and in different registers, simultaneously.

Without a doubt, their marvelous production Comme Toujours Here I Stand, 2009, especially lingered in my mind—featuring a cast remaking Agnès Varda’s film Cléo from 5 to 7—as its action shuttled across disciplines of cinema, dance, and theater; and across temporalities, with different staged passages conjuring rapid juxtapositions and superimpositions of past and present, representation and presence. The screens on which film was projected were echoed by screens that moved swiftly across the stage to create new compartments of action. The distinctions between image and body were tenuous. Most of all, if Cointet took inspiration from Roussel’s interest in how the meaning of a sentence could be totally altered by a change in a single letter—setting in motion an entirely new narrative stream—a pleasure in such transformations has long been known by Big Dance Theater.

And yet, there’s always been a sense of stakes as well, as made clear by The Mood Room. Much as Cointet did implicitly, the piece asks where that place for art still resides in a realm of peripheral visions—whether in their permeating commercial systems or social ethos—and invites audiences to navigate, with pleasure and trepidation, a tenuous social terrain much as Cointet himself did once upon a time in Hollywood.▪︎

Experience Big Dance Theater's The Mood Room at the Walker February 8–10, 2024. Learn more or get tickets here.