Who is Guy de Cointet?

From the late '60s until his untimely death in 1983, Guy de Cointet was an active member of the Los Angeles art scene whose encrypted works on paper and theatrical productions using readymade language--taken from both the high literature of his native France and the soap operas of his adopted land--were often as enigmatic as the man himself. Looking back on the life and work of this quintessential artist's artist, Artforum presents new assessments of and reminiscences about Cointet by curators Marie de Brugerolle and Connie Butler, writer Jay Sanders, and artists Mike Kelley and Matthew Brannon, as well as Cointet colleagues and collaborators Larry Bell, Mary Ann Duganne Glicksman, William Leavitt, and Jeff Perkins; followed by a facsimile manuscript of Cointet's 1976 play At Sunrise ... a Cry Was Heard.

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Enigma Variations

GUY DE COINTET'S FINAL PLAY was never performed during his life, but in a tribute to the artist shortly after his death in Los Angeles in 1983, at age forty-nine, one of his longtime actresses, Jane Zingale, and the mime Tery Arnold decided to stage and film the work. The Bridegroom was the very last writing that the enigmatic Frenchman ever put to page. The setting is quite ordinary--a family's living room, complete with a couch, a door that opens onto the street, and a curtained window. At the beginning, we meet Pamela, who is seated, wearing a white mask and black shirt and black leggings beneath a skirt. She is sad. Her aunt Harriet arrives; she tries to give her niece hope. Something, however, is immediately amiss: Aunt Harriet speaks in monologues, whereas Pamela answers in mime (and, just once, with a scream). And when Aunt Harriet points through the window to a young man, Peter, and suggests that he would make a nice boyfriend, Pamela quickly pulls out a suitcase full of shoes, dresses, makeup, magazines, jackets, and perfume--and then rushes out the door. Aunt Harriet, now alone, follows quickly but then stops at the window, where she turns to the audience and says sadly, even mournfully:

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  Goodbye, my Calvin ... Goodbye, Charles Jourdan, Adios, little Saint
  Laurent ... Adios, Cosmopolitan, Playgirl ... Adieu, my Guccis ... So
  long, Estee Lauder, Oil of Olay ... Farewell, Vidal Sassoon ...

Perhaps Aunt Harriet is disappointed to lose certain outfits Pamela took. Or perhaps she is somehow saying good-bye to her own youth. Regardless, in this final monologue, the last words written by Cointet, it is clear that products take on the qualities of people--even seeming like actors offstage, as this spoken list resembles so much name-dropping--while actors, in their interactions, can seem more like objects, speaking in a language set somehow at a distance from their own emotions.

You might be forgiven if you thought that Cointet was himself just such a figure out of the pages of fiction, for his personal story can, on occasion, seem too incredible to be true. Drifting through his life were figures ranging from Andy Warhol's muse Viva, with whom Cointet shared a studio loft in mid-'60s Manhattan, to Marshall McLuhan, who was once spotted at a Venice, California, bookstore purchasing a copy of Cointet's completely encoded newspaper, ACRCIT (see Perkins, page 412). Known informally by some in the Los Angeles artistic community during the '70s as the Duchamp of LA, Cointet today is the stuff of hearsay, or even legend--a figure spotted in the background of photographs of early Paul McCarthy performances like Class Fool, 1976, or said to have stood at the head of classrooms at CalArts, where John Baldessari would sometimes invite him to guest teach ("an alternative to the Finish Fetish artists," Baldessari says). Someone, in other words, with a powerful hold on the imagination and yet who now seems all but lost to time, a figure nearly as inscrutable as the wealth of encoded drawings and books he produced; and as uncanny as his plays incorporating snippets of television soap operas, Baudelaire, Mexican radio, and conversations overheard on the streets as dialogue. In his own time, Cointet was recognized for his ability to execute "mirrored handwritings"--an artist who was ambidextrous, he possessed the ability to write a correct line with his right hand and its reverse with his left, like Leonardo da Vinci--and, similarly, he produced an oeuvre to mirror contemporary society so that we would recognize its conventions better. As theater critic Frantisek Deak once wrote of Cointet's structuralist approach in plays such as Tell Me, 1979--in which fashionably attired actresses variously describe a white cardboard square featuring the black capital letters A, D, M, and T (though their actions imply that they are simply waiting for one woman's boyfriend to join them for dinner, which he never does)--the artist juxtaposed "lifelike casual conversation with contrived literary language ... [pointing] out that both are particular styles and that, with a certain distance, the casual conversation will appear contrived as well." Only, now it is the artist himself whose reflection is difficult for audiences to see.