🔍
Advanced Search

Born Paris 1934. Moves to New York in 1965, then Los Angeles in 1968. Teaching Positions : Spring 75, 76, 77, Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, General Studies Department, courses focusing on Performance. 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.