PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : THREE WORKS FROM GUY DE COINTET

If Franz Kafka wrote soap operas, or all playwrights were trained on Madison Avenue, the result would closely approximate the work of Guy de Cointet. The late French-born artist (he died in 1983) was a master of post-modernist performance, a practitioner of that particularly Gallic brand of Surreal theater that fuses elements of farce, the absurd, and structural linguistics.

Cointet draws from a variety of sources: the 19th-Century novel, television soaps, scientific journals, overheard conversations and advertising. This material is filtered through French post-structural philosophy, in particular the writings of critic/semiologist Roland Barthes. Barthes studied popular culture and institutions through its so-called codes, the signs and language that create a rational explanation for society’s structure. He dismantled this structure by developing the idea that there was a completely arbitrary link between language and the concepts attached to it.

The implications of this approach became apparent Thursday night when the Museum of Contemporary Art re-created three of Cointet’s pieces at the Temporary Contemporary (the performance will be repeated tonight at 8:30). The works seem to speak their own private language. Cointet’s characters delight in the pleasure of the text for its own sake, speaking a code that they understand quite logically but that the audience must piece together from a series of arbitrary fragments.

We plunged into the deep end right from the start with Jane Zingale’s spirited reading of Cointet’s novel, “Espahor ledet ko Uluner!” The work is written in unintelligible phonetics, so that intrinsic “meaning” is divorced from sounds and words and replaced by intonation, gesture and body language. Just as Barthes celebrated the ideals of pure language without meaning (like reading Chinese characters without understanding Chinese), so we learn to accept the phonetic codes independent from any subject or concept.

With the audience well primed, Helen Mendez then performed “My Father’s Diary,” an account of the tragic events following the death of the subject’s father. The latter has left his daughter a precious book filled with texts, signs and diagrams, which she interprets while relating her adventures after the outbreak of war. The book (shaped like one of Robert Therrien’s sculptures) is merely a collection of ciphers and codes, which Mendez “bends” to fit her own narrative.

With the play “Five Sisters,” which followed, we were by now willing to ignore the codes of conventional narrative--plot, suspense, character--in favor of cultural and symbolic elements. Several years after the death of their parents, four sisters (or perhaps five, Eileen and Rachel are both played by Jane Zingale) meet one Sunday afternoon at their old house in Tustin. Maria (Rikky George in drag) has just returned from Africa and has developed an aversion to California sun. Yvonne (Sharon Barr) is a painter with a predilection for the color red, while Dolly (Peggy Orr) is a busy executive with strong identity problems. Cast members cannot decide whether Eileen or Rachel is actually there, or whether they are in fact one or two people.

The plot is not very important. Character is subservient to the sisters’ absorption with their own problems, and their constant switching of language codes and personality, dictated by the lighting changes of the set (effectively designed by Eric Orr and Stephen Bennett). The cast, ably directed by Gillian Gordon, is splendid, affecting just the right amount of overwrought mannerism to undermine any realistic narrative integrity.

While the work is very funny in its refashioning of cliche, it is ultimately quite subversive. If we are able to decipher the arbitrary nature of codes within a literary text, it is only a short step to apply that knowledge to other areas of communication, to politics, to media, even to this review. Reality becomes inseparable from the text. Read it with caution.