Halved Painting, 1976

That subject is particularly visible in his creation of codes and visual analogues to written and spoken language, as in the performance At Sunrise a Cry Was Heard (first presented in 1974), for which Halved Painting was a prop. In this performance, which is characteristic of de Cointet’s work at the time, an actor tells a beguiling but meandering and nonsensical story about this painting; she claims that it is a “famous vocal painting” discovered in an archaeological excavation in Egypt, and that “long before our era” people ventured from all over the world to hear its “thin, strident song,” emitted “infrequently, but always at sunrise.” The comical incongruence of this fantastical tale and the illegible, opaque painting exemplifies de Cointet’s interest in the abstraction of language and its irreconcilable abilities to both clarify and obfuscate.