Press release

“And Gravity” – Proposed by Paul McCarthy
Bas Jan Ader, Guy De Cointet, Wolfgang Stoerchle
October 20 - January 5 1997


A tribute of Paul Mc Carthy to three artists from the Californian context of the 70/80's: Bas Jan Ader, Guy de Cointet and Wolfgang Stoerchle. The presentation of significant works of these three European artists living in the USA will give a new light on the artistic scene of Los Angeles.


Bas Jan Ader, born in 1942 at Winshoten, Holland. Disappeared in 1975.
He arrives in California in 1963, studies at the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont and prepares a doctor degree on Descartes and Hegel.

Closed to Ger Van Elk, Bill Leavitt and Allen Ruppersberg, he develops a peculiar work which has a strong impact in California and Europe. His influence is still present today in the works of artists from the young generation, such as Douglas Gordon.

His work includes principally installations, films, videotapes and photographs of performances or actions. Confronting himself to the concept of "masters" in art history, he takes the opposite course of the romantic myth of the artist as a hero. The theme of fiasco, of failure underlies his work. It takes the form of the recurrent action of falling, in a series of performances where the artist appears as a vulnerable instrument. In the film Fall I, Los Angeles, 1970, he tries to sit on a chair, on the top of his house's roof and falls. Fall II, Amsterdam, 1970, shows him riding a bicycle by a canal in which he falls. The loss of balance, the slippage, the tripping are as much metaphors of the concept of slip, etymologically connected to "slippage" in English.

Strongly marked by Mondrian, he refers directly to him in several pieces. In Primary Time, 1974, he remakes the theories on form and colour using daily objects; Dressed in black, he arranges and recomposes bouquets with red, blue, yellow flowers in monochromatic suites. He expresses his interest for the notion of cycle in art history with a computer game project in 1974.

His taste for mystery is expressed until his last project in 1975. This work in three parts, called In Search of The Miraculous takes place first in Los Angeles, with a series of photographs taken during a walk at night in the city. The second part is the crossing of the Atlantic ocean from the USA to England. His boat leaves Cape Code July the 9th 1975, he disappears 3 weeks later. The third part of this work would have been a series of photographs in Holland.

Guy De Cointet, born in Paris in 1934. Died in Los Angeles in 1983.

After studies at the Fine Arts School of Nancy and a stay in North Africa, Guy de Cointet leaves for New York in 1968 where he is the assistant of the sculptor Larry Bell. Then he moves to Los Angeles where he teaches performance at UCLA. He has a strong impact on the Californian artistic scene, from Paul Mc Carthy to Mike Kelley.

His interest in books and vernacular culture makes him close to Allen Ruppersberg with whom he becomes friends.

The exhibition presents paintings, books, films and objects which help to discover the richness of Guy de Cointet's production.

Since his first notebooks, he develops research where poetry, painting and scenarios are mixed.
His first pictorial works show his will to understand forms by structure: “Study all the possibilities of light to dissociate plans, systematically, play with them. By the light first, by the colour then", he wrote in a note of 1963. It results paintings in which he includes objects from everyday life, covered by paint. "The real painting is not a picture, a work in itself, but a step”, he wrote at the time.

The language becomes a recurrent source of inspiration.

Interested by the visual aspect of words, he creates alphabets which are basis for drawings, paintings and texts. Ideograms, anagrams and cryptograms are combined in books which sense is to be developed. For instance TNSX C24VA7ME, A PLAY BY DR HUN, 1974, or A Captain From Portugal by Gei No Mysxdod.

Influenced by the automatic writing of the Surrealists, by treatises on colour of Mondrian or Kandinsky, he mixes systems of language. If the formal aspect is important, it is in the space and movement that his works makes sense. It varies upon the context. Using combinatory means closed to permutations or collages of Brian Gysin or William Burroughs, he receives the influence of Raymond Roussel.

His performances and his theatre plays are an extension in space of this work on the codes. He realizes Stage objects, coloured geometrical forms which participate to the play, being manipulated by the actors. "The action is defined by the stage space" he says. "The visual elements function like enigmas to solve. As the play takes place, these generally abstract elements (…) find their identity and take their place in the dialogue and activities of the actors" says de Cointet about TELL ME, 1980. De toutes les couleurs, his last play, interpreted in Paris in 1982, is the burst of this research on the spacialization of the verb.


Wolfgang Stoerchle, born in 1944, in Neustadt, Germany. Died in 1976, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

W. Stoerchle moves first to Canada, and to the USA in 1964. After studies at Oklahoma University, he goes to the University of California at Santa Barbara. Then he teaches video at Cal Arts, where he has Matt Mullican and James Welling for students, among others.

During his short life, he participates to exhibitions and festivals in Europe, travels to Mexico, New York, realizes videotapes and performances in Los Angeles, before moving to New Mexico where he dies accidently.

"Wolfgang always wanted to break down barriers. His work (and his life) were about confrontation. There was a visceral antagonism to whatever was established. Yet from his earliest paintings to his final performance, Wolfgang used the most traditional the most classical, of elements, the human figure, qualities of beauty of form, simplicity of style. His art was an ironic confrontation with the elements of his own sensibility. He was also an extraordinary human being and a very funny man", wrote Paul Mc Carthy in High Performance, Spring 1981.

Stoerchle's performances and sculptures always have an experimental dimension, his body is the basic element.

The series Critical Work, 1980, consists in 16 sculptures in bronze after models from female genitalia.
"The artist is the exhibition", he declares during the exhibition where he presents Arm Wrestling. Sitting, the elbow on the table, he invites the public an arm wrestle with him. A new start in the artistic communication by which the public is asked to complete the creative kinetic-act.

Performance is for him a way to go beyond the classical categories of sculpture.

His actions provoke sometimes scandals, like The Artist Concentrates Until He Achieves An Erection, 1972, or Urinating Short Spruts On The Rug, 1972, for which he realizes literally the proposition of the title.
The artist's body is understood as an instrument he can use.

Publication of 3 catalogues (one for each artist), bilingual French-English
16 pages, texts, illustrations, bio-bibliographies
Project Room of Le MAGASIN's collection.