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Saying no and meaning yes. Communication is full of tricks, traps and misunderstandings − difficult to avoid even with proper linguistic covenants in place. The art of Guy de Cointet and Emily Wardill up the ante: that which is named is other than that which is meant. The viewer realises only gradually and only when instinct is allowed to take over from rationale. ‘Deep in the … circled by hazardous; As the shadows of night approached in Africa; Long and curious chants were raised, stories were told: Oh! What a marvelous vacation!; If the sun goes on torturing me, I will have to make a decision; I won’t live here anymore. A fine head of care.’ These are all titles from the artist Guy de Cointet’s drawings with mirror writing, made between 1972 and 1983. I grouped them together one day because I was unable to choose just one; I was trying to find a title for a project which circles around the artist Guy de Cointet and stumbled upon a site with not just a few, but I think all, of his paper works. I fell in love. I fell in love a second time when I read this quote by him about his work called Tell Me, first staged in 1979: ‘Northern California, October 1979. It’s late afternoon at Mary’s. Her house is situated on the bank of the Sacramento River, in that stretch of the river which is as beautiful as the Danube between Ybbs and Melk, east of Vienna. A few miles away is the town of Courtland, a Chinese settlement for many years, where the famous Dr. Sun Yat Sen lived for a time in exile.After her day’s work, Mary is home planning to spend the evening with some of her best friends: Michael, Olive, and hopefully, the elusive Mark.The way these young women behave, talking and listening to each other, how they see and perceive their surroundings interest me. One of these days, I believe, I’m going to drive up North and pay a visit to Mary.’Tell Me is a piece that is still being performed, and was recently played by the original actors during the Festival aan de Werf in Utrecht. Tell Me deals with ‘abstraction and language’, as the blurb usually reads. But more importantly, Tell Me stages the question of how reality is perceived and interpreted. This is done via a level of literal abstraction; props are used by the actors as discussion pieces and are simultaneously also the real thing. So a painting on stage is a prop representing ‘painting’ but at the same time is a painting in its own right, a so-called ‘prop painting’. In the 45-minute play three women discuss their lives, telling one another bits and pieces: the presents they got from lovers, things that recently happened to them and to others, dinners they are planning, paintings they have bought. The stuff of ordinary conversation. Most of their comments and longer monologues (all three have at least one) are full of sexual innuendo (Olive’s orgasmic encounter with Mary’s new painting, Mary and Michael’s reading of Arthur’s big book, Michael’s rendering of her love letter to Mark…). At one point they visit a neighbour named Arthur who, we learn first from Mary and then from Michael – both enamoured instantly – has an amazing collection of books. Tell Me, like another of Guy de Cointet’s plays, Ramona (1977), contains invented languages, where sounds become words, gestures are sentences; where the actors mostly understand one another not because they use words as we do, but because it seems they have agreed to agree. Agreed to agree on unknown meanings, shifting conventions and altered states. A plate is a hammer, a wooden pyramid is a Turkish carpet, a green trapezoid is salad. Together they manage to set a table, move a carpet or convey the latest gossip through a mixture of regular language and eccentric communication forms, like touching each other’s palms only or waving their arms while making specific sounds. At one point they even ‘sing’ a song without vocals, silently by way of a dance routine. Strangely, watching Tell Me doesn’t generate a feeling of exclusion from the content. It’s as though we are able to follow the absurdist language, having been initiated without even realizing it. As the shadows of night approached in AfricaGuy de Cointet was influenced by the French early 20th-century poet and playwright Raymond Roussel, who also manipulated language in order to recreate a reality slightly askew. Roussel employed a compositional code that he kept secret until after his death, when it was published in How I Wrote Certain of My Books (1935). In this, he explains his method: ‘I chose two similar words. For example, “billiards” and “pilliards” (looters). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two sentences found, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second. Amplifying the process then, I sought new words reporting itself to the word billiards, always to take them in a different direction than that which was presented first of all, and that provided me each time a creation moreover. The process evolved/moved and I was led to take an unspecified sentence, of which I drew from the images by dislocating it, a little as if it had been a question of extracting some from the drawings of rebus.’De Cointet’s performances deal with language and meaning and the point at which these meet: the conventional codification of life, the regulation of communication – or the codification of relationships, if we were to agree that life consists mainly and perhaps only of these. ‘Metalogue’ is a term which might fit here. A metalogue is a conversation which ‘stands above’ the actual facts, figures, data discussed. It’s bigger than its smaller comprising parts and thus deals with the act of the conversation itself, its ‘method’, you might say.A metalogue isn’t really about the details of the information being passed, but about how we position ourselves in relation to the subject. Gregory Bateson (1904−1980) was a British anthropologist, social scientist and linguist who practiced the metalogue as a device to explain sociability, conventions and the mechanisms behind understanding. He also practiced it as a means of therapy. He believed that the metalogue could be an active vehicle in learning about or teaching social behaviour. Many of his books contain metalogues he held with his daughter (the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson). In a question/answer format reminiscent of Socrates’ dialogues, Bateson gets to the bottom of things – big things. I remember once reading a metalogue called Metalogue: Why Do Frenchmen? which taught me that people really only ever have conversations in order to be liked. More recently I read Metalogue: Why Do You Tell Stories? In this, the daughter is clearly older; she holds her own, countering her father’s logic with her own experiences. And though it appears they’re discussing the complicated subject of the abstraction of language, we realize soon enough that behind this first layer of dialogue lies another: the real – or perhaps more encompassing – subject of cloaked ‘metamessage’. The metamessage is – put simply – the context of the message; the message is not so much the content of the information as it is the nature of the message. The type of conversation, of communication, its nature, must be asserted to the listening party and accepted by both in order for the conversation to begin. You have to say: ‘I’m going to play’ before you start playing; otherwise, you won’t be playing. If the sun goes on torturing me, I will have to make a decisionAn excerpt from La Duchesse De Langeais, a short story by the 19th-century author Honoré de Balzac (recently made into a film of the same name), could for argument’s sake be considered a kind of metalogue: ‘Uncle, so long as I cared for nobody, I could calculate; I looked at interests then, as you do; now, I can only feel.’ To which her uncle replied: ‘But, my dear little girl,’ […], ‘life is simply a complication of interests and feelings; to be happy, more particularly in your position, one must try to reconcile one’s feelings with one’s interests.’[1]Honoré de Balzac decided to make all his work fit under one metatitle, one major umbrella called La Comedie Humaine, which he subsequently subdivided into different metasections: ‘Etudes de moeurs’, ‘Etudes philosophiques’ and ‘Etudes analytiques’. ‘Etudes de moeurs’ was further divided into various ‘scenes’, such as ‘Scenes de la vie privée’, ‘Scenes de la vie de province’, and ‘Scenes de la vie Parisian’. A passive-aggressive compulsive obsessiveness oozes from his master plan as self-appointed ‘secretary of the modern world’, which, because of its ‘majorness’, its fervent grip on narrative, the recurring characters, the symbolism of each interaction, makes it seem a very contemporary body of work. Balzac even reshuffled things occasionally, placing all of his preceding works within one of these divisions, depending on the mood, tone and subject matter, and forming a veritable highbrow soap opera concerned with the trial and tribulations of domestic France. In all, Balzac wrote over ninety short stories ¬– some only existing as titles, some overlapping. La Duchesse de Langelais was part of the 11th edition of La Comedie Humaine and was concerned with ‘Scenes de la vie privée’ but possibly also straddles ‘Scenes de la vie politique’. As in many of Balzac’s works, this short story contains a strong measure of didacticism. Life is simply a complication of interests and feelings, Vidame sums up, while the uncle explains how actions and words must be calculated. They might have added: ‘What you say is not important, it’s how you say it; or, how you say it is what you say.’Long and curious chants were raised, stories were toldThe screen is white, as though painted, chalky; a girl’s voice begins telling us a story about Ben, a 52 year old Arkansas-born man who works for a postal company and whose parents didn’t finish high school. The screen goes black and an older man’s voice comes on, which, slowly, precisely, smoothly, begins to lure us – possibly Ben – into a hypnotic sleep. ‘Concentrate on my voice,’ he begins, ‘now listen very, very carefully.’ The female voiceover and the male hypnotist are not communicating with one another – at least not obviously. After several ‘exchanges’ and intermittent white and black, the screen remains illuminated and we finally have a sense of where we are, or perhaps, where they are. The ‘scene’ we see and will continue to see fragments of, consists of a group of heavily made-up and baroquely clad people (actors?), standing at first close in a row, some masked, all hooded. They are in a large room; there is a coffee table with a vase of flowers sunk halfway through a hole. The actors walk around or sit, sometimes drinking, sometimes talking. They appear to be part of a ritual – this could be a play, but we’re not sure. There is a carpet, a couch, pillows, speakers, geometric hippy-like paintings on the walls and room dividers. The 10-minute-long 16 mm film Ben (2007) by Emily Wardill (UK, 1977) follows two parallel narratives, the one a story of Ben and the other a hypnotizing session; the audio is supported or, more precisely, accompanied by, intermittent fragments of soundless scenes. Ben, we learn, is an only child, whose parents were ‘weird’. People find Ben a bit ‘odd’, mainly because he seems to smile when he sees people who are angry, and often seems distressed and agitated when someone is laughing. The details of Ben’s life and psychological make-up are told as the male voice cuts in now and then, saying things like: ‘Everything I tell you now is true. Everything I tell you now is true. Everything I tell you now you can and will do immediately.’ While we listen we see, for example, someone crouch down pretending to pick up some kind of object; or a detail of a hand-sown sneaker; or someone from behind sitting on the ground, arms and hands covered in long sock-like gloves. The camera is panning the room, zooming in and out, but not smoothly. Just as the narratives are cut, so are the visuals. The most dramatic moment in Ben’s life, we find out midway through the story, also proves the most pivotal for the film. Apparently Ben once took a box he was meant to deliver and gave it not to its rightful recipient but to someone on the street, telling the person: ‘This is a gift from God, please keep it with you always.’ Again we see someone handing something invisible over to someone else ¬– and this is where the fragments seem to conjoin: as we watch an actor handing over the prop, a box-like pyramid-shaped object which appears white and isn’t much larger than shoebox, perhaps made of wood, perhaps of styrofoam, we can connect the dots: Ben and his package, the listener under hypnosis doing as told, and the actor passing his prop. The male voice tells us to open our eyes, and when we do that, we will find ourselves in an empty room. He then says: ‘Go down and pick Ben up very slowly, and bring him back to me.’Ben is a psychological portrait where three levels of narration interact – and equally don’t. One level of communication adds to the others, though without explaining them, without getting into the details of what is happening. There are moments where we sense associations – it is, after all, human to will that things connect. Perhaps the characters symbolize Ben, perhaps the male narrator is speaking to Ben rather than to us or the actors – perhaps; but crucially, these moments are undercut by the overall tone of disassociation, of fracture. How Wardill’s film correlates with Cointet’s work is made wonderfully clear at this moment: when the narration and the visual momentarily melt together, the moment the character bends down to pick up a prop that suddenly becomes ‘Ben’. This prop is uncannily like one from Cointet’s Tell Me, both in physical nature and connotation. It looks like a Cointet prop and it acts like one, you could say. And like Cointet’s props, this one acts as itself, as a prop, and at the same time as a representation of itself – possibly ‘Ben’. As in Tell Me, the narrators and characters in Ben describe a situation which is framed unconventionally by the author, whose methodology we have to agree to accept while watching it. Here, then, begins a line which can be drawn from Ben to Cointet via Balzac and Bateson – this is a line of the authors’ made-up worlds, psycho-geographical spaces, constructed through a particular use of language. Linguistic games create a dense network where social communication occurs on a level just next to our own. We have to understand the conventions of its method in order to be admitted into the story. Perhaps less like Father and Daughter than Patient and Analyst, these voices take part in an odd sort of meta mismatched dialogue where life indeed – for us and for Ben – is simply a complication of interests and feelings.[1.] The Duchesse De Langeais by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Ellen Marriage, section 10, first published in 1834.Emily WardillFortescue Avenue/Jonathan Viner, London6−29 SeptemberFollow Fluxus Emily WardillKunstverein Wiesbaden6 September 2008−May 2009