Tina Girouard
Tina Girouard
*In reference to her retrospective exhibition at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), visited in September 2024.
I first encountered Tina Girouard's work when researching the art scene in downtown New York in the 1970s. While looking at the first years of 112 Greene Street / 112 Workshop, which became White Columns in 1979, I noticed a couple of exhibitions of her work in their online archives, more precisely, five exhibitions between 1971 and 1975 (one group, one two-person, and three solo shows). The performative aspect of her work caught my attention as the shows were related to everyday actions and spaces. In the exhibition "Live House" (1971), she invited other artists to create a work based on a room, and in the video Swept House (1971), she sweeps a pier under the Brooklyn Bridge and uses the dirt to outline the floor plan of a house. Girouard also collected floral wallpaper and textiles, decorated tin ceilings and linoleum, and a multiplicity of items guests left in her home. The elements she collected were not just objects but looked like prompts for other actions; they still served to organize space, but not as we would usually see. With them, Girouard shifted notions of domesticity, setting a new order. Looking at the installation "Hung House" (1971), which she initially created in her Chatham Square apartment and that was recreated at CARA—with a collection of fabric on the floor, wall, and leaning like a ceiling, and a suspended wood platform with an open suitcase on top and a bedframe on the bottom—I kept thinking of her work as looking at daily actions and movements as rituals of everyday life that could be transformed and reinvented. Her work integrated life and art making, departing from a typology so familiar to us all: the house and the domestic. However, while repeating certain actions, like cleaning and cutting her hair, she created new forms and meanings for them with the participation of others and within newly arranged spaces. As in "Live House" or in the exhibition "Four Stages" (1972), the work was also done by other invited artists, bringing an idea of collective work and the effects of living together. In these and other works, especially in "Four Stages," the space consisted mainly of structural elements, not objects, such as wooden boards and slats and fabric hung parallel to the ceiling and the walls, which didn't have a fixed character, but a moveable one, as if the space was also in movement, in transformation.
