Contributed by Adam Simon / At some point, my IG algorithm sent me a clip of Brian Eno talking about how the term ‘genius’ should be replaced with ‘scenius’ because no artist works in a vacuum. Artists all come from some version of a scene, however small. Perhaps no one illustrates this better than Tina Girouard, who died in 2020 and whose work can currently be seen in NYC at two galleries, Magenta Plains and Anat Ebgi, and at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA). During the 1970s, Girouard was instrumental in founding 112 Greene Street, which spawned White Columns, the maverick restaurant/art project FOOD, P.S.1, the Kitchen, and the Anarchitecture Group. Later, she also collaborated with artists in her native Louisiana and Haiti. Each of the titles of the three concurrent Girouard exhibitions expresses an aspect of her approach. “I Want You to Have A Good Time” at Anat Ebgi and “Sign-In” at CARA directly address the audience and viewer, while “Conflicting Evidence” at Magenta Plains suggests something to be analyzed or pondered.
“Sign-In” is the most comprehensive of the three, a traveling exhibition billed as the first NYC retrospective of Girouard’s work, embracing film, performance, drawing, sequin, textile, and installation. The show at Anat Ebgi, which represents her estate, focuses on her performances, and includes intermittent live ones amid diagrammatic drawings and photo documentation on the walls. The exhibition at Magenta Plains features her silk-screened pictograms on patterned material, the DNA-Icons, created in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop Museum in Philadelphia.
The Magenta Plains show grabbed my attention before I was aware that this was the artist that created FOOD with Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Gooden and Suzanne Harris in 1971. FOOD is probably what Girouard is best known for, having garnered renewed interest as a forerunner of the unfortunately named Relational Aesthetics. The latter was more a catchphrase for describing socially engaged art practices in the 1990s than anything approaching a movement. FOOD was a restaurant in Soho, by and for artists because that’s who lived there (illegally) in the 1970s. Although at times it seemed as much an artwork as a place to eat, it was primarily a restaurant. Matta-Clark’s film documenting a day at FOOD shows Gooden shopping for striped bass at Fulton Fish Market, food being prepared, customers and friends dining, and bread being baked for the next day. There were other kindred restaurants around at the time. As a teenager, I worked at a macrobiotic restaurant in the East Village named The Paradox. Most customers sat at a long communal table, and conversations between strangers was the norm. Yoko Ono was said to have staged performances there.
Viewing images from “Conflicting Evidence” at Magenta Plains online, I didn’t at first realize that Girouard’s symbols, what she called the DNA-Icons, were silkscreened onto commercially produced patterned fabric. They looked to me like abstract paintings reminiscent of Sigmar Polke, the knitted works of Rosemarie Trockel, the pictograms of Adolph Gottlieb or more recently, certain works by Charlene von Heyl or Jonathan Lasker. It’s difficult to convey the impact of Girouard’s works. Her lexicon of symbols, with designations such as Earth, Fire, Tina, Child, Conflicting Evidence, House, Death, Gonna Go, are human scale with vibrant contrasting colors. They possess the decisiveness that comes with reduction. In all, she created over 400 distinct symbols, which she considered a universal language. Many of them can be seen in a display of drawings at CARA. The symbols are specific and personal in a way that distinguishes them from most signage and make them closer to aboriginal art or cave paintings that serve ritualistic or psychic ends. Yet, they feel consistent with contemporary Western art. This fluidity, a timelessness married to contemporaneity, makes them especially interesting. They bear enough of a resemblance to abstract painting that they seem to be nudging that genre out of its well-worn grooves. At the same time, Girouard was primarily a performance artist, and they feel performative.
The exhibition at CARA is essential viewing for an overview of Girouard’s life and work. It includes an installation reflecting her idea of architecture as a form of social space, vitrines displaying working notes and documentation of performances, large-scale sequin pieces and the wall of drawings of her DNA-Icons.
Girouard loved to cook, for and with others. In that spirit, the performers that are restaging key performances at Anat Ebgi add their own ingredients. On October 5th, Erin Leland performed Sound Loop, from 1970. Girouard’s instructions have the performer counting off the numbers one through ten with long intervals in between and in the same manner constructing the sentence, ‘I want you to have a good time’. Each spoken word or number is recorded and played back in a sound loop that grows increasingly discordant as the ambient sound in the room is magnified with each added loop. Leland added her own element, simultaneously sketching the audience on a pad she couldn’t see, on an easel in front of her. The last performance will be by Ken Castaneda on Saturday, October 12, at 11 am.
Second-wave feminism informs Girouard’s work, in which domestic materials predominate. Her first performances were versions of houses – Hung House, Live House, Swept House. Her work has appeared in museums around the world and at prominent art events such as Documenta and the Venice Biennale but rarely in commercial galleries. One senses that Girouard thought of art primarily as a means of engaging others in the myriad modes of thought, play, reimagining, and reinvention. This activity could take multiple forms across different mediums and occur in varied locales – not just downtown NYC but in Louisiana, where she was raised and returned to live in 1978 after a fire destroyed her New York studio, and in Haiti, where she lived and collaborated with Haitian artists including Antoine Oleyant, with whom she created the traveling exhibition, “Under A Spell.” Girouard dwelt in the realm of the possible. I can do this; we can do that.
“Tina Girouard: Conflicting Evidence,” Magenta Plains, 149 Canal Street, New York, NY. Through October 26, 2024.
“Tina Girouard: I Want You to Have a Good Time,” Anat Ebgi Gallery, 372 Broadway, New York, NY. Through October 19, 2024.
“Tina Girouard: Sign-In,” Center for Art, Research and Alliances, 225 West 13th Street, New York, NY. Through January 12, 2025.
About the author: Adam Simon is a New York artist and writer. His solo painting show is up at OSMOS Address, 50 East First Street, NYC, through November 9, 2024.
Great Stuff
So thrilled to see this article, Adam. I first saw her work in Bard and LACMA’s With Pleasure: Pattern & Decoration exhibitions. Intrigued by the news as a soundtrack for folding wildly patterned fabrics. Her sensibility lay, as you say, in the realm of the possible and there is a feeling to her work that is the same, nascent, mobile, not grand, but close to the ground and real.
I first saw Tina Girouard’s work in the early ‘80’s at Holly Solomon Gallery where I was the gallery assistant. Holly showed Tina along with quite a few other women and I believe I sat at the front desk while the DNA/Fabric Workshop pieces were on the walls. I’m grateful that her work is being shown again and also for your wonderful article. Thank you!