When the artifacts of an artist’s life are collected as an archive, they change from river to reservoir, their ideas no longer circulating in the artist’s mind but left for others to navigate. Orienting oneself in the archive of a performance artist can be especially fraught because it consists of the ephemera around a performance rather than the performance itself. How do we experience an artwork that existed decades ago for perhaps only an hour or a day?

Tina Girouard left behind reams of material when she died in 2020, at the age of seventy-three. Between 1969 and 1979 she created some thirty choreographed and lightly improvised performances involving movements, rituals, and symbols drawn from everyday domestic tasks and her upbringing in rural Louisiana; she also made installations, textile works, paintings, and more. All the while, she resisted a definitive view of her art. “I learned not to want to hold on, not to concretize a work to the point of killing it,” she told the filmmaker and writer Liza Béar in a 1973 interview in Avalanche magazine. “I don’t want dead art, I want it to be still breathing.”

Some of Girouard’s performance works do live on in recorded form. She was an early user of video, and in 1970 she began a series about methods of transformation couched as self-care. In Maintenance I: Take One—Role Change, she cuts her own hair, treating the camera as a mirror as she changes her appearance; she called the resulting video a “physical broadcast” to the world. Later that decade she integrated video cameras into her live events, creating versions of the performances that, she thought, could “broadcast an image into the universe that reflects the universe back to itself.”

But often all there is to go on in understanding what Girouard’s work might have looked like are notes, drawings, and photographs. For Beached (1978), performed on the Battery Park City landfill, we have her lists of collaborators and objects (a dozen eggs, five hundred pennies), a loose choreography (“MAKE A MAN ON THE SAND/PUT A MAN IN THE NEST OF SAND”), diagrams of the set-up, and photos of the performance itself, which show a large circle divided into quadrants in the sand, ringed by seated performers digging small holes while an audience watches close by, the Twin Towers and other buildings standing in the near distance.

In 2024 the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art organized “Tina Girouard: Sign In,” the first comprehensive retrospective of her work. By bringing together performance videos, installations, fabric series, and other diverse material from her archive, the exhibition sought to highlight Girouard’s view of art as a place to mix the public and private and to celebrate the value of habitual actions, everyday objects, and collaborative work. Its title came from Girouard’s contribution, Moving In-Moving Out-Sign-In, to the inaugural show at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in 1976, where she asked anyone who had spent time in her apartment to sign in on a chalkboard.

A recent book of the same name offers a more freewheeling way to explore what Girouard left behind. Tina Girouard:Sign-In contains informative essays by Andrea Andersson, the founding director and chief curator of the Rivers Institute, and several other contributors, among them the critic Aruna D’Souza and the poet and curator Anaïs Duplan. The centerpiece of the volume mimics the ethos of Girouard’s archive and her art, consisting of more than three hundred pages of personal and performance photographs, video stills, notebook pages, contact sheets, exhibition announcements, interviews, and other printed matter produced between 1970 and 1998, all presented without captions; brief descriptions are provided on a separate sheet of paper slipped into the book like a detached list of wall labels.

The book begins with a “glossary of major terms” such as glyphs, memory maps, test patterns, wallpaper, and food—mini-essays that introduce different aspects of Girouard’s work. It ends with a chronology that mixes her artistic achievements with entries from her datebook and “life events” like her marriage to the musician Richard “Dickie” Landry in 1973 and the opening of her first personal bank account in 1974. That same merger of life and art, domestic and communal, permeates her work. She wanted it to be “a preserve, a refuge,” she told Béar. It was a place where “functionless things are given a function as art, and the art functions as an experience.”

Girouard was born in 1946 in DeQuincy, Louisiana, in the area known as Acadiana, a swath of twenty-two parishes between New Orleans and the Texas border. Her father farmed rice, and her mother was a special-education teacher. When she was five, the family moved west to San Antonio, but Girouard felt a bond with Acadiana’s Cajun culture and cuisine for the rest of her life. She attended the University of Southwestern Louisiana, where she met Landry, and graduated with a BFA in 1968.

In 1969 they moved to New York City, renting a two-story apartment in a neglected building in Chinatown, at 10 Chatham Square, with the painter Mary Heilmann. The building provided ample space for both living and making art, and it quickly became a hub of the 1970s Soho art scene, with some forty artists and musicians residing there at different times during the six years Girouard and Landry lived there. Girouard was soon a central figure in a tight-knit community of sculptors, musicians, dancers, painters, and performers that included Keith Sonnier, Gordon Matta-Clark, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Harris, and Richard Nonas.

Heilmann described Girouard and Landry as “genius Cajun cooks,” and Girouard’s big pots of gumbo were a regular feature at Chatham Square dinners with friends, which took their cue from community cooking in Cajun country. A photograph in Sign-In shows the aftermath of one of these evenings, the table burdened with dirty dishes and serving platters, bottles, glasses, and cigarette packets. The communal meals fed into Girouard’s work, as did the improvisatory nature of Cajun and “backwater” blues, which she admired because it was “made by a group of people participating equally.”

In one of her earliest performance pieces, Hung House (1970–1971), Girouard constructed an apartment in miniature in a lofty space at 10 Chatham Square, decorating it with objects and furniture left by friends. The walls were pieces of fabric hanging from a second “floor” created by suspending wood platforms from the ceiling. The art historian Pamela M. Lee describes it in Sign-In as a “makeshift architectural structure recalling a children’s playhouse.” The installation remained in place for eight months. Maintenance was also part of the piece: Girouard and other Chatham Square residents periodically lived in, cleaned, and rearranged the space.

In 1971 Girouard participated in “The Brooklyn Bridge Event,” organized by Alanna Heiss on a condemned pier underneath the Manhattan side of the bridge as part of its eighty-eighth anniversary. More than twenty artists performed music, screened films, and created installations from material gleaned from the neglected waterfront. Matta-Clark roasted a pig, serving five hundred pork sandwiches to visitors.

Girouard set up her installation, Swept House, underneath the bridge, near the water’s edge. Rather than clearing the dirt from the area, she made it a primary material, heaping the accumulated dust and detritus into berms that defined the space, which was modeled on her apartment at 10 Chatham Square. She scavenged a couch, rug, and stove from nearby dumps and arranged them in the rooms to create a public version of private hospitality. As she worked, the neighborhood kids thought she was homeless and started bringing her food. They became her performers. One photograph of Swept House shows three boys hanging out in the tidy space, draped across chairs and cushions that surround an area rug. Another shows two boys at the stove while three others sit around a dining table painted onto the ground.

“It’s an achievement,” Girouard told Béar, “to maintain an open life that other people can share and be made to feel at home in.” She called herself an “artist-activist,” and there was, naturally, a political charge to these invocations of daily life. Along with artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose performances of acts like scrubbing floors and gathering trash turned maintenance work into public art, Girouard made visible the invisible labor in sustaining domestic and civic environments.

Girouard returned periodically to Acadiana to go “a-gathering,” bringing materials such as linoleum, wallpaper, feed sacks, and fabric back to New York, and maintaining a connection with the multicultural agrarian community. As she put it, “I go there to gather myself as well as gather materials.” In 1969 she received a collection of eight three-by-twelve-foot patterned silks from Landry’s mother, who had gotten them from a man named Solomon Matlock, a Palestinian dry-goods salesman and a relative by marriage. Girouard called the fabrics Solomon’s Lot, and she used them in about a dozen performances and installations in the 1970s. Details of some of the floral material are included early in Sign-In, giving the reader a chance to recognize them in different works.

One of these was Air Space Stage (1972), for which Girouard draped four of the silks from the ceiling in an airy canopy at the exhibition and work space 112 Greene Street (now the address of a Stella McCartney store, though the gallery lives on as White Columns in the West Village). Sign-In’s chronology mentions that daily performances were a part of the piece, but there’s no evidence in the book of what Air Space Stage looked like when activated by the performers, and in the recent exhibition the work just billowed quietly overhead. Yet Girouard thought of the fabric as a collaborator that had come, like her, from Louisiana. In her interview with Béar, she described using it in 1973 at a wake for the Louisiana musician Robert Prado, where it provided a way for a group of people—all women—to connect “with a kind of intensity…to each other and to an activity.”

Girouard’s collaborators—both human and material—begat a network in which one person or object was part of something larger than itself. The book’s glossary entry for suspension explains that Girouard believed that lines connecting any two points could make a world. She expressed the connective impulse in a kind of poem she wrote about a work called The Bridge to Louisiana: A Collaboration with Barbara Dilley(1973):

The Bridge connects:
you to me
us to them
me to it
you to it
it to them
you to them
me to them
now to then
here to there

A collective spirit was in the air during those years. In October 1971 a new restaurant opened at 127 Prince Street in Soho. Called Food, it was an artist-run space founded by Carol Goodden and Matta-Clark, with Rachel Lew, Harris, and Girouard (the location now houses a Marc Jacobs store). In its first three years, Food employed about sixty artists, who made up 84 percent of the restaurant’s workers. The aim was to support the artistic community. As Harris put it, “Rather than attacking a system that was already there, we chose to build a world of our own.”

A contact sheet in Sign-In shows the artists of Food demolishing the interior of the previous restaurant in order to make it their own and goofing off atop the rubble in the bed of a truck. In the renovated space, the entire kitchen, including the dishwashing area, could be seen through a Plexiglas window from the dining area. (“We did not want a noisy, water-consuming, electric-consuming dishwasher, we wanted a person, an artist, one that could use a job,” Goodden recalled.) The restaurant’s openness, with large windows looking out onto the street, created a sense of theater, too: prep, cooking, serving, eating, busing all become a kind of performance in service of community nourishment.

The book includes a sample menu, a modest, typed broadside topped with a photo of the crew changing the exterior signage. Lunch offerings were mostly soups and stews: gumbos, chowders, and vegetable options, as well as more exotic fare like “used car stew” and “liver dumpling stew and alka seltzer.” Food’s hours leaned late—until midnight on weekdays, 3 AM on Saturdays, and 11 PM on Sundays (which were reserved for “special guest chef night”)—a schedule that must have suited the artists’ untraditional working hours. Goodden described Food as a “spin-off” of 112 Greene Street—in other words, a site for artmaking. For Girouard, her labor there was art. “That was my work,” she said of the year she dedicated to the restaurant. “All my friends, all of the energy, was poured in there.”

Food was also used as a meeting place by groups like Anarchitecture, a “think tank,” as Girouard called it, that was active in 1973 and 1974. The word had been coined by Matta-Clark to signal a rejection of traditional thinking about buildings and space. Precise understandings of it varied; Girouard told the art historian Mark Wigley that for her the word pointed to “the relationship with living environments,” or what she called “psychological scale.” She thought in particular that the kitchen should be the largest and primary room in the house. In artists’ lofts, she explained, there were no walls, so the kitchen became the entire space: a place for living, eating, dancing, and working.

As the 1970s progressed, the routines of domestic maintenance in Girouard’s earlier work expanded into more metaphysical rituals. Her notebooks reveal her thinking about seasons, the equinox, and phases of the moon. A photograph pasted into a notebook from around 1974 shows a large, leggy spider suspended against the sky, its web nearly invisible; next to it Girouard wrote the phrase “NONPREMEDITATED UNARCHITECTURE.”

In 1977 she created Pinwheel, commissioned by the New Orleans Museum of Art and performed in its colonnaded Beaux-Arts Great Hall, a venue unlike any she had access to in New York. The work was part of a group exhibition, “Five from Louisiana,” which featured sculpture, music, painting, and sound art by nationally recognized natives of the state, for whom it was a kind of homecoming. For Pinwheel Girouard incorporated the Solomon’s Lot fabrics and other objects representing the region, such as palmetto fronds and Spanish moss. In the performance, four performers—or “personas”—construct four conjoined “world images” by overlapping the fabrics to form a central circle. Each quadrant is defined by materials (animal, vegetable, mineral, and other), as well as by time, colors, and gender, recombining the binary genders into four possibilities, like a Punnett square, or like the permutations in The Bridge, in which each aspect is networked to the others. The performers then ceremoniously fill their spaces with a host of corresponding objects, such as a ball, a machete, a snow globe.

Girouard said of her work around this time that she was trying to find “a world view”—a sense that she was part of something bigger than herself and her own time. She wanted this feeling to extend to her performers and audiences. In Pinwheel she created a world big enough to hold Acadiana alongside the rest of her life. Like the homemaking of Swept House, which is the same whether it occurs in a house, out on the street, or in a performative artwork, Pinwheel confirmed for Girouard that rituals and objects could be adapted anywhere. In a notebook she kept in 1979, she wrote, “I go inside a house, I see things, I know what’s going on in each room, the things tell me.”

Girouard participated in a slew of major international exhibitions and festivals in the late 1970s, including Documenta and the Paris Biennale. But the economic transformation of Lower Manhattan made the area less hospitable to working artists, and several of Girouard’s friends left the city. Matta-Clark died in 1978, and the next year a fire destroyed much of Girouard and Landry’s apartment at 10 Chatham Square, after which they moved back to Acadiana. Girouard retired Solomon’s Lot with the performance of Pinwheel and, in the 1980s, began making paintings based on a language of signs and symbols and using textiles and stencils that elaborated on the patterns and objects she had used in earlier works. Pages in Sign-In excerpted from her “Signs and Symbols” notebook (circa 1979) show her transcribing pictographs and glyphs that she attributes to Ojibwa, Egyptian, and East Asian languages. She declares that “OBJECT WRITING preceded all other forms of abstract communication.” The things tell me.

One of my favorite parts of Sign-In is a line that Girouard wrote at the start of her “Reminder” notebook in scrunched capital letters, like a breathless exclamation: “I AM ME AND I AM GOING THIS WAY.” A few pages in, she continues the thought:

Everyone wants to know where they are going. The artists want to say “where it’s at” and where they are going. But no one can know where its at because in knowing there is no longer any going—going on. I know I am going this way…. A good art thing is then and now and who and where and keeps going on. Those things say what’s going on now but they don’t say what. They are what. Now, why do those things say those things? I dont know but I keep going that way.

These meandering lines come as close to being a manifesto as anything I’ve read by Girouard, though that genre is too formal, too rigid for an artist who saw collaboration and the pleasures of experience as essential qualities of her work. They insist without insistence that even as she embraced a degree of the unknown—incorporating improvisation into her performances and relinquishing control of the outcome—her route of artmaking was the right one for her, perhaps especially because its end wasn’t in sight. They enunciate the kind of mysteries that her archive holds: facts but not necessarily answers, a community waiting to be found.