Maintenance I: Role Change, 1970
I give myself a haircut using the video system as a mirror. It is completely private, no one in the room. The audience is on the other side of the mirror.
—Tina Girouard*
When my family left Seoul for New York, my mother’s struggle henceforth became one of reclaiming her life as a homemaker, which she felt she was at risk of losing when she began what would become a twenty-five-years-long labor in nail salons. She was unsparing in her criticism toward her coworkers who seemed to pay no regard to their domestic life. It was a form of grief that had direct consequences on fostering a new community, as she located her loss in the lives of others who were doing their best to survive as first-generation immigrants.
In her effort to care for our living space, my mother salvaged reproductions of Impressionist paintings from free calendars and framed them in gold-trim frames she found from the 99-cent store. There she discovered temporary vinyl wallpapers, which she used to cover up the oil-stained walls of our rental’s kitchen. I admired her determination, but it bordered on unfeeling. I wanted to talk to her about missing Seoul, but I feared she would be dismissive or find it distracting from her homemaking project. Our conversations revolved around future planning—the day we would have our own rooms or furniture she was eyeing.
Growing up with a mother who overidentified with the home, I pulled away from ideas of the domestic in my own caricatured understanding of it. Therefore, it would be typical of me to be more disinterested in Tina Girouard’s work than to be drawn to it—installations of fabrics with botanical patterns, performances involving domestic acts such as sweeping, cooking, and washing—yet I sensed something about her approach that was discordant, awkward, and uneasy, which matched my ambivalence toward the home.
I feel a mixture of heartache and envy when I think about Girouard at her building in Chatham Square, where she lived with her then husband, the musician Richard Landry, and friend, the artist Mary Heilmann. Heartache because her gumption to make a home in a new city reminds me of my mother’s, and envy because not only did she make a home, but she also made art and community in ways my mother would never realize in her lifetime, even as my mother in many ways was an artist. The Louisiana-born and -raised Girouard was remarkably prolific in Soho’s art scene from 1969 to 1978, working in proximity with artists such as Joan Jonas, Laurie Anderson, Gordon Matta-Clark (with whom she founded FOOD, an artist-run restaurant, alongside Carol Goodden), and the Philip Glass Ensemble.
Maintenance II: Role Change Two, 1970
Another solo self portrait with the addition of an audio commentary a la Howard Cosell describing the swift snaps of the scissors, etc.
When Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN debuted at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, in the spring of 2024, Hung House (1971) was featured prominently, creating a home within a gallery space. The installation, which Girouard created at her Chatham Square apartment using items left by guests who had been there for parties and rehearsals, is a makeshift two-story home precariously assembled using two-by-fours, wooden planks, rope, chains, and pieces of fabric. In the gallery, a wooden platform suspended from the ceiling held an open suitcase, a rod for hanging clothes, and a cot inviting temporary refuge. Girouard allowed visitors to interact with the installation however they liked.
The curators Andrea Andersson and Jordan Amirkhani, both of the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought in New Orleans, organized this first major retrospective of Girouard’s work, with help from assistant curator Jade Flint. They placed a television inside this restaging of Hung House that plays a series of films Girouard made between 1970 and 1976, titled Maintenance. These are video performances in which the artist is seen doing “self-maintenance,” such as cutting her hair. Girouard’s Hung House and much of her oeuvre is guided by close attention to the ritualistic labor enmeshed in the domestic, which she called “maintenance.” But it is revealing that this notion of maintenance extended for Girouard to her body and appearance. This extension illuminates an aspect of maintenance not as evident in the home: how maintenance is an act of conjuring, as well as “catching up to yourself.” As she said in a 1977 interview, “The hair is the one part of the body that’s alterable. … First you change and then comes the physical broadcast.”
Installation view of Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York, 2024. Photo by Kris Graves, courtesy of CARA. Tina Girouard Art © The Estate of Tina Girouard / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The version of Hung House recreated at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) in New York, where Girouard’s retrospective traveled this past fall, was more pared down—this time, it featured just the suspended wooden platform with the open suitcase, and a cot underneath. Smaller in scale than at the Ogden, this exhibition seemed to be comprised largely of ephemera and documentation rather than actual “work.” But the essence of Girouard’s work is that what is and can be documented constitutes art itself.
Onlookers may conflate Girouard’s work with conversations about the neglected and invisible parts of domestic and gendered labor. And when people talk about Girouard’s work blurring the boundary between art and life, they may see her work as reconciliatory based on the former binary. But what Hung House and her Maintenance films show is that the tension in Girouard’s work exists not because she made the unseen seen, but because her work articulates how ritual is not a result of something existing, but rather what brings it into being and keeps it in existence.
Maintenance III: Washing, Rinsing, Drying, 1972
[This] is not a role change, it is a maintenance tape. Washing Rinsing and Drying “Solomon’s Lot,” 8 lengths of silk, each 12′ long. Used in performances + installations from 1969 to 1977.
I wrote a review of Girouard’s show after it opened at the Ogden for a mainstream art magazine, expecting it to be published around May of 2024. The piece received an OK from the editor and went into copyediting. A week or maybe more passed, and I never received word about any copy edits. When I followed up, I heard from a more senior editor that the editor I worked with was no longer there, and due to a flux in timing, they had lost the chance to publish the review. They immediately offered a kill fee. I responded, saying that fortunately, the exhibition would travel from Ogden to CARA in the fall, and therefore, my review wouldn’t be untimely if published later. The editor said that would not be an option. Normally, I would have just given up, taken my fee and the piece elsewhere, but it seemed worth offering yet again that I could rework the piece to fit CARA’s rendition. After probing, the editor stated that actually, my piece did not meet the magazine’s standards. Perhaps there was an internal problem, or this editor simply did not like what I had written. But later, that magazine published a review of CARA’s show written by another writer and included both the Ogden and the CARA shows as among the best of 2024. I felt made an outsider in a conversation of which I had briefly been a part.
Installation view of Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York, 2024. Photo by Kris Graves, courtesy of CARA. Tina Girouard Art © The Estate of Tina Girouard / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Having my initial review scrapped, I was presented with an opportunity to use the writing process as a way to receive some answers from Girouard, as a basic review was not big enough to ask the questions I wanted to ask of her. Writing about Girouard has been one of the most difficult challenges, not just because my wounded ego caused self-doubt, but more so because her work is about the edges and encounters of things like the home, our body, and language. Trying to write made me mute, but in trying to live despite and through my writing, Girouard’s work came into view.
Maintenance IV: Role Change Three 1975
With Suzanne Harris . . . In this work Ms. Harris does a few portraits of me, going from very long hair through several intermediate lengths to short and sassy. Remember Peggy Fleming??
One of the earliest words and concepts I learned in Korean through my mother was“살림.” Used as a verb it means homemaking; as a noun it denotes the domestic sphere. In shorthand, the word would be used to describe “setting up house” which could mean to live together or be married. A wife who performs 살림 would oftentimes refer to her husband in Korean as“바깥양반”, which transliterates to “outside man,” while conversely, a husband would refer to his wife as“집사람”, which means “house person.” While patriarchy is an undeniable reality in Korea, there is no hierarchy implied by the terms outside man and house person; they are simply a designation of arena.
In Swept House (1971), a performance curated by PS1 Contemporary Art Center founder Alanna Heiss as part of the Brooklyn Bridge Event, which marked the 88th anniversary of the bridge, Girouard went to a pier underneath the bridge where there were homeless settlements and swept the dirt and detritus she found to create an outline of a home. After she did this, local children found discarded furniture and added to the work on their own.
Swept House hearkens me back to the house person and outside man, as it makes clear how Girouard understood the duality of the home: that it is not only a condition of rank or visibility, but of delineation. By marking a home through a simple act of outlining, Girouard reveals the precariousness of the factual distinction of the “inside” and the “outside,” notions so often distorted and loaded with value and hierarchies.
Maintenance V: Role Change Four 1976
A professional portrait . . . I went to Antenna “beauty parlor” and told them to do whatever they wanted. This one had a surprise ending for me.
Writers joke with one another that we can locate the home of a writer under deadline by finding the tidiest one—as there is nothing like being plagued by an immovable sentence to cause one to move around the house and put it back in order. My friend, the writer Marcus Civin, said he is glad for his in-unit washer and dryer, because when he is writing, he can scarcely find dirty clothes as he compulsively does the laundry. The hum of the washing machine brings him back in front of his laptop, writing again.
Installation view of Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York, 2024. Photo by Kris Graves, courtesy of CARA. Tina Girouard Art © The Estate of Tina Girouard / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
While writing this essay, when I was stuck on a word, I slowly went through the ritual of my daily transformation, thinking about Girouard’s maintenance films. I filled in my brows, and I curled my lashes. I pressed and rubbed my index finger into an eye-shadow pot that fits the groove of my finger and ran it over my eyelids. I did that again with a second color that muted the pink. Before I moved onto liner and mascara, something a lover once said to me echoed in my ear: You look so beautiful in the morning. It wasn’t said presumptuously as in, “You don’t need makeup,” but as a sweet confession. Going back to my laptop after transforming into the me that most, including myself, would recognize as me, I thought about how my relationship to my writing would change as I meet it as this self. Perhaps the makeup would serve, as the outlining and haircutting did for Girouard, a ritual that brings me from the outside, into the writing.
Maintenance VI: Role Change Five 1976
It included a four channel installation at Film Anthology Archive of previous “Role Changes” with a live haircut–role change performed on me by Suzanne Harris.
Around 1970, Girouard was gifted eight lengths of fabric from her mother-in-law who had received them from a dry-goods salesman named Solomon Matlock. Girouard brought them back with her to New York, and “Solomon’s Lot” became active participants in her performances and installations.
The documentation photos of Pinwheel (1977) show a quadrant on the floor made up of four different fabrics, each quadrant framed by a border made of additional fabrics, all of this coming together to form what in structure resembles a quilted blanket. The floral, botanical patterns add to the quotidian aesthetic. Around the center, where the four sections meet at a single point, there is a circular metal armature. One performer stands by each quadrant, approximately equidistant from the others, holding up a long length of silk fabric from Solomon’s Lot so that it forms a cross. In a performance that lasted around an hour, the performers activated their areas by enacting rituals with objects that relate to personae—of animal, vegetable, mineral, and others—Girouard had assigned to them.
In the video documentation of Pinwheel, the performers move assuredly, not choreographed like in a dance but as if they are making the breakfast they had made daily for ten years, or taking a shower and getting dressed for the day. As familiar as they seem, these movements do not make the spectacle of this performance appear banal or everyday. I was struck by how the performance relates American domestic life to America’s craft and decorative culture with a sense of remove and reverence.
As a Korean American, I had always felt a similar distance toward American decorative details. For instance, my family moved into a prewar apartment in Brooklyn that had crown moldings. This architectural element, so unfamiliar and therefore peculiar to me, seemed to pulsate, reminding me of being on the outside, like the grammar of the new language I did not yet know how to speak.
Maintenance VII: Role Change VI 1981 “Live and Loud from Louisiana”
The current version, commissioned by A. I. R. includes a two channel installation showing selections from “The Maintenance Tapes.” The update is in the form of a slide series depicting the current haircut. This ‘role change’ will go beyond the body to include the environment. I have recently moved my studio to rural Louisiana. Via amplified live telephone hook up I will describe physical and psychological changes brought about by the dramatic change from city to country. The beginning of a Southern Saga?
The difficulty I find in writing about art is in the question and confusion around the notion of the “outside.” Art writers and critics are viewed as those outside of making, who make remarks from the outside. This belief persists as critics are asked to account for any “conflict of interest” in their writing about the proposed topic, to determine how validly “outside” they are.
I send a pitch to an editor proposing to write about an artist, and I am met with positive interest, but “on condition that you don’t have any kind of relationship with the artist that might constitute a conflict of interest,” the editor elaborates. I am obliged to divulge: “I am friends with the artist, but they have not asked me to write about their show. In fact, my friendship with the artist began through my genuine interest in their work.” I am not surprised to hear that this constitutes a “conflict.”
Installation view of Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York, 2024. Photo by Kris Graves, courtesy of CARA. Tina Girouard Art © The Estate of Tina Girouard / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Giorgio Agamben writes that “the outside is not another space that resides beyond a determinate space.” Rather, Agamben sees the outside as “the passage, the exteriority.” He continues: the outside is a “face.” No wonder that in exploring the concept of maintenance, Girouard not only thought of the home but also of her appearance. A home, just like a face, was for her a passage, a threshold.
My made-up face is not different from me, but it is the threshold that allows those who are not me to experience my exteriority, which in turn is how one could have some access to my interior. This is perhaps what made seeing my face in the morning moving to my lover—not because of any delusion of having caught a glimpse of the “real” me—but because a bare face makes the condition of being still outside of each other more plain. It is that very movement toward, the going, the potentiality, that is the experience of love itself. In regard to art criticism, while I admit to its outsideness to art, the writing that I am wholly interested in is the kind that believes that outsideness is a portal, a movement inward.
*All epigraphs from Tina Girouard’s personal papers, as presented in the exhibition Tina Girouard: Sign-In, Center for Art, Research and Alliances, New York (2024–25).
