TINA GIROUARD

** A schedule for SOUND LOOP and list of performers will be announced in early September. **

Centered around the re-performance of Girouard’s Sound Loop from her Time and Distance series (1970), the exhibition brings together early works by the artist to examine her use of layering, seriality, language, and performance as an approach to world building. Sound Loop features a single performer speaking into a microphone to record sequences of numbers, words, and phrases on a tape loop. The recording process continues as the multiple re-recordings progressively layer on top of each other until they are rendered an undistinguishable density of aural space.

Two drawings both made in 1974, Live Body Beat and Sound Loop, show the ‘score’ for these earlier performances. Each offers a history as well as a set of instructions which, in Girouard’s words, “enable others to repeat the performance.” Her approach to performance frequently left certain choices of interpretation or engagement up to others. Throughout her life she worked in-collaboration, relying on feedback, participation, and cooperation. Girouard seeds our fantasies and visions, creating conditions for art-encounters.

Playful and spirited, I Want You to Have a Good Time highlights the ways in which Girouard’s practice is counterpoint to the dry and self-serious conceptualism and experimental forms of the 1970s. The exhibition includes rarely exhibited video and photographic documentation of Girouard’s performances from this period. Game-like, Girouard’s practice establishes a framework for discovery. Her open structures allow and even encourage performers and collaborators to take the wheel, to bring in their own experiences and ideas, to add-on and build a world of exploration together.

Moving between genres and geographies, Tina Girouard (1946 – 2020) invested objecthood with meaning through ritual, performance, role-playing, and community participation. From the 1970s until her death, she played a galvanising role in the founding and development of a range of alternative art organisations, including the Anarchitecture Group, the interdisciplinary cohort of 112 Greene Street, FOOD restaurant, The Kitchen, P.S. 1, the Festival International de la Louisiane, and as a collaborator in artist communities in Louisiana, New York, and Haiti.

Girouard’s first comprehensive retrospective SIGN-IN is currently on view at the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA) in New York, from September 21, 2024 – January 12, 2025 after debuting at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. SIGN-IN was researched and organized by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, curated by Rivers Founding Director and Chief Curator, Dr. Andrea Andersson, and Rivers Curator, Dr. Jordan Amirkhani.

Girouard’s extensive exhibition history includes a 1983 mid-career retrospective mounted at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, and international events such as the 1980 Venice Biennale, the 1977 Paris Biennale, 1977 Documenta VI and 1972 Documenta V, Kassel. Her work was exhibited widely at galleries and museums including: Leo Castelli Gallery, The Kitchen, Walker Art Center, New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels, Holly Solomon Gallery, David Zwirner, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the New Museum.

In 2019, Anat Ebgi presented the historic restaging of her most important performances Pinwheel (1977) in curatorial partnership with Lumi Tan and The Kitchen, NYC for the inaugural Meridians sector at Art Basel Miami Beach. The following year (February 2020), A Place That Has No Name: Early Works, the first solo exhibition of her work in Los Angeles took place at Anat Ebgi, the last presentation of Girouard’s work prior to her passing.

Girouard was featured in the exhibition With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972 – 1985 curated by Anna Katz, originating at MOCA Los Angeles, which traveled to the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, NY. Girouard’s work is in the permanent collections of the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Ludwig Forum fur International Kunst Aachen, DE; Rufino Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, Mexico; and Stedelijk Museum Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium.