Contact/Sheet: On Tina Girouard
Girouard’s Four Stages were not just environments or objects, they were unfixed material conditions for not-yet-determined relational processes.
Details from contact sheets of photographs documenting performances at Tina Girouard’s 1972 exhibition Four Stages. © The Estate of Tina Girouard / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Contact sheets are a series of strips of thumbnail photographs that are laid out in columns next to each other. They are tools to help a photographer and any interested parties choose which images to develop—a middle step in the process of selection. Contact sheets transform successive time into a spatialized plane of simultaneity, almost like a bit of motion picture film cut into a quilted grid. In viewing contact sheets, the viewer sees a succession of moments and yet is also able to take in all those moments at once.
The three images included above are details from contact sheets containing photographic documentation of Tina Girouard’s 1972 exhibition, Four Stages. As the title suggests, the exhibition consisted of Girouard dividing the artist-run space 112 Greene Street into four “stages,” each constructed out of fabric, rope, wood, and metal that was suspended, hung, or leaning in various relationships to gravity and the supportive architecture of the gallery. The four stages were titled “Air Space Stage,” “Wall Space Stage,” “Sound Space Stage,” and “Floor Space Stage.” Over the course of the two-week exhibition, Girouard and her collaborators (many of whom were or would later become members of the experimental theater company Mabou Mines) performed on, with, around, underneath, near, and alongside Girouard’s spaces and stages.
In the exhibition press release, Girouard detailed that two performances would take place on the opening day of the exhibition (one from “3 pm–6pm” and the other from “9 pm–on”), and that, in addition to this, “continual activities” would occur in the gallery from 1 to 6 pm on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays over the course of the run of the show.In this way, Girouard’s stages were not installations or sculptures, but instead conditions for “continual activities” that evoked the double meaning of stage as both a raised floor or platform for performance and a point, period, or step in a process—a meaning that, while often repressively deployed (the phobic parent admonishing their queer child, “it’s only a stage”) calling something a stage also implies a perhaps playful sense of ongoing transformational process (“I’m in my x stage, check back with me tomorrow”). Girouard’s Four Stages were not just environments or objects, they were unfixed material conditions for not-yet-determined relational processes.
In reviews of recent exhibitions that feature Girouard’s work, critics have ventriloquized Girouard’s materials as having their own desire for as-yet-undetermined relational processes such as this. For instance, in a 2011 Artforum review of the retrospective exhibition 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970–1974) at David Zwirner, which featured Girouard’s “Air Space Stage,” Frances Richard writes that “Girouard’s four-panel canopy of flowered fabrics, ‘Air Space Stage,’…begged to be activated by live bodies, though it wasn’t clear how.”1 More recently, in a 2024 e-flux review of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s installation of SIGN-IN (the traveling exhibition on view at CARA), Cat Kron writes that Girouard’s suspended fabrics seemed to be “straining against their tethers, waiting to be reanimated.”2 According to these writers, Girouard’s fabrics wait, strain, and beg for people, for touch; they call out for activation and (re)animation; they are sheets that in themselves want to animate contact.
In the contact sheets reproduced above, Girouard and her collaborators collectively play with her stages, turning stages (material conditions for performance) into stages (points or steps in a process) and back again. They suspend fabric on rope and suspend themselves over poles. They lean on wood that is leaning on a wall. They sit and pull and crouch and bend.
Girouard’s work is often interpreted as commenting upon the feminized labor of social reproduction—washing, folding, sewing, cooking, and otherwise maintaining life. The contact sheets from Four Stages give a window into another register of gendered labor found in Girouard’s work—the position of the facilitator, a femininized figure who creates conditions for others to gather, who mediates collective practice, who guides groups through their negotiation of the complexity of social contact. These images show Girouard taking domestic objects such as pieces of floral fabric (sheets) and transforming them into conditions for improvised social relations. For Girouard, sheets become contact sheets.
NOTES
1 Frances Richards, “112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970–1974),” Artforum 49, no. 7 (March 2011), https://www.artforum.com/events/112-greene-street-the-early-years-1970-1974-195671/. Italics for emphasis added by author.
2 Cat Kron, “Tina Girouard’s ‘SIGN-IN,’” e-flux Criticism, April 10, 2024, https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/601648/tina-girouard-s-sign-in. Italics for emphasis added by author.
Ethan Philbrick is a cellist, performance artist, and writer. He teaches at various institutions and serves as a performance curator at The Poetry Project. Philbrick's first book, Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence, was published by Fordham University Press in 2023.
