Institutional Patterns
In Swept House, maintenance—a term Girouard also used to title several early seventies videos involving laundering and self-grooming—is a contradiction. Dust and refuse both define and erode its patterns.
The familiar, as we have seen, becomes the expected and thus we take it as read, unless an unfamiliar context arouses our attention.1
Tina Girouard’s two 1973 videos Test Patterns, like the televisual tools to which they refer, are exercises in calibrating perception. Both off-the-cuff and technologically self-reflexive, they have common ground with many New York artists’ first experiments with video in the early seventies. The more formally inventive of the two works, in black and white, comprises a series of visual “patterns” that the artist constructs for the screen by layering and permutating floral-printed wallpaper strips and fabric skeins. Their combinations and superimpositions are animated in the video by stop-motion or accentuated with fades, reversals, and shifts in focus.
A woman’s body—the artist’s—appears variously and partially. Calves and feet tug on, and emerge lissomly from, a layer of fabric; an occasional forearm propels a wallpaper roll across the screen. Arranging herself in a supine diagonal, the artist mimics flat wallpaper strips, and near the end of the video, a crush of rose-printed fabric fades to her fetal posture. Like the inchoate wallpaper pattern that nearly absorbs the likeness of Nabi painter Édouard Vuillard’s sister in a haunting 1893 interior scene, decorative prints both conceal and tenuously support Girouard’s figure in Test Patterns, imbricating her with her environment.2
Through camera angles and adjustments in focus, the video stages a series of depth distortions, turning the viewer into the subject of perceptual tests. What at times appears as a flat, abstract composition becomes at others a set of material artifacts laden with historical and cultural associations. The “ground” mutates from the negative space that surrounds repeating motifs on decorative surfaces to the studio floor on which these patterns rest.
A “test pattern” is a visual sequence devised and broadcast by midcentury institutions of analog mass media like Radio Corporation of America and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. Like the tone of a tuning fork, such an image—commonly, a set of polychromatic vertical bars—offered a visual benchmark for adjusting a television set’s incoming electronic signals; these modulations controlled the contrast, brightness, framing, and aspect ratio of the resulting image. Girouard’s Test Patterns alludes, then, not just to ornamental motifs but to “conceptual or perceptual frames” that define this historically particular technology and its regulation—the “environmental and imperceptible” social structures that arrange our visual field.3
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The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception. Antienvironments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention…4
Swept House began with a blueprint.5 The artist explains:
I began by sweeping a chosen area and using the dirt to form the outline of a house. Once the house existed in outline specific areas were developed. A pile of sand was swept to form a bed with pillows. Other artists in the show and people from the neighborhood began filtering through the garbage around the bridge and bringing props for the house.6
The local participants Girouard refers to—mostly children and adolescents—appear in extant photographs of her “site installation” abutting a massive stanchion of the Brooklyn Bridge. They lounge three-across on the sand bed or languidly align their bodies with the misshapen contours of salvaged furniture. The patinaed stone behind them nearly fluoresces in the slantwise light. In other photographs, Girouard sweeps in a worker’s jumpsuit, backlit within the bridge’s vaulted underbelly, or partially diffused by dust, as her gesture blurs both her own limbs and the broom they propel.
Swept House sits alongside other installations—Cloth House (1970–71), Hung House (1971), and Live House (1971)—that Girouard constructed while living in a shared studio in nearby Chinatown. “Psychological scale” and its relationship to domestic space—the kitchen in particular—was a concern for Girouard both in her engagement with the early-seventies working group of artists known as Anarchitecture and the artist-run kitchen FOOD, which she would open with Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden in Soho later in 1971.7
Girouard described Swept House as “a site installation that dealt directly with the concept of maintenance.”8 In histories of postwar New York art, the term maintenance is commonly associated with Mierle Laderman Ukeles, an artist who, like Girouard, worked in and around domestic, art, and urban environments, including the municipal Department of Sanitation.Both Girouard and Ukeles used “maintenance” as a lens for testing these environments, including their tacit institutional frames and social determinations, against one another.
Ukeles’s 1969 “Manifesto of Maintenance Art” drew upon an array of contemporaneous intellectual currents that include sixties urban planning and the environmental media theories of Norbert Weiner and Marshall McLuhan.9 Both the high-profile and publicly circulated 1969 Plan for New York City and language derived from cybernetics indirectly informed Ukeles’s conception of maintenance, which she later likened to negentropy, or the processes that reverse entropic disintegration.10 A sandbox is the set for the entropic parable Robert Smithson constructs in his 1967 essay on Passaic, New Jersey’s post-industrial “ruins in reverse.”11 As a child runs in circles, regardless of direction, sand that was once distinctively white and black turns irrevocably grey. In Swept House, maintenance—a term Girouard also used to title several early seventies videos involving laundering and self-grooming—is a contradiction. Dust and refuse both define and erode its patterns.
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No matter how public in placement, immaterial, transitory, relational, everyday, or even invisible, what is announced and perceived as art is always already institutionalized.12
Swept House was commissioned for Alanna Heiss’s 1971 Brooklyn Bridge Event, in which a group of artists involved with Anarchitecture and the artist-run exhibition space 112 Greene Street created site-specific, temporary works under the Brooklyn Bridge and on neighboring piers in the East River. The three-day festival ran concurrently with a public commemoration of the bridge’s construction that Heiss had organized for the Municipal Art Society.
The Brooklyn Bridge Event would later become the origin story of multiple nested institutional histories. In 1972 Heiss incorporated the Institute for Art and Urban Resources (IAUR), an itinerant organization that would go on to program exhibitions and performances at other disused spaces throughout the city. These included the Clocktower Gallery in lower Manhattan and a school building in Long Island City. In the 1976 exhibition Rooms, seventy-eight artists would inhabit and reinvent Queens Public School No. 1 as an exhibition space, with many highlighting, through various structural interventions, the implicit conversion of a decrepit Romanesque Revival building from one type of institution to another. What began with similarly immaterial, transitory works under the Brooklyn Bridge—another form of public infrastructure—would converge, at the turn of the millennium, with the expanding purview of the city’s mainstay art institution, the Museum of Modern Art.
NOTES
1 E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 113.
2 See Susan Sidlauskas, “Contesting Femininity: Vuillard’s Family Pictures,” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (March 1997): 85–111.
3 Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum 44, no. 1 (September 2005), 281; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964), ix.
4 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 1967), 68.
5 Two floorplans and a kitchen view of the artist’s home and studio at 10 Chatham Square in Chinatown are among Girouard’s sketches photographed by Matta-Clark for possible inclusion in Anarchitecture’s 1974 exhibition at 112 Greene Street. No record of the installation exists, and the contributions were presented anonymously, though some of the records have been identified and reproduced in Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation, a 2018 volume (and related exhibition) on the fabled but hitherto under-researched group. The project, rigorously researched and presented as a forensic investigation into the archives, issued from a collaboration between the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), a research institution in Montreal that holds Matta-Clark’s archives. Mark Wigley, Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation (Zurich: Lars Müller/Montreal: CCA/New York: Columbia University GSAPP, 2018), 404–405.
6 Tina Girouard, typescript of description of Hung House (1971), The Estate of Tina Girouard.
7 This phrase appears in another drawing by Girouard that was a candidate for inclusion in the 1974 exhibition at 112 Greene Street. Wigley, Cutting Matta-Clark, 403.
8 Girouard, typescript.
9 Ukeles’s conception of “maintenance” is further historicized in the author’s forthcoming dissertation, the first monographic treatment of the artist’s work. Kenneth R. Allan remarks upon Ukeles’s uncommonly acknowledged relationship to McLuhan in “Marshall McLuhan and the Counterenvironment: ‘The Medium Is the Message,” Art Journal 73, no. 4 (Winter 2024): 40–41.
10 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “An Analysis of Maintenance Art: Inquiry and Creative Process” (master’s thesis, New York University, 1974), 157n29.
11 As a mentor and notable influence on Matta-Clark’s work and thinking, Smithson and his ideas likely infiltrated Anarchitecture discussions. Robert Smithson, “The Monuments of Passaic,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (December 1967): 51.
12 Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” 281.
Kaegan Sparks is a writer, educator, and curator. She is completing her doctorate in art history at the City University of New York and is currently based in Jackson, Mississippi, where she is associate curator at the Mississippi Museum of Art.
