The mouth is a boundary

I believe one’s life is made up of many parts, and that you get your world view or philosophy by adding up these parts.¹
—Tina Girouard

The ancient Egyptian deity Bennu is the ultimate self-starter. Represented as a giant heron, this potent being creates himself and, through his call, helps to create the world, choosing what will and will not be. “I am the keeper of the volume of the book of things,” Bennu proclaims in The Book of the Dead. “I am the one who assigns what exists.”

To watch a great blue heron stalk the shallows, so still in its searching, so fast in its attack, is to watch a self-contained creature, a creature unto itself. Its cry is raw, guttural, and harsh. Elemental. It is easy to imagine how such a being could find its way into a foundational myth.

I thought of Bennu while standing before Tina Girouard’s DNA, a finite world of existing and invented symbols she created (choosing what would and would not be) when just twenty-two. Another sort of foundation, this lexicon, which she also referred to as Signs, Pictionary, and Glyphs, reoccurred throughout her life in various media and combinations: swept into the ground, silkscreened onto fabrics, drawn and redrawn. Language moves the way time moves. It’s not linear and it’s all mixed up.

Viewed from a short distance, the one hundred and ten notebook pages, arranged on the back gallery wall in a five-by-twenty-two grid, could almost be stone tablets. Up close the soft graphite marks are like shadows, smudges, afterimages. Some are obvious in their meanings, others less so, but taken as a whole Girouard’s choices, prosaic and poetic, seem inevitable, a true book of things. Included among the hieroglyphs from ancient Egypt is a long-necked bird, poised to strike. It’s meaning: to find.

As a young woman I drove through the swamps and bayous of Louisiana and Mississippi, traversing raised highways snaking through the watery ghost forests of the deep South. They were lonely, spooky, fecund. How many herons moved silently through the estuaries below, waiting for their prey to find them? How close did I come to Cecilia, where Girouard settled a decade after having left her native Louisiana for New York? She grew up on a rice farm, she says in a 1976 interview with Liza Béar, “in a place that has no name.”² There are three symbols for “house” in her lexicon, as well as signs for other types of buildings, for “road,” “water,” “earth,” and “swamp,” but none for home. Maybe her “home” didn’t need saying; maybe it couldn’t be said. Maybe it was in the doing.³

“We're going to find out what it is all about,” Eric Clapton sings on the radio as Girouard cuts her hair in Maintenance I (1970), a grainy black-and-white video playing adjacent to her DNA, a moving-image self-portrait next to a self-portrait score in parts. I adore her mustache, a barely there constant as she reshapes the rest of her hair.

Girouard made multiple “maintenance tapes”; how could she not? As with so much of her work, not least her DNA, they’re a study in daily life, which is nothing if not a process (a practice) of repetition. To write, to speak, to read—to do any of these things is, inevitably, to repeat oneself. “Rather than introducing some new object or some new idea, one just continues to care for existing ideas and existing objects,” she explained in a 1975 interview, a beautifully understated rejoinder to the tedious “make it new” regime under which, in many ways, we still labor.⁴

Fifteen years ago, I visited the playwright Richard Foreman’s cavernous apartment to observe the director David Herskovits interview him. There, as a fly on the wall, I was startled when, upon greeting us at the door, Foreman said to me, “I have a bone to pick with you.”⁵

At issue was my having criticized an artist for repeating themselves. To repeat, he emphasized, was not necessarily to be lazy, but to go deeper into one’s true material. To find and sustain through repetition one’s own language.

Of course, not all repetition is created equal. Intent matters.

“I wanted,” Girouard says in that same 1976 interview, “to really have a spot where I was alone and in total control; I wanted the power.”

Her DNA contains two depictions of “through me.” In one a line bisects the upper and lower halves of a body. In the other, the body is whole, belly full, lines like limbs radiating outward. The call travels through you, issues forth. The world, once again, is made.

^NOTES

¹ Tina Girouard, interview by Liza Béar, Radio WAVE, WBAI Radio New York, October 27, 1976, unpublished transcript, 15. Courtesy The Estate of Tina Girouard.

² Tina Girouard, “Two Trees in the Forest,” interview by Liza Béar, Parachute, October 27, 1976.

³ Notably, while the DNA appeared as grid poems and in live performances, there’s no record of Girouard having given voice to these symbols—which include “to speak,” “to hear,” and “to sing,” not to mention two full-bodied representations for “shout of joy.” Unlike Bennu, her universal language was for the hand and the eyes, not the mouth.

⁴ Tina Girouard, "Art & life," interview by Mary Ellen Brown for "Some Voices, Some Visions: Women Video Tape Artists, New York, 1975," posted June 24, 2021, YouTube, 19:24 min., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AkpWlvAVNE.

⁵ There’s no record of Girouard and Foreman crossing paths, though certainly they shared connections in the downtown performance scenes both belonged to. I like to picture them cozied up to the bar at Fanelli’s, where I used to go sometimes after reviewing shows in Soho. It's possible I passed both 127 Prince Street, where Girouard helped to create FOOD, and 112 Greene Street, where she lived and worked on her DNA, on my way to and from Foreman’s loft that day.

Claudia La Rocco is the author of the novella Drive By (Smooth Friend); the chapbook-length essays Certain Things (Afternoon Editions) and Quartet (Ugly Duckling Presse); The Best Most Useless Dress: Selected Writings (Badlands Unlimited); and the novel petit cadeau, published in live, digital, and print editions by The Chocolate Factory. With musician/composer Phillip Greenlief she is animals & giraffes, an experiment in interdisciplinary improvisation that performs across the US and has released three albums. She was a critic for The New York Times (2005-2015), editorial director of Open Space (2016-2021) and now edits The Back Room at Small Press Traffic.