Women’s Work: Jane Crawford in Conversation

Artist and Director of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark Jane Crawford and Tina Girouard were friends for years, beginning in the mid-1970s. Their relationship spanned performance, collaboration, and shared loss. Crawford and Girouard moved through countless phases of life together as regular confidantes, co-conspirators, and companions.

In a 1998 letter to Crawford, Girouard wrote:

Dear Jane,

Just woke up from a dream where I was surrounded by great old buddies and meeting new ones. The strangest part of the dream was that all these people were eating boneless gumbo (who ever heard of such a thing?) and were watching old black and white movies on T.V.

The dream/hallucination got even stranger when I found a crumpled up piece of paper in my blue jean pocket with a grocery list of roosters, ducks, capons, okra, etc.

Now I have solid evidence that I was not dreaming and I was abducted by friendly aliens and transported to a love/art/orgie and cajoled into slaving over a witches brew of swampy libations.

Tonight I will make gumbo and savor the memories and essences.

Love,

Tina

With this conversation, we hope to share some of the memories and essences.

Marian Chudnovsky Thank you so much for taking the time to talk today. Tina’s work was so profoundly social, and having SIGN-IN on view here at CARA, I’ve felt the absence of the voices of her friends.

Jane Crawford Have you talked to people about her background and Louisiana? The thing about Tina was she was the personification of Cajun culture; it's hard to separate the woman from the culture.

MC That's a really beautiful phrase. Can you tell me more about what you mean by personification of Cajun culture?

JC Tina lived next to a Bayou, between Baton Rouge and Lafayette, Louisiana. That area is known for its small wooden houses and its Cajun culture.

It was very interesting to me that Cajun women and men both shared a lot of the work of cooking and hunting, and also the music-making and dancing. Tina based her art on that culture, her openness and particularly women's work, which up until then, had been invisible. She utilized that vocabulary in creating performance and installation art.

Tina, herself, was considered rather “exotic” being Cajun in New York. There were a number of other great artists who also came up out of that culture, like Keith Sonnier, Lynda Benglis, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. SoHo was like a gumbo—a melting pot of all different kinds of ideas and backgrounds, but with a little okra thrown in [laughs].

Music was very important to the Cajuns. When I'd go down there, I discovered that behind every garage someone would usually have a cooker and invite you to share in some of the best food you’d ever eaten. Then, after the meal, they’d bring out their musical instruments, including spoons and a washboard, or they’d sit on the porch and tell "lies," which is way of saying “stories about the family.” Meals were a form of community cooking because families were large and no one had a lot of money. It was like the backbone of a community: if someone caught a lot of the crawfish in the bayou, they would make up a big pot of gumbo, and lots of people would come and share in that. It was really a shared culture.

Tina took the language of her culture and brought it to New York City and used it in the context of her work. When she first arrived in New York, she lived in a loft on Chatham Square, which she shared with her husband, Dickie Landry, Philip Glass, Mary Heilmann and whoever needed a place to stay. Tina was used to cooking for a group of people. We never knew how many would show up for dinner. Even when I entered the downtown art world, I knew that if I was cooking and we’d invited a friend, our friend would probably have invited everybody they knew!

MC I'm so curious to hear about how you first met Tina. I'd also love to learn a little more about your art practice and the work you were making at that time.

JC Well, I got involved with an entirely wrong crowd [laughs]. I was an object maker, so I think my direction would have been a little different had I not gotten involved with Gordon [Matta-Clark] and the rest of the gang.

I met Tina in 1975. Gordon had invited me to a dinner at his loft on Wooster Street. He met me at the elevator [laughs]. I was an uptown girl. I had no experience with downtown elevators—it was the kind you had to pull on a wire rope to get it to move. Gordon's loft was on the top floor, so up there you would have to lean out over the empty air shaft to call it to you. Once we got up there, I discovered that he had also invited a "couple" of other friends. It was packed with people dancing, sitting around, cooking. I didn't know anyone, and I didn't know Gordon very well, although we had a mutual attraction. Gordon was like a tsunami or something—overwhelming… but charming! I mean, you kind of just had to hold on. He was Mr. Energy and Charm.

Tina was in the kitchen busy stirring away. She saw that I was feeling very uncomfortable in this crowd because I didn't know anyone except Gordon. She was very warm and friendly. She welcomed me and so I appreciated that! We started talking about what we did. I said I was trying to organize a group of artists—performance artists—and that I would act as an agent to try to find venues for their work and see that they’d get paid. Tina was all into that because she was doing performances for free at the time [laughs].

I discovered that Tina was one of Gordon's best friends, and she and Suzanne Harris—another bright star we lost young—formed a kind of a group with a lot of other artists. Tina and Suzanne were both involved with the dancers who were working with [Robert] Rauschenberg, Trisha Brown, The Natural History of the American Dancer, and others. Dance was very much a part of their artwork.

It was really a fairly small, tight group because there were only about three hundred people living in SoHo at that point. No one had any money and there wasn't much to do except meet for loft parties, so places like 112 Greene Street and FOOD became meeting places to socialize and exchange ideas. They had a huge, profound influence on the artists. For instance, Tina would create “domiciles” at 112 Greene Street Gallery with the fabrics she had (like Solomon's Lot), which she would suspend from the ceiling. Other artists and dancers would then use the spaces as part of their work. Tina would also use the installations to cook there, then inviting people in to sit on the floor and eat gumbo.

MC Can you tell me more about this initiative you were starting, the Foundation of Art Performances and Projects?

JC I started the Foundation of Art Performances and Projects in 1975 because I was very interested in the fact that so many of these downtown artists were on the covers of art magazines, but the galleries didn't know how to sell their work. Essentially, performance and installation artists were ignored by everyone except for the art magazines.

I was able to really get an incredible group of artists—at its height, I think I was working with about forty people—and arrange a kind of performance network in Europe. At that time the plane ticket to Europe was the most expensive part of the performance. I worked it out so that the European institutions would share the cost of a plane ticket and then individual organizations would just have to pay for trains and accommodations. That model worked out really well for a lot of the performance artists. I was able to hook them up with festivals as well as institutions and alternative spaces. I sent Tina to Austria, for example.

MC We have a piece on view here, Mass Transit: Stosz Zeit; I’ve been wondering how she ended up in Austria! I kept thinking to myself: “Who arranged for that? How did she pay for it?” You're answering a lot of my questions. Were you also involved in bringing Tina to Kassel for Documenta?

JC Yes. And also to a festival in Yugoslavia. She did work in Amsterdam, Antwerp, and I believe in Brussels as well. She was great, and there were a lot of places that were very interested in her work.

MC Who were some of the other artists that you worked with? Were you mostly working with folks within the SoHo community, or was it broader?

JC No, I worked with a variety of people. I did not work with musical groups, I only worked with individuals. Laurie [Anderson], Tina, Diego Cortez, Joan Jonas, Robert Kushner, Vito Acconci, Charlemagne Palestine—those were some of the people….and Gordon, of course.

MC You were doing profound work, connecting these artists to performances they would otherwise never have had access to. This kind of work seems to have been so necessary, but also so largely missing from what was on offer, at least in what is found in the art historical record. How long did the Foundation operate for?

JC Not very long. I think it was from the middle of 1975 until Gordon died in 1978, so not very long at all.

While I ran the Foundation I was trying to be very democratic. But after Gordon died, it seemed like suddenly so many of the artists I worked with had people who were copying them. I just didn't have the heart to continue with it

I ended up taking film classes and making documentary films. I met my second husband, Robert Fiore, who was a cinematographer. I've always made things myself, objects, but I’ve just never really shown them [laughs]. As I said, I got in with the wrong crowd.

MC What does your practice look like now?

JC I still have a lot of my pieces. I worked in steel and then wood. They’re mostly three dimensional wall works that were sort of the 1940s aesthetic. Some were freestanding.

The ’70s was a terribly, terribly misogynistic decade. Gordon never considered my work seriously. Laurie Anderson was one of the only ones who really didn't experience that. But the other women artists who did were so wounded! It was a very difficult period. I think 1969 or 1970 was the start of the feminist movement, with Guerrilla Girls, Gloria Steinem, and Betty Friedan, etc. In the 1970s, God forbid you were a woman and a painter. Those poor women who survived are saints; they had to be incredibly strong! Yoko Ono, Mary Heilmann, Ana Mendieta, Nancy Holt—the few of them who did survive were wounded by years of being ignored.

MC Was there a general feeling of solidarity amongst the women artists of the time?

JC Not at that time. It was a little early for solidarity. I remember I liked Ana Mendieta's work a lot. But the guys would say [about her work], "Well, it's not very good. It's just women's work." Having heard criticism of Ana Mendieta from different male artists, I was influenced enough so that I didn't go up to her and tell her how much the work meant to me. I was not strong enough to stand up to them. I was strong enough to find artists and promote them for art performances, so you’d think I would have been strong enough to tell Ana how much I liked her work, but I was influenced by all these successful men. That troubles me today!

MC I mean, of course, it's such a pervasive structure. It's hard to push through that.

JC Yeah. And they were all famous and very macho.

A similar thing happened with Tina’s work. She used a woman's vocabulary, her tools were women's tools, and they just didn't get it, or maybe they did but wouldn’t accept it. Artwork by women was somehow lesser, not to be taken seriously.

MC But she kept doing it, and you kept doing it, and continue to this day.

JC Yeah.

MC I know many folks didn't end up staying in touch with Tina after she left New York and continued on to Louisiana, but you really did. I'd love to hear more about that next phase of your friendship as she moved back to Louisiana.

JC Well, we were best friends. Tina and I just shared a common vocabulary and experience… and friends. I said I never chose my friends because they were nice, but because they were very interesting. But Tina was nice and she was really interesting [laughs]. She was always going a mile a minute, like Gordon. She had always planned to come back to New York.

Before they left, I think around 1979 or ’80, she and Dickie were living in a building a block south of the World Trade Center. The building caught fire and they lost a lot of work. Members of Philip Glass’s group and William Wegman were also in that building. They also lost a lot.

After the fire, I did a funny thing: I tried to raise money for them by holding a twenty-four-hour performance at Mickey Ruskin's place on Chambers Street; I think it was called The Ocean Club. It seemed like every performance artist in the world donated a performance there, but there was hardly an audience, no one to give money. All these artists had such good intentions performing, you know, to help their friends, but there was no audience. Bob Rauschenberg stepped in to help them, as he always did. He gave them money to help them get back on their feet.

Because Tina and Dickie no longer had a place to live, and they had lost a lot of work, they decided to go back to Louisiana to regroup. They were just devastated by all the loss around them. We had just lost Gordon, and then Suzanne Harris died—another of our best friends. It seems like it was just like one hit after the other.

We tried to do a number of things to get them back up [to New York]. They did get a little apartment across the street from the World Trade Center, but it was too small as a studio and it couldn’t hold much art. It just had enough room on the floor for a double bed, a kitchen, and bathroom. They just didn't have enough money to start over. You know, things might have worked out for them if they hadn’t lost their loft. I mean, we all existed on practically no money [laughs]. I financed my Foundation of Art Performances and Projects on my unemployment checks!

Tina continued to make art but she also had to find a way to make money. I think around that period she started working with the Festival International de Louisiane, a Francophone arts festival. Eventually, because she was so knowledgeable and well connected to the art world, she became its director for several years.

Since the early years of her artmaking, Tina had collected symbols and utilized them in her work. In addition to being a warm and generous part of the Festival, the festival also used some of Tina’s symbols as part of their institutional artworks and promotional images.

She befriended a number of Haitian artists and musicians who inspired her to visit the island. There, Tina continued her artmaking, working with different ateliers, until she set up her own workshop. I visited Haiti with her a few times. She set me up with a metal artist who helped me make elements I used in my own work.

MC That's a beautiful testament to how much your relationship grew and evolved, that you spent time in all these different parts of her life.

JC Yeah. I had gone down a number of times before the political situation made it more and more difficult.

MC So much of what you've shared with me touches on your administrative work within the art world—taking on the role of someone who understood how to organize things as needed. And I know you've been wonderfully stewarding Gordon's estate and archives. I'm curious how it feels for you now, having overseen many years of this process of legacy formation work, to watch the art world paying renewed attention to an artist like Tina, or even if you have any insight for the next generation of arts administrators working now.

JC It took many years of supporting the work before anything sold. I was very lucky that Gordon’s work attracted a number of very gifted curators. I just kept my head down and worked. There’s really no magic, you know. Of course, I never expected any money from it. I did it for love. The money came as a bonus.

Unfortunately, Tina had to leave New York at just the wrong time… I think if she had stayed into the 1980s, her work would have been picked up. People became more comfortable with conceptual artworks. Finally now they’re more comfortable with art made by women.

MC Was that something that Tina had always really desired? To have more mainstream recognition?

JC Of course. Recognition is affirmation. I think she would have been really happy if someone had bought her work [laughs] so that she could make more of it. Her late work is especially strong: her flags and sequin pieces!!

Jane Crawford is an artist and the Director of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark.

Marian Chudnovsky is the Curatorial Assistant at CARA.