Sometimes, the language we’re culturally assigned doesn’t do the job intended. Sometimes, words don’t add up to the many thoughts that define who we are and the relationships we share. And now, in an age when we’re engulfed by the sheer proliferation and profane alteration of diverse data, communications and imagery, wouldn’t it be nice to fundamentally express what we think and feel and––most importantly––be heard clearly? It seems like such a straightforward request with a simple solution. But it isn’t.
A few decades ago, I imagine that artist Tina Girouard faced the same question and, like her near-peer Matt Mullican, sought answers. While Pictures Generation artist Mullican focused on knowledge systems, perception and representation in his gigantic, flat, universal-icon wall art, Girouard instead used simple symbols related to women’s daily life, work and home in her installations, which mixed live public performance with real objects in here-and-now, multidimensional space. She was always directly involved—in body, mind and spirit—expressing her commitment to the act of making, as much as to the evidence that her act gave birth to. She often seemed to leave some part of her personal experience, like traces of DNA, in that work. This was equally true in her wall art.
“Inventing vocabularies has been and remains my mode of art making.” — Tina Girouard (1946-2020)
In early 1980, just three blocks from the Magenta Plains gallery where they currently hang in Tina Girouard: Conflicting Evidence, Tina Girouard created her never-before-seen fabric works, the DNA-Icons. As a socially forward, multidisciplinary artist, Girouard strove to create a new lexicon that could appeal to and be comprehended by broad swaths of regular folk. Importantly, she used everyday domestic materials in her art—from linoleum flooring to cast-tin ceiling tiles—that most of us recognize.
In the current show, Girouard’s base material is commercially printed fabric. With this medium, the artist applied modest, simplified—though adroit—screen-printed images. In one work, Land, a large, silky fabric square with blue and yellow, herringbone-like zebra striping, she applied a bold letter M in the center. Underneath each pointed crest lie a few thick, horizontal bars that brace the zig and zag of the figure. Together, they form the hieroglyph for a mountain range: so simple, so strong. They declare no detailed narrative but instead reiterate the staccato M’s of the background pattern. As such, they display a like-minded, like-bodied continuity of figure to ground, of member to tribe.
In another work, Child, Tina, Gonna Go, Conflicting Evidence, Girouard places spare symbols on different fabric backgrounds that—following the title—run clockwise in a square configuration. The first, in the upper left quadrant, is her very yellow, block-headed, signature Child with arms in runner formation, which sits on a piece of fabric with black and white images of classic 1950s Hollywood television and film stars––from Lucile Ball holding a ventriloquist’s dummy to Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s Monster.
To the right of this is a yellow, black and white, vertically striped square of floral fabric topped with eight screen-printed, burnt-orange circles––some nearly adjoined, others solo––that correspond to Tina, the artist. Below this is a colorful, exotic, tropical island print––also from the mid-twentieth century––coupled with Girourd’s applied symbol for Gonna Go, an on-the-move, humpbacked, spine-covered creature. Finally, in the lower left lies a square featuring yellow, gray, black and white circles with more vertical stripe patterns. Atop this is the artist’s symbol for Conflicting Evidence. A flowing yellow shape with a straight line bisecting its writhing curves, the glyph is reminiscent of the symbol for the serpentine, primordial creator of life, Damballa, from Haiti, where the artist later lived and worked on several of her series with local artisans.
Tina Girouard titled her multipaneled works consistently so audiences could more easily read her core lexicon of symbols. But what do they accomplish together—in this formation, on these fabrics—in Child, Tina, Gonna Go, Conflicting Evidence? In many ways, the piece feels like autobiographical shorthand, a method of reviewing roots. The retro media personalities and narratives from Girouard’s formative youth that are featured in the Child segment of the work could inspire that child to cavort about or drive her to run from on-screen myths towards tangible earthen realities. The paired and single dots of the Tina segment might represent cooperation or independence, respectively––or many other interpretations implied by the infinity of circular forms. The Gonna Go animal spines suggest comic book motion lines, living up to the square’s title, indicating swift primal movement.
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Then there’s Conflicting Evidence, the last square in the work, featuring the voodoo snake. The interesting thing about this particular archetypal symbol––the benevolent life generator––is that, while this version was originally from Benin in West Africa and later used in Caribbean religious healing practices, snakes were often independently featured in other religious traditions as an evil underworld power, as well as a symbol of fertility, life and rebirth––and tied to such Catholic and Judaic prophets as St. Patrick and Moses. Does the difference in the ways various religions use snake imagery make for conflicting evidence? Does this final square represent the generator of the entire cycle we see in the work: a child who learns and breaks from widely accessible cultural stories, develops her personal identity and pairs up within a group, eschews convoluted civilization to find her primal nature in a pastoral setting and finally, perhaps, offers us the god within her, generating life as a provident artist––just like the Damballa? It was the common use of time-honored symbols that Girouard was interested in exploring, combining several from her own updated, re-tooled lexicon in a single piece like Child, Tina, Gonna Go, Conflicting Evidence––unified formally by color and pattern––and often revealing contradictory but coexisting myths we share around the world and across cultures.
While paring down her language to the barest of visual headwords, Girouard also focused on the unavoidable primary elements that make up this practical life on earth. Immense pieces like Water, Air, Earth, Fire and its on-view compatriot Air, Earth, Water, Fire point to those respective essentials so integral to the human experience that without them, perhaps, we tell no stories, make no art, see no beauty. Air, Earth, Water, Fire intriguingly presents these basic symbols—each with its own titular meaning—directly over lush floral prints, as if to perhaps say that it is they that enable this other natural splendor to bloom. Is one the foundation for the other? Maybe they hold equal footing for us. Or do the human-created symbols––in which we frequently invest too heavily––override or supplant the actual nature represented in the backgrounds?
Many other great works in this show at Magenta Plains are worth a solid, sustained gander that also point to essential operating procedures, materials and stations in life from which we are made. They are laid out in two entire, dedicated floors of the gallery, a testament not only to the scale of the work but its revelation and great importance today, some 40-plus years after its creation.
If you can make it down to Chinatown, be certain to take in all the evidence, read the signs and find your roots.
“Tina Girouard: Conflicting Evidence” is at Magenta Plains through October 26.
