‘I Don’t Want Dead Art’

When the artifacts of an artist’s life are collected as an archive, they change from river to reservoir, their ideas no longer circulating in the artist’s mind but left for others to navigate. Orienting oneself in the archive of a performance artist can be especially fraught because it consists of the ephemera around a performance rather than the performance itself. How do we experience an artwork that existed decades ago for perhaps only an hour or a day?Tina Girouard left behind reams of material when she died in 2020, at the age of seventy-three. Between 1969 and 1979 she created some thirty choreographed and lightly improvised performances involving movements, rituals, and symbols drawn from everyday domestic tasks and her upbringing in rural Louisiana; she also made installations, textile works, paintings, and more. All the while, she resisted a definitive view of her art. “I learned not to want to hold on, not to concretize a work to the point of killing it,” she told the filmmaker and writer Liza Béar in a 1973 interview in Avalanche magazine. “I don’t want dead art, I want it to be still breathing.”Some of Girouard’s performance works do live on in recorded form. She was an...