Notes on Tina Girouard’s Swept House

The most striking aspect of Tina Girouard's Swept House (1971) is how, in the midst of drafting, constructing, and, of course, sweeping it, she gives it away. The house takes form as Girouard picks up her broom to clear a pier beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. With the swept debris, she delineates the walls of a house modeled off her loft at 10 Chatham Square in New York City—a space, many have noted, she frequently hosted friends in. As she articulates the house under the bridge, local children join in its construction by contributing discarded household items, and together, they make a home that serves as a place for hosting. This was neither a charitable act nor simply an “activation” of a space. It was Girouard’s practice of homemaking which—even if momentarily, in the context of curator Alanna Heiss’s Brooklyn Bridge Event—turned the house into a constitutive element of the city. What I'm learning in my overdue study of Girouard’s work is that while the children's contributions were spontaneous, giving the house away was part of the plan all along. Girouard had previously explored the impermanence of a home in her eight-month, continuous performance Hung House (1970–71), where the acts of constructing and maintaining a space for living became intertwined gestures. In her words, “the activities for the piece were also part of its maintenance.”¹ Her approach to emergence and ephemerality also extended to her work as part of the Anarchitecture group (a portmanteau of “anarchy” and “architecture”), for which public and tactically disruptive architecture was essential to opposing modernist architecture’s rational, stable order, imposed from the top down. Again and again, Girouard improvises a form of communal homemaking where the house only becomes a home insofar as it can create and contain life.

In an architectural project, there is typically a distinction between the plan and the planning—in this case, the plan for a house versus the planning of a home. The plan of a house is commonly understood as the blueprint, a set of instructions from the architect for arranging spatial relationships. The plan is drawn from a distance, overlooking the drafting table, whereas the planning, or what Fred Moten might call “the general plan,” is made on the ground.² In Swept House, these two modes converge. Girouard’s broom outlined the floor plan of her loft, where she lived with Richard “Dickie” Landry, Philip Glass, Mary Heilmann, and, as Jane Crawford noted in her interview with Marian Chudnovsky at CARA, “whoever needed a place to stay.”³ The general plan encompasses not just concrete construction tasks but also political, economic, and even metaphysical dimensions. For Moten, this type of insurgent planning is part of the work of undoing modernity’s attempt to link being a “normative self” with taking, owning, and occupying land. By enacting Swept House as a virtual translation of her home, and by insisting on moving hospitality from the private sphere into the public, Girouard rehearses alternative conceptions of privacy and land ownership. The modernist ideal of having “grounds to stand on” is reconfigured less as a matter of property and more as a relational practice, as sweeping, as gift. In this, her performance embodies Moten’s understanding that a home is one that constantly gives itself away.

It is worth noting that in 1971, Heiss had to disguise the Brooklyn Bridge Event as a four-day film shoot to obtain a permit; the New York City Police Department would have arrested Girouard and the local children had they continued to maintain Swept House beyond the sanctioned time—just as they would today. Hospitality has been appropriated by the state. The role of architecture within the monopoly of hospitality is a central theme in Palestinian architect Sandi Hilal’s work, particularly her project Al-Madhafeh/The Living Room (2016), which creates spaces in which refugees with unstable housing can refuse their prescribed role as passive guests and exercise their right to be hosts. These living rooms bridge public and domestic spheres and ask on whose terms inclusion and integration are supposed to work. In the book, Permanent Temporariness, Hilal critiques Jacques Derrida’s notion of unconditional hospitality, noting that he overlooks the possibility for the roles of host and guest to shift.⁴ She calls for decolonizing our understanding of hospitality and, by extension, our notion of a house to call home. In a seemingly contradictory way, when Girouard invites the public to be both guest and host and gives her house away, what she receives in return is a home.

In a drawing sent to Gordon Matta-Clark titled 10 Chatham Square, 2nd floor, in progress, Oct. 69 to June 73, Girouard draws her loft without respect for proportions, alongside a note that reads: “The kitchen + bedroom are in psychological scale!” Translating a drawing into a space for living is a projection of a home, but it’s also a reflection of the self. A term from an unpublished notebook by Girouard (1974) perhaps best captures this architectural practice of home-as-psyche, where dwelling becomes an extension of self: “Nonpremeditated Unarchitecture.” The journal pages contain evidence of alienation and intimidation from the patriarchal modes of production that Girouard experienced within the Anarchitecture group. It’s opaque and sinuous, requiring reading sentences backward and forward, and following references that direct the reader elsewhere. The format offers an architecture that is hidden and only accessible to those she is close with. While Girouard states she has no important theories to present, her ambition is evident: proposals for a construction made in common. She offers a practice of careful yet insurgent hospitality, where neither roles—guest and host—are fixed, and sharing becomes a mutual act that transforms both the giver and the receiver. To give your house away is to share and maintain a home, and oneself, in the process.

^NOTES

¹ Tina Girouard, Hung House Description, 1970–71. © The Estate of Tina Girouard/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

² Fred Moten,“Building and Bildung und Blackness: Some Architectural Questions for Fela” (lecture, MIT Architecture, February 2021), YouTube, 1:29:57, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW1aR3rHeZE.

³ Jane Crawford, “Women’s Work: Jane Crawford in Conversation,” interview by Marian Chudnovsky, Center for Art, Research and Alliances, December 2024, https://www.cara-nyc.org/research/womens-tools-jane-crawford-in-conversation.

⁴ Sandi Hilal, “Sparks: In Conversation with Maria Nadotti,” in Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, Permanent Temporariness (Stockholm: Art And Theory Publishing, 2018), 42.

Mark Hernandez-Motaghy is an artist and cultural worker. They are a co-founding editor of Fortunately Magazine and a Fellow of Civic Media at the Boston Ujima Project.