LOUISE BOURGEOIS

 

 

Art is not about art. Art is about life.

 

L. B.

A TINY, SLENDER WOMAN WITH LONG hair tied back in a ponytail, regal posture, a shrewd expression, and a forceful walk swept through the Pierre Matisse Gallery, an entourage of young men trailing behind her. She was dressed in black, something dramatic, and her presence acted on the room like a bolt of electricity. “Who is that?” I asked my husband. “Louise Bourgeois.” “Oh, of course,” I answered. A couple of years earlier, in 1982, The Museum of Modern Art had mounted a major show of her work. Curated by Deborah Wye, the exhibition brought the seventy-one-year-old Bourgeois, who had been showing painting and sculpture in New York since the forties, into the art world limelight.

That was the only time I saw her in the flesh. After a couple of minutes, she vanished, followers in tow. Although the details may not be perfect, my memory of what I felt as I looked at her is vivid—a mixture of awe, fascination, and amusement. There was a theatrical quality to her sudden entrance, as if she had staged it for our benefit. Louise Bourgeois is now ninety-five and still making art. The Tate Modern will show more than two hundred of her works in an exhibition that opens October 11 and will run until January 20. It’s a major retrospective that includes many of her most famous sculptures as well as less well-known pieces that were made during seven decades of intense artistic labor.

The story of Louise Bourgeois’s early life has become so enmeshed with her work that many critics have been seduced into biographical or psychoanalytic readings of the art, densely punctuated with pithy pronouncements from the artist, who is also a prolific writer: “My name is Louise Josephine Bourgeois. I was born 24 December 1911. All my work in the past fifty years, all my subjects have found their inspiration in my childhood. My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.”1 Or perhaps more tantalizing (at least for someone with an analytic bent): “50 years old be kept in the dark—result rage result—frustration from knowing/10 years old unsatisfied curiosity—rage outrage result rage/kept out/1 year old—abandoned—why do they leave me/where are they/3 month old—famished and forgotten/1 month old—fear of death.”2

The second of three (surviving) children, Bourgeois began her life on the Left Bank, where her parents owned and operated a gallery. Later, the family moved to Choisy-le-Roi and then to Antony. Her father served as a soldier during the First World War, was wounded at the front, and after his return, the family opened a tapestry restoration studio, where Louise learned to draw in order to assist in the family business. She suffered terribly when her father brought his mistress, an Englishwoman, Sadie, into the house under the pretext that she was the children’s tutor, a situation his wife, Josephine, an avowed feminist, tolerated. Sadie stayed for ten years. Louise attended the Lycée Fenelon, and in 1932 studied mathematics for a short time at the Sorbonne. That same year, she cared for her critically ill mother, who died in her presence in September. Bourgeois left the Sorbonne for various art schools. At one of them she had Fernand Léger as a teacher. She knew the Surrealists, but understood they had little use for a woman artist and was frankly irritated by their preaching and antics. In 1938, she met the art historian Robert Goldwater, married him, and moved to New York, where she has lived and worked ever since.

Stories that are told and retold harden. Part of the pleasure we take in fairy tales and myths is that their forms are fixed, but family stories often turn rigid as well. Our narratives about tormented fathers or depressed mothers or suicides or lost money serve to explain ourselves. They order the chaotic and fragmentary character of memory, which is not stable, but dynamic and subject to change. Bourgeois’s tale of the family interloper has been reiterated time and again both by the artist and by her critics since she first revealed it in Artforum in 1982 under the title “Child Abuse,”3 but neither it, nor any other story or poetic utterance from her writings, can explain her art. The work has its own oblique vocabulary, its own internal logic or anti-logic, its own stories to tell, that resist placing an external narrative, no matter how titillating, on top of it. Its meanings are made in the encounter between the viewer and the art object, an experience that is sensual, emotional, intellectual, and dependent on both the attention and expectations of the person doing the looking.

Before I had read a word about or by Louise Bourgeois, I was fascinated by the emotional power of her work, how it stirred up old pains and fears, summoned complex and often contradictory associations, or echoed my own obsessions with rooms, dolls, missing limbs, mirrors, violence, nameless threats, the comfort of order, and the distress of ambiguity. Bourgeois can take you to strange and hidden places in yourself. This is her gift. What may be deeply personal for her finds its translation in art that is far too mysterious to be confessional. Throughout her long career, however, there are repetitive themes and forms that appear in multifarious guises and mutations. From the paintings first shown in 1947 under the collective title Femme Maison to the mesmerizing Cells of the nineties, the artist has vigorously reinvented versions of the body/house—as refuge, trap, a bit of both—and she has done it with an eye and mind that interrogates the history of art as well as the human psyche.

The mind and its memories as a metaphorical place, topos, is ancient. Freud, too, was fond of a spatial trope—archaeology. Dig and you shall find. Repressed memories. Screen memories. Fantasies. For Aristotle, every memory has two parts: simulacrum, a likeness or image, and intentio, an emotional color that is an associative link to a person’s inner chain of experiences. Word association as a clue to unconscious processes would become an essential part of psychiatry in the nineteenth century, and today brain scientists know that emotion is crucial to memory. What we don’t feel, we forget. I have come to think of Bourgeois as an artist who roams the antechambers of a charged past, looting it for material she reconfigures as external places and beings or being-places. The house/women of Femme Maison are in and of the architecture that can’t hold their huge but vulnerable bodies. The debt to Surrealism is obvious. As in Magritte’s Le Modèle Rouge (1935) in which boots and feet are one, Bourgeois makes the container the contained. But while the impulse in Surrealism was always toward objectification— turning person into thing—Bourgeois’s does exactly the opposite. The inanimate houses come alive.

Her early sculptures, or Personnages, first shown in 1949, are thin, life-size rough-hewn wooden figures that have often been cited as an early example of installation art. These abstract tower/beings or “presences” inhabit a room in relation to one another and to the visitors who come to see them. “They were about people in my mind,” Bourgeois said in an interview. Stiff, hacked, and precariously anchored, one expects them to teeter or even topple. When I look at Sleeping Figure, I think of someone on crutches. Portrait of Jean-Louis is a boy-skyscraper. A work from the same period, the abstract The Blind Leading the Blind, with its long multiple legs, feels startlingly like an advancing crowd. But these objects also resemble three-dimensional signs or characters from an unknown language inscribed in space. Like letters, they are stand-ins for what isn’t there, tactile ghosts.

Bourgeois’s sculptures from the sixties, when she left wood and began to work in latex, plaster, bronze, and marble, look different but reprise her themes. The rigid anatomies and architectures of the fifties seem to have been melted down into organic forms that summon genitalia, internal organs, stones, fossils, caves, primitive huts, as well as the work of other sculptors from Bernini to Brancusi. Labyrinthine Tower (1962) is a phallic spiral. The Lairs, Cumuls, and Soft Landscapes are variously disquieting and comforting, suggestive of phallic outcroppings, womblike retreats, and baroque drapery. The suspended bronze Januses are phallic, pelvic, labial, mammary, and ocular. “Oh my God, it’s a penis!” becomes “Well, not really, sort of, but it’s also…” The unstable borders, sliding recognitions, aggressive sexual ambiguity, and visions of the body amputated, in pieces, or sprouting extra parts, evoke a world in which perception is not yet structured by language, a hallucinatory prelingusitic space of primal drives. A nod to Freud’s “polymorphous perverse,” perhaps? It’s not strange that critics have called upon the theories of Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Jacques Lacan to explicate the work of a woman who was once quoted as saying, “Psychoanalysis is my religion.”

The Destruction of the Father (1974) illustrates the difficulty faced by those trying to interpret Bourgeois’s art, because the object and the narrative that accompanies it have become inseparable. The thing looks like a stage with its frame, draped fabric, and internal red illumination. A gigantic mouth or maw with mounds above and below holds at its center cast animal bones, as well as lumps and protuberances. The story, told in first- and third-person versions by the artist, is that “we” or “the children” leap up onto the table and eat the father—an “oral drama.” Part Greek tragedy, part Totem and Taboo, the exciting fantasy of eating Dad may be implicit in what we see, but it is not explicit. Revenge for Sadie? Feminist politics through the language of Kleinian child analysis? These are just two proposed solutions that, however well meant, pinch the work and don’t begin to capture its wounded, raw, ambivalent feeling.

The artist’s intellectual sophistication, her mordant commentary, and the weight of the theory brought to bear on her work can quickly obfuscate rather than reveal what’s in front of us. Even when a visual reference is explicit, as in the Arch of Hysteria, critics are quick to jump to conclusions, which are then passed from one to the next. The body in most versions of Bourgeois’s arch is male. Art writers have repeatedly glossed this as a feminist inversion of Jean-Martin Charcot’s idea that hysteria is an illness exclusive to women. But the nineteenth-century neurologist (with whom Freud studied) firmly believed in, wrote about, lectured on, and treated “traumatic male hysteria.” In the Bibliotèque Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris there is a photograph of a naked man in the arc en circle. I am convinced Bourgeois knows the picture—the similarity is striking. Although the connotations of hysteria then and now are undeniably sexist, and the artist may have wanted to play with that assumption, her use of the image addresses something else: an ongoing fascination with psychic/somatic states, with explosive tension as well as its opposite—flaccid exhaustion and withdrawal.

One version of the arch is part of a Cell (1992–93), in which the man has lost his head and arms, perhaps to the saw that stands nearby in the enclosure. Under him, on his bed or covered board, I read the words Je t’aime written by hand in red over and over again like an incantation. I love the Cells, and there are several in the show. For me, they hold the attraction of forbidden places in my childhood—an erotic tug to see what’s in there. They both lure and frighten me. They beckon me in and keep me out. Sometimes I can peer through an open door. Other times I look through the cage walls. In Eyes and Mirrors (1993) I confront my own voyeurism. In Choisy (1990–1993) a guillotine hangs ominously over a marble house, and I imagine it being cut in two. My body. My house. I can’t help writing stories for these enigmatic spaces, in which I feel both violence and love. They are like mute, motionless narratives, and even when one doesn’t know that much of the iconography is personal—the house is a model of the Bourgeois family house in Choisy, the tapestries in Spider recall the restoration work of Josephine—its intimacy is palpable. And while the artist makes use of found objects—beds, chairs, spools, perfume bottles, keys, for example—their placement and proximity to sculptures of body parts or abstract forms create an atmosphere of only partial legibility and turn the Cells into machines of metaphorical association and recollection for the viewer. I clutch at the fragments of my early memories through the familiar architecture of my childhood house that allows me to locate my experience in space. Without that frame, the memories are suspended in emptiness. But memories change, too. Each time we remember an event, the present tinges the past, which is always also imaginary. The Cells gives us enchanted access to that fragile topos where memory and fantasy merge.

The most recent pieces in the show are made of fabric, more Bourgeoisian bodies, many of them injured, some of them unhoused or suspended. The rooms have vanished. One of the bed partners in the headless pair of Couple IV (2001–2002) wears a prosthetic leg. The Three Horizontals (1998), mounted one above the other, like diminishing versions of the same person, are amputees. Their soft anatomies appear to have been torn and mended. The aching expression on the face of Rejection (2001–2002) makes me want to reach into the box, take out the poor head, and cradle it in my arms. I know that these sewn, scarred figures are disturbing, but for me they are also among the most beautiful and compassionate works Bourgeois has made. They are dolls of loss and mortality. I am looking at myself. I am looking at all of us. The artist brings back the Arch of Hysteria (2000), this time as a woman. She hangs in the air, her wounds stitched up, but her body alive in its shallow arc. Louise Bourgeois is old, but the vigor of her imagination is clearly ageless. She once said that her sculpture is her body. If I could choose one work from her, I would pick Seven in a Bed (2001), a late piece of manic joy—sweet, erotic, and funny. But neither I nor the artist can choose. The body of Louise Bourgeois is multiple and potent. It borrows from and transforms the vocabularies of modern art. It is feminine and masculine, terrified and bold, soft and hard. It speaks in the language of space and form and plays with both recognition and strangeness.

In his essay for the Tate’s catalogue, Robert Storr proposes an “unreading” of Louise Bourgeois, the theoretical object.4 This is wise. I propose that you go to the Tate Modern and look long and hard at the work. After that, you may want to read what has been said by and about this extraordinary artist. And then, you may want to unread all of it, not excluding the words I have offered here.

2007