Most also include sculptural elements made from glass,
marble or latex, which themselves often revisit motifs from the artist’s
earlier work. These are theatrical spaces whose incumbent objects and memorabilia
project enigmatic messages of former lives and significances. Evoking both the
punishment cell of the prison and the contemplative cell of the convent, these
are spaces for solitary contemplation and self-reflection. Each one explores,
through metaphor, an aspect of human pain or suffering. According to Bourgeois,
the "Cells represent different types of pain: the physical, the emotional
and the psychological, and the mental and the intellectual".(5) The Cells
are presented principally as single units, but just as biological cells are building
blocks in a teleology of growth and metamorphosis, so Bourgeois began to make
links between individual units. In the Red Rooms (1994), two circular enclosures
of recycled panelled doors provide enclosures for a dialogue between parents and
child, while Passage Dangereux (1997) deploys a number of small cell-like chambers leading from a central passageway, each one functioning as a little Wunderkammer, arrangements of marvellous curio-objects evoking suffering and loss.
The three vast towers, I Do, I Undo, I Redo, commissioned for the opening of Tate
Modern in 2000 are truly the apotheosis of the Cells. Roughly the size of small
houses, the towers draw on the architectural vocabulary of lighthouses and watchtowers
suggested half a century earlier in He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947).
The architecture is now real-scale and these towers offer experiences of actual
space in which the characteristics of the space, the spiral staircases, dark enclosures
and mirrored platforms, and our movement through them, become metaphors for the
way we negotiate our lives: the ups and downs, the spiraling returns, encounters
with the self and confrontations with others. In place of the three-dimensional
tableaux of the individual cells and the mediated symbolism of human relationships
that they embody, the towers are immensely restrained in terms of iconographical
association. Each one however, contains within it a small sculptural figurine
describing an aspect or stage of the mother-child relationship – intimacy, estrangement
and reconciliation.
Since the artist’s revelations in the 1980s about her childhood and in the
deluge of notes, interviews and written texts that followed, Bourgeois has made
the autobiographical origins of these pieces, and especially the centrality of
parent-child relationships, tangible.
The simple facts of Bourgeois’ family background were already, by this time,
well known. Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 to a mother whose family had been
long engaged in the Aubusson tapestry industry and to a father who, trained as
a landscape architect, found his profession as a dealer in restored tapestry and
antique furniture. As the third daughter (the first died in infancy) her gender
was a disappointment to her parents, though recompensed, in part, by her taking
her father Louis’ name and inheriting hislooks. At an early age Bourgeois
assumed the role of "dessinateur’ within the family business of repairing
antique textiles. Photographs of the family home, first at Choisy-le-Roi and then
at Antony, between Paris and Orly, on the banks of the Bieve, a river rich in
tannin for the dyeing of wool, suggest a prosperous and convivial existence. Hers
was a large family surrounded by cousins and a host of familiar employees. Summer
parties, picnics, and trips to the mountains and seaside punctuated the daily
rhythm of skilled industry. Bourgeois’ mother, insistent on the highest standards
of traditional craft, ran the homeside of the business while her father travelled
the country to locate antique tapestries which, once repaired, were sold from
showrooms on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris.
In a piece commissioned for the magazine Artforum in 1982 Bourgeois combined a
number of faded photographic images from her childhood with a revelatory text
entitled Child Abuse (6). Here she took the reader beyond the facade of comfortable
gentility to a personal drama of betrayal and transgression. In 1922 the family
hired a young English woman, Sadie, as governess for the children. As Bourgeois
recalled: "she was introduced into the family as a teacher but she slept
with my Father and she stayed for ten years. Now you will ask me, how is it that
in a middle-class family a mistress was a standard piece of furniture? Well, the
reason is that my mother tolerated it and that is the mystery. Why did she? So
what role do I play in this game? I am a pawn. Sadie is supposed to be there as
my teacher and actually you, mother, are using me to keep track of your husband.
This is child abuse. Because Sadie, if you don’t mind, was mine. She was
engaged to teach me English. I thought she was going to like me. Instead of which
she betrayed me. I was betrayed not only by my father, damn it, but by her too.
It was a double betrayal. There are rules of the game. You cannot have people
breaking them right and left. In a family a minimum of conformity is expected."(7)
That Bourgeois waited so long to broadcast this confession to a wide public is
perhaps not surprising. The term "abuse" only gained currency in the
1970s, (8) and the social and political climate as well as the predominant aesthetic
fashions of earlier years was hardly conducive to the kind of biographical readings
that became possible inn the wake of feminism. Although, as Robert Storr points
out, the repression in holding back the "truth" of her childhood was
largely one of not speaking openly (9) in that the fundamentally archetypal nature
of human relationships and emotions has been a continuous – obsessive – driving
force of her sculpture from the beginning, it is also arguable that her confession
in 1982 encouraged Bourgeois to move away from exploring the self through metaphor
and association to works such as the Cells, in which the accretion of personal
narrative lends itself to overt "autobiographical" readings. The narratives
therein constructed gave Bourgeois an "almost unprecedented opportunity for
self authorship" (10) as well as opening the work to serious psychoanalytic
study exploring Freudian, Lacanian and Kleinian models.
Although it gave Bourgeois her first set of skills as an artist, sewing is a technique
that remained repressed in her practice for many years. Nevertheless, she has
frequently employed the language of spinning, sewing and weaving formally and
metaphorically, and nowhere more persuasively than in the series of magnificent
Spiders from the 1990s. Now, sewing has presented itself as a major focus of her
work.
Like drawing, an occupation Bourgeois has pursued continuously throughout her
career, sewing involves hand and eye and is simple to accomplish at the kitchen
table where she now spends most of her time. Fabric, however, is not an obvious
choice of material with which to make works in three dimensions. Its innate properties
are hardly sculptural. Bourgeois had noted the challenge presented by textiles
as early as 1969. In a review of an exhibition of contemporary textiles entitled
Wall Hangings at the Museum of Modern Art and published in the magazine Craft
Horizons, Bourgeois dismissed the show as "sedate" and proposed a more
ambitious scenario: "I could think, for instance, of all kinds of turned
shapes, cubes or any three-dimensional forms that could have been used. The pieces
in the show rarely liberate themselves from decoration and only begin to explore
the possibilities of textiles. They can be woven into any shape and then made
rigid by spraying. They can be stretched over armatures, draped and pulled. All
this is still open to exploration..".(11)
Louise Bourgeois’ most recent works present themselves as a direct answer
to her own challenge.
In recent years Bourgeois has fabricated a series of tall, slender, columns. Using
fabric of different types, they are constructed mostly from sections sewn and
stuffed and stacked around a central, hidden, armature. Some deploy an outward
thrust as the column gains height and width; others progressively diminish in
circumference from a wider base. A number adopt a spiral formation, as the individual
cushions appear to fly out from a central pole, suggesting movement and instability.
Aside from these straightforward formal differences, the columns are differentiated
by the fabric used: carefully aligned sections of ticking yield an insistent verticality,
patchwork from fragments of tapestry offers rich and enigmatic conjunctions of
imagery – figures in conversation, plants and animals – drawing attention less
to the form in itself than to its individual, dissonant parts. Occasionally an
embroidered text embellishes a surface – evoking a mood or state of mind.
To propose an architectural vision from a material without innate load-bearing
potential testifies to Bourgeois’ often-demonstrated interest in transforming
materials through process – many of the plaster and latex pieces evoke architectural
structures such as tents or caves – and to her attempt to find uses for discarded
and overlooked materials, often laden with associations. Within her oeuvre these
recent totems most obviously return too a number of formal and expressive concerns
initially worked through in the series of figures made from stacked sections of
wood in the early 1950s. They evoke a very human presence in their strident verticality,
the associations of fabric with clothing and the "human" emotions embroidered
on their surfaces. Additionally, the materials employed for a number of upright
motifs from the early 1950s were occasionally rescued from waste and recycled
as art. This business of "rentrayage", remaking or reweaving,
was a skill at the centre of her mother’s industry and one that underpins
much of Bourgeois’ own art, both in her insistent revisiting of themes and
her recycling of materials.
Bourgeois’ childhood home had been richly decorated internally with fabrics
– tapestries hung from walls, were spread over beds and tables, and fragments
used to upholster chairs. The historical associations of tapestry are not only
decorative and pictorial but also architectural. As Bourgeois points out: "In
the beginning tapestries were indispensable, they were actually movable walls,
or partitions in the great halls of castles and manor houses, or the walls of
tents. They were a flexible architecture…I, myself, have very long associations
with tapestries. As children, we used them to hide in. This is one reason I expect
them to be so three-dimensional – why I feel they must be of such height and weight
and size that you can wrap yourself in them…My personal association with
tapestry is for this reason, highly sculptural in terms of the three-dimensionality".(12)
Prior to embarking on these fabric columns, largely "untitled", Bourgeois
began, in the late 1990s, to fashion strange stuffed mannequins from a range of
different fabrics including towelling, mismatched pieces of tapestry and stretch
fabric as well as fake fur. Technically these are complex figures, their bodies
made not in a random patchwork of scraps but revealing, in the cut and design
of their surface sections, a kind of structural, external skin which is, ironically,
more evocative of the human body beneath the skin – the pattern of muscle and
tendon or the conjoined curving plates of the cranium. Naked yet clothed, suggesting
skin yet revealing aspects of the flayed body, they are at the same time profoundly
disturbing and yet speak of warmth and nurture.
Femme Maison (2001) depicts the head and limbless torso of a female body. The
softness of the rugged white fabric is at odds with the fulsome, robust mass which
it encases. On top of the chest and in the lee of her breasts is the form of a
gabled building with open door – a house growing out from, or weighing down, a
human landscape? Bourgeois made a work of the same title as early as 1947, and
has revisited the motif of the woman-house many times over the years, at first
in drawings, prints and paintings and later in sculpture. This is a more explicit
kind of anthropomorphic architecture than that seen in the early (and recent)
upright figures, and also one which engages with notions of gender, identity and
female experience: the French "femme maison" denotes both woman-house
and house-wife. In the early two-dimensional depictions of the "femme maison"
the form of the house obliterates, or contains, the upper half of the woman’s
body including her head, obscuring her identity or enclosing it within the domestic
realm. At the same time the woman’s legs and sexual parts elevate and support
the home. A similar duality is suggested in the fabric piece. While the house
holds down and is a burden to the faceless female figure, at the same time it
grows from and is nourished by the female body landscape. Whatever reading the
viewer prefers, the centrality of woman and home is not at issue.
Many other fabric pieces refer to domestic and family life. Some, such as Seven
in Bed (2001), can be provided with iconographical "sources" from Bourgeois’
many recollections of her childhood experiences. This work seems to distil the
artist’s memory of far distant weekend mornings when she and her siblings
would tumble into the bed of their still slumbering parents, while the Janus-like
addition of heads warns us that things, especially people, are not always what
they seem. Cell XVI (Portrait) (2000) with its elegant head mounted on an ornate
serving dish, relates not just to a series of recent works combining female figures
with kitchen utensils but also, at a distance, to the "femme maison"
with the dish as surrogate body/house. At the same time, perhaps, it encapsulates
the drama of the table — a site for diplomatic negotiations, for face-to-face
encounters, complex medical operations, family gatherings, and backdrop to the
still-life genre in art with its attendant legacy of metaphor and symbol. Years
before she trained as an artist, so she tells us, Bourgeois made her very first
"sculpture" – a little figurine made from squeezing and moulding a piece
of bread, in a moment of ennui, while her father droned on at the head of the
table.
For Bourgeois the table and the bed are key sites for the playing out of relations.
Referring to The Destruction of the Father (1974) – a large installation exploring
and extending the childhood fantasy of killing and devouring her father whose
presence at meal times was immensely dominating – she described the work thus:
"The sculpture represents both a table and a bed. When you come into a room,
you see the table, but also, upstairs in the parent’s room, is the bed. These
two things count in one’s erotic life: dinner table and bed. The table where
your parents made you suffer. And the bed where you lie with your husband, where
your children were born and you will die".(13)
Many of her recent works comprise small stuffed figures and are displayed in minimal
glass and steel display cases. Adopting various attitudes and accompanied by different
attributes, they play out human emotions and states of mind as embodied forms
– emotions of pain and pleasure. Like archaeological specimens, their iconographical
origins might only be discernible with specialist knowledge or the assistance
of the artist’s words. These words could tell us, for example, that the often
repeated image of a one-legged man, relates to a vividly recalled memory of visiting
the staff canteen of the Louvre while working there as a tour guide and finding
it overflowing with mutilated ex-servicemen working out their peace time lives
in secure government employ. But this secret knowledge does little more than personalise
the description of what is fundamentally archetypal in human experience.
We have all been, or will be at one time or another, mothers, fathers, lovers,
infants, as well as individuals, young or old, couples and members of families
and wider communities. The individual who dominates can in turn become victim:
in life we experience extremes of love and hate as well as ambivalence, and sexual
identity is less a matter of binary opposition than a sliding scale between two
related poles. Although direct references to mythological narratives are rare
in her work, the multi-part Oedipus (2003) brings together a number of small figurines,
many of which depict situations or relationships Bourgeois has already worked
through in different ways.(14) The figure of a young child, of adult figures joined
in sex, of a mother nurturing her child, and of an elderly couple offering mutual
support speak of the various stages of growth and decline in life and the ways
in which these are defined as much by the "other" as by the self. However,
as in the Theban legend of Oedipus, life’s journey may be subject to turmoil,
misunderstanding and tragedy. At the centre of the collection sits the Sphinx,
and to one side is a head (Oedipus) whose closed eyes are pierced by needles.
These (often very small) pieces are like the crudely anatomical dolls a child
victim-of-crime might be asked to use in a re-enactment of some trauma; and their
material presence evokes the bindings of the wounded and maimed. Equally, however,
they seem like surrogates from a distant past, reminiscent in their fabrication
of Peruvian grave dolls and of the swaddled bodies of Egyptian deities, safeguarding
the past, nurturing the secret but ensuring a continued presence in the world.
Of the most arresting of recent works are a series of extraordinary upright and
front-facing fabric heads. Sewn with a crudeness that belies their structural
sophistication, they are nevertheless uncannily lifelike – open mouths appear
moist from exhalation; their eyes apparently focus to confront the viewer or seem
to deliberately glance away. These are very difficult works to confront; this
difficulty is compounded by the imposition of "silence" by the mute
and resistant glass cases which enclose them, so we see them as if through a two-way
mirror, as voyeurs, trespassing. If Bourgeois is an artist of the human condition,
a self-confessed existentialist, almost all her work traffics in the trauma of
relationships. These heads, in contrast, are utterly solitary and comparable in
presence and impact to other great statements of man’s existential aloneness:
the screaming Popes of Francis Bacon, the hollow-eyed portraits of Giacometti
– both, incidentally, artists for whom Bourgeois has at times confessed an admiration.
Giacometti and Bacon are, like Bourgeois, artists who occupy distinct and difficult
positions in relation to the history of Modernism in the twentieth century. Both
were driven by strong personal obsessions to create remarkably coherent bodies
of work sustained over the course of their lifetimes, as if each work, once achieved,
led them immediately back to a reconstitution of the same obsession. Bourgeois’
continual return to the traumas of her childhood operates in a similar way. As
she has often explained, the sense of exorcism which follows a confronting of
these memories in a new work returns her, in its wake, to a renewed experience
of the trauma. Each work is a summation of past and present and a propulsion into
the future. What so profoundly distances Bourgeois from these artists is the way
in which the coherence of her inner voice is manifest, over time, in such richly
diverse ways. Art historians have contributed to an understanding of her work
but whether her co-ordinates are found in a formal dialogue with Surrealism and
Cubism (15) or, later, in relation to a psychologically-charged re-working of
minimalism (16) – regardless of whether primitive regression is at stake
in her restaging of human archetypes- or whether the drive is understood by different
psychoanalytical theories, what unites her work in each of its guises is the way
in which her private history and personal mythology still afford the viewer a
uniquely individual response to the work.
Unlike so much of twentieth century art that is about art, an understanding of
the artist – her history, intention, relation to others, however compelling –
is not necessary to a powerful and personal experience of this work. Despite the
plethora of words devoted to her life and career by dozens of critics and historians
and the wealth of texts generated by the artist herself, Bourgeois has warned
us that "An artist’s words are always to be taken cautiously…the
artist who discusses the so-called meaning of his work is usually describing a
literary side-issue. The core of his original impulse is to be found, if at all,
in the work itself." (17)
This exhibition calls the viewer to return to the present and to what is new in
Bourgeois’ career. Her exploration of needlecraft, after decades of experiment
in a host of modernist and post-modernist idioms (carving, casting, assemblage,
installation, performance and so on), is also a return – a return to the original
aesthetic impulse that she first experienced as draughts woman and seamstress
at her mother’s side. Like the fabric of these pieces, the fabric of Bourgeois’
life and career is woven by thousands of distinct yet repetitive gestures, moving
forwards but back over themselves in an intricate web of industry to create a
grand and coherent tapestry from astonishingly varied parts. The language and
metaphor of spinning, sewing, weaving, unravelling and rethreading that Bourgeois
understood from infancy underpin the repeated narratives as well as the rhythm
and substance of her work from its inception, in the elegant knitting together
of architecture and body in her Personages, to the present works which unravel
and re-work so many threads from her past.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time
at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. The exhibition runs from 26 November
2003 to 22 February 2004. The exhibition is co-curated by Francis Morris,
Senior Curator, Tate Modern and Brenda McParland, Senior Curator: Head of Exhibitions,
IMMA.
5. Louise Bourgeois, ‘Louise Bourgeois’, Balcon,
8-9, 1992, pp.44, 47
6. Louise Bourgeois, ‘Child Abuse’, Artforum,
vol.20, bo.4, pp.40-47
7. ibid.
8. See Ann M Wagner, ‘Bourgeois Prehistory, or The
Ransom of Fantasies’, in Oxford Art Journal op.cit., pp.3-23.
9. Robert Storr, ‘A Sketch for a Portrait’ in
Louise Bourgeois, Phaidon, London, 2003, p.40.
10. Ann M Wagner, op.cit.
11. ‘The Fabric of Construction’, Craft Horizons, vol.29,
no.2, pp.30-5, reprinted in Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans Ulrich-Obrist ed., op.
cit., pp.87 – 91.
12. ibid.
13. Louise Bourgeois ‘Statements 1979’ in Eleanor Munro
Originals: American Women Artists, pp.154-9. Reprinted ibid., p.115
14. Robert Storr, op.cit.
15. Alex Potts, ‘Louise Bourgeois – Sculptural Confrontation’,
Oxford Art Journal, vol.22, 2 November 1999, pp.37-53.
16. Thomas McEvilly, ‘Louise Bourgeois: “The She Wolf is
my Mother”’ in Sculpture in the Age of Doubt, New York, 1999, pp.237-245.
17. Louise Bourgeois, An Artist’s Words, op.cit., p.66. |
