Louise Bourgeois: Pandora’s Box
Louise Bourgeois’ career spans a century and is beyond the confines of modern or even contemporary art. It is beyond any art styles or art movements. Her work simultaneously absorbs and repels all labels art critics so eagerly apply to artists.
Bourgeois at the Guggenheim
This summer, New York’s Guggenheim Museum is honoring 96 year old sculptor with a retrospective lasting until September 28, 2008.
More information about it can be found at the Guggenheim Web site.
I saw the previous version of this show at the Pompidou in Paris this past March. Somehow that show seemed more intimate and appropriate to Bourgeois’ work and its private nature.
While shooting, I remembered that my friend — and art critic — Olesya Turkina wrote a book about Bourgeois in the occasion of her exhibition at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Olesya has kindly let us reprint part of it here:
Louise Bourgeois: Pandora’s Box
Louise Bourgeois, who was born in Paris in 1911 worked more than half a century in New York. In fact her creative work reflects the century, with its revolutions and world wars, Utopian hopes and crippling disillusionments. Never one to blindly follow fashion in art, she has been compared with such masters of the 20th century as Constantin Brancusi and Vladimir Tatlin, Hans Arp and Alberto Giacometti, and even Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman. Her work is abstract and figurative, realistic and phantasmagorical, and is made from all manner of material such as wood, marble, bronze, plaster, latex and fabric. Probing themes of universal import, it is also highly autobiographical. In fact the personal and traumatic is Bourgeois’ most vital material.
Throughout the 20th century one might say Louise Bourgeois has created an idiosyncratic symbolic dictionary in which certain personal experiences and fantasies are concretized into expressive images. In the words of the artist, “Symbols are only empty bottles. They function only through what you put in them — personal symbols mean personal alphabet, our uniqueness is all we have.”
For example, her use of the spider is not a sign of arachnophobia (terror of spiders), but a sign of the enveloping and diligent mother. In much the same manner, sewing needles are not represented as aggressive instruments but symbols of magic to signify the restoration of losses. And home is depicted not as a refuge, but as an enclosure where one is in danger of losing oneself.
These objects thus recover magical properties connected to personal experiences well known since childhood. Childhood, in the artist’s words, “has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama”.
In fact, Louise Bourgeois describes herself as a woman without secrets. For her, sculpture is an instrument of exorcism, a place to work through traumatic childhood experiences.
In 1982 the artist formulated this principle in her artist’s project for Artforum called “Child Abuse” where she says, “Everyday you have to abandon your past or accept it and then if you cannot accept it you become a sculptor.”
In this project, she disclosed the secret of her life — a tale that reads like a melodramatic novel. Louise Bourgeois grew up triangulated between an adoring but ill mother and an authoritarian father whose mistress of ten years was also Louise’s governess. The complex relationship with her father, in which the duality of love and hate were manifested, resulted in a lifelong ambivalence to authority.
Within this context it is no coincidence that her creative work is metaphorically compared to the space of memory. It can be said that Bourgeois’ drawings, prints, and sculptures constitute a unique theatre of memory. Each work is related to one or another important event in her life on the principle of free association. Memories therefore play a leading, not auxiliary, role.
The full article can be downloaded here.
Olesya Turkina is a critic and curator (her projects include Russian Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennial (1999) and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Contemporary Art in the Russian museum, St. Petersburg. She is contributor to Flash Art International, Kabinet journal (St.Petersburg) and Moscow Art Magazine. She is Editor of on-line journal on Contemporary Russian Art and Member of the Russian Space Federation. During several years she is working on the series of films “The Chain of Flowers” with The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles).
MORE SMAC:
on OS GEMEOS
on SWOON
on CAI GUO-QIANG
on ART BASEL MIAMI 2008
Alexandra Lerman is the founder of SMAC: ScribeMedia Arts and Culture. She is also a video artist and a documentary filmmaker.
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