//louise bourgeois//

Louise Bourgeois considered herself an existentialist. She studied math and philosophy, particularly Descartes and Pascal, at the Sorbonne, described herself as a “Daughter of Voltaire,” and defined herself in opposition to Camus.  

In an August 1991 diary entry, she wrote, “Sisyphus liked pushing his rock up. It was his reason for life. A form of self-expression that taught him nothing. Camus didn’t want to learn. He wanted to justify his suffering. I want to learn.” Art historian Saul Nelson continued, “Bourgeois, on the other hand, wanted to be a Sisyphus who learns, whose repetitive action not only reveals the surface condition of mortal existence but penetrates its being” (490).

Bourgeois was obsessive about her work, or rather, she plumbed the depths of her chosen imagery - eyes, the color red, hands, the human form, spiders, reflections, circles and spheres. In Rebecca Carlton’s artist talk on Monday, she talked about using universal symbols that all humans recognize and can relate to as an entry point for the ideas that an artist really wants to discuss, and I think that’s relevant here because so much of Bourgeois’s symbolic language is universal. 

Her work has largely been considered as autobiographical, as so much of it explicitly relates to childhood trauma, sexuality, her difficult relationship with her parents, and because of this - probably, also, because she’s a woman - a lot of the scholarship on her work is psychoanalytic, considering her work as external illustrations of her internal world. Nelson set out to destroy the “myth of Bourgeois as an interior artist using sculpture as therapy, rather than an active intellectual staging and examining the philosophy of experience” (473), finding a very different core question in her work: “how is it that we find ourselves in a world that matters, in which experience and subjectivity emerge through embodied engagement with the world and others?” (471).

Bourgeois’s diary entry from 1991 backs Nelson up: 

it is the 

form not 

the content

the revenge

of the form

everybody

knows

the contents

nobody 

can analyse

the form

The form is the refuge

Of creativity

– Louise Bourgeois, diary entry, August 1991

Herein lies the thesis: Bourgeois chose to work in the embodied world, in sculpture and installation, because of the form’s inherent possibilities of opening up experiential worlds, of the body of her work interacting with the bodies of its viewers. The childhood traumas informing her work are important as well, but her purpose in creating wasn’t therapeutic; rather, through the form, she asks questions about physicality, about existing alongside Others, about relationships between things in the real world. 

This work is part of her Personages series, made from 1941-1955, carved in wood and then cast in bronze and painted. She began making this series just a few years after moving to New York, away from her community and working to establish herself. Eerily anthropomorphic, painted white and whittled skeleton-thin, this piece invokes the absence of physical presence. Bourgeois’ purpose in making Personages was to examine the absences in her life when she moved to New York in 1938, leaving all her people behind. Saul Nelson writes, “Understanding the Personages as real-world encounters with the ‘physical presences’ of absent Others contradicts their psychoanalytic explanation, which interprets the works as phantasmagoric projections of internal processes” (475). In 1954, Bourgeois wrote, “Eighteenth-century painters made “conversation pieces,” whereas her sculptures might instead be called “confrontation pieces,” and indeed, this work forces viewers into a physical, visceral confrontation with alienation, isolation, and loneliness. 

On one level, this work represents Bourgeois’s difficult relationship with her father, who had an affair with the live-in nanny when Bourgeois was a child. The work depicts a family dinner table, around which children devour their father, or maybe around which parents devour their children, surrounding by plaster and latex protrusions and bathed in a sickly red-orange light. “I make an awful story,” Bourgeois wrote. “Children conspire against the parents / parents cook their children.”

On another level, the level of the viewer interacting with the form and not with the artist’s emotional content, it feels like being inside of some huge, grotesque, alien organism. Rather than eating, I get the sense of being digested. The latex of this work resembles human skin, a reminder of decay. Alex Potts, another art historian, wrote that  “When she offers a reading of one of her sculptures in terms of some archetypal childhood trauma, the story she tells is not so much an explanation of the meaning of the work, as an allegory of the viewer's engagement with it. The structure of the story really matters, rather than its manifest content.” Though her personal trauma clearly informed the form of the piece, it also makes sense as an allegory for the viewer- just as the children eat their father, the viewer is taken in and chewed up by the piece, with its strange, latex-skinned, tooth-like protrusions. 

This is the last of Bourgeois’s cells, made 2 years before her death, and I think this one really invites the viewer into contemplation of their own mortality. At the center is the spiral staircase - another spiral - that lived in her Brooklyn studio until 2005, when the building her studio was in was torn down. The blue glass spheres look like rain drops to me, and the staircase ascending into the rain feels like a peaceful meditation on mortality. The blue color of the spheres seems significant, since she worked with red so much in her earlier pieces - there’s no rage, but instead peace here. The spheres are larger toward the top and smaller toward the bottom of the installation, which has a sort of anti-gravity effect, as though something is pulling them upward along with the staircase. In so many of the other works I chose, there are either actual representations of human bodies, in full or in pieces, or latex objects that resemble human skin, or even intelligible artifacts of everyday human life, like the bed in Red Room (Parents) which implies sleep, a bodily process, or even general creaturelyness, like the spider in Spider. In The Last Climb, though, the only bodily implication is of climbing. 

I think this piece implicates the body of the viewer in a way that none of the other pieces I selected do - it invites the viewer into a world where you ascend an eternally spiraling staircase into the clouds, through the roof of the world - and asks, then what? Where does the staircase take you?

This is just a small sampling of Bourgeois's massive body of work, but even so there's such variety in the questions she poses about the nature of existence, and the experiences that can be opened up through immersive art - from the isolation of the modern world to body horror and the fear of physical decay to questions about what's next after all this existing is through.

Here's my powerpoint and bibliography!