Louise Bourgeois as a feminist
Bourgeois came to symbolize the woman artist and to act as a figure of transference for feminism, galvanized the belated historical reception of her art.
"It is difficult to define a framework vivid enough to incorporate Louise Bourgeois's sculpture", the feminist critic Lucy Leppard had observed in 1975, pronouncing a defining problem for the study of this diverse body of work, in which "shapes and ideas appear and disappear in a maze of versions, materials, in carnations."
Any matrix of interpretation of Bourgeois's art must surely be drawn along the axes of feminism and psychoanalysis. Her art's determined resistance to patriarchal patterns of genealogy and influence, and its cardinal themes of feminine aggression and desire, demand a political analysts informed by feminism.
"Mother was a feminist"
The artist's early life in a prosperous bourgeois family evokes the social milieu of early psychoanalysis, with its stories of charismatic, philandering fathers, passive, retiring mothers, and sensitive daughters. Except that Louise Bourgeois"s mother, who was her husband's partner in the family's tapestry restoration business, was a feminist. Of her introduction to feminism, Bourgeois remembers, "Mother was a feminist and a socialist...All the women in her family were feminists and socialists-and ferociously so !" So when, as an art student in Paris in the 1930s, Bourgeois met the surrealists and confronted the sexist culture of sexual liberation movement, she arrived equipped with a material feminism.
In a series of paintings on the theme of the femme maison, or woman house, she initiated a critical reworking of surrealism in relation to feminism that was to be sustained for over forty years, into the period of her active involvement in the feminist movement. A rejoinder to surrealism's jokes at the expense of women, the femme maison also lays claim to the figure of the mother, whose role, for the surrealists, was above all to be renounced as a symbol of patriarchal law. Only in the transforming social environment of the feminist movement of the 1970s, Susan Suleiman contends, were artists able to revise" and critique their negative attitude toward women-an attitude that...had its source in and was exemplified by their repudiation of the mother."
Couple 1996
In this work Bourgeois addresses the complex nature of relationships. The masculine and feminine figures of Couple I are locked in an embrace that could be read as both supportive and strained. The masculine figure both constricts and holds the feminine figure. Likewise, she encircles him with a caring arm whilst straddling and weighing down his hanging body. The curator Lucy Askew has argued that, ‘hanging from a meat hook, these archetypes lack the capacity to move or part and are bound in an embrace that suggests more anguish than pleasure.’ Yet their proximity and dependency could also be indicative of an intense emotional attachment as well as the physical act of having sex. Indeed the suspension of Couple I suggests the destabilizing feeling of falling in love. On the notion of the hanging figure, a recurring conceit in Bourgeois’s practice, the artist has said: ‘Horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence.’
As the figures float in space, they almost form an infinity symbol suggestive of the inexorable cycle of a relationship. Yet the ‘timeless’ nature of the work – we are unsure of the age of the headless figures – might be read as the artist’s reflection on her own past relationships. This correlates with curator Marie-Laure Bernadac’s argument that Bourgeois’s intense focus on the nature of sexual relationships between men and women in her later career ‘can be seen to derive from the return of repressed memories.’
Untitled 2010 (self portrait)
It was quiet shocking when I saw this at the first time. Since she was child, She was helping her mothers family business and looked after her mother who is valetudinarian. and lived with mother, father and her housekeeper who is father's mistress. Also her parents tried to attract Louise's interest. She was literally sandwiched between mother and father. This simple sculpture express her entire childhood life. Also this looks like a sexual way. Maybe It's because also she was sexual harassed from her father?? Anyway, I really like she express such a simple of her childhood memory.
References
Louise Bourgeois Ann Coxon 735.23 BOU
Louise Bourgeois Works in Marble Prestel 735.23 BOU
Louise Bourgeois Spider The architecture of art-writing Mieke Bal 735.23 BOU
Louise Bourgeois recent work 735.23 BOU
Fantastic Reality Louise Bourgeois and a story of Modern Art 735.23 BOU
Louise Bourgeois reperes chhiers d'art comtemporain 735.23 BOU
Louise Bourgeois storm king art center 735.23 BOU
Tate Modern website
Spider 1994
Spider
The spider is a creature that Bourgeois associated with this ability to "redo," or to repair ; "I came from a family of repairer, The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she dent get mad. She weaves and she repairs it."
Maman is a huge steel structure, the legs spanning nearly nine metres. The spider holds her marble eggs in a sac that is protected below her abdomen.
A patchwork of steel pieces welded together forms each spindly leg, narrowing to a point where they meet the ground. Bourgeois's fascnination with spiders has been in evidence since the 1940s, when she made the drawing Spider 1947. She even compared the act of drawing itself to the industrious making of a spider's web; "What is a drawing?" It is a secretion, like a thread in a spider's web... It is a knitting, a spiral, a spider web and there significant organizations of space."
The English name for the eight-legged creature is derived from "spider", one who spins a thread. Spiders loom large in myth and symbolism. In Greek mythology, Arachne is turned into a spider by the goddess Minerva, whom she challenges with her skills as a weaver. Aside from their ability to spin a thread and weave a web, spiders are known as predatory creatures and the female of the species is particularly greedy, sometimes eating the male after mating. Arachaphobics often say that they are alarmed by the fast-paced scuttling motion of the spider, but the psychological associations may run deeper. Primo Levi explained the fear of spiders in Other people's Trades(1985)
" The spider is the enemy-mother who envelops and encompasses, who wants to make us re-enter the womb from which we have issued, bind us tightly and take us back to the importance of infancy, subject is again to her power; and there are those who remember that in all languages the spider's name is feminine, that the larger and more beautiful webs are those of the female spiders."
But for Bourgeois, this imagine of the smothering, predatory or overprotective mother does not entirely match her own image od Maman, the industrious mother/spider she made to represent her own mother. In 1995 Bourgeois wrote her "Ode to my mother" a poem that reveals her motivations and her irritations at being caught in a web of her own making;
"The friend(The spider-why the spider?) because my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and useful as an arraigned. She could also defend herself, and me, by refusing to answer "STUPID" inquisitive, embarrassing, personal questions.
I shall never tire of representing her.
I want to; eat, sleep,argue, hurt, destroy...
Why do you?
The treatment of Fear.
To my taste, the spider is a little bit too fastidious.
There is a very French, fiddly, overly rational, "Tricoteuse"
Side to her(Xavier Tricot), with her ever more precise and Delicate invisible mending; she never tires of splitting hairs.
This endless analysis is exhausting, and visually it can be reductive.
It makes me want to rush out onto the street and fill my lungs with air.
Analyses without end, questions within questions-mincing away.
For once, this spider admits to being tired. She leans against the wall (see the prostitute who eyes her clients from the shadow of the doorway, against the door of the years.
To analyze to mince away is one thing but to make a decision is something else(a choice, a judgement of value)
Caught in a web of fear.
The spider's web.
The deprived woman."
The spider, however, is also suggestive of material phantasies of bivalence; phantasies in which creative and destructive trends converge in the shadowy realm of maternal anxiety.
Her art...maternal anger is less a pathology of patriarchal social ill visited on mothers-than a manifestation of ambivalence to which patriarchal culture is blind.
Portraying this ambivalence through the material body, but also through its objects, Bourgeois suggests that the mother who carries, bears and tends her child expecting to lodge it in "the realm of love" suffers phantasies of failure, abandonment, and destruction that may in turn rebound upon the child. In defence of them both, she nurtures her own ambivalence, and that of her child.
Cell(Eyes and Mirrors)
The Cell play on our voyeurism as viewers and force us to confront our own baggage along with Bourgeois's accumulated possessions. They are teasing, seductive, evocative, giving enough of themselves away yet always holding something back from view.
The Cell epitomise Bourgeois's ability to simultaneously expose and protect herself through her works. Miss-en-scene" is a cinematic or theatrical term referring to the tone, meaning and narrative information made visible to the viewer through set design and other visual elements. Often, a character's state of mind is represented through these devices. Following Bourgeois's analogy of the flasher's overcoat in Precious Liquids being like the unconscious in which she wishes to hide, it would be possible to read her Cells-and the stories she presented to explain and support them.-as "staged" versions of her memories and realities, where Bourgeois the director, the "stager" of her own miss-en-scene, is revealing insights that she is happy to offer up and yet also to hide behind.
One of my favourite her work is Untitled (Devouring a child)
She is eating children. She just cram into her mouth. She said she had no idea what should she do. She just wanted to pretend that nothing happened. Because the experience of termination of pregnancy was an encumbrance. It is interesting that there is this history during the world war II. I reminds me back the German film The Lives of Others. While spay was researching and following the target who was victim or wrongdoer, they sometimes mixed the personal feeling and attempted to destroy the evidence. "They swallowed my words". This can say something. I really like how she use metapho. This is definitely I can say she use necessary stupidity ! (my new favourite thing) my bad habit is think about too much and at the end sometimes don't make sense and went to completely different way. Necessary stupidity show the truth issue very obvious and simple way which is very good.
À L’Infini 2008–9
The French title of the work, ‘À L’Infini’, translated as ‘into infinity’, is suggestive of both an unmapped expanse and a life cycle. This idea is borne out by the evocation of bodily forms across the series, which range from full figures to body parts as well as more abstract shapes and textures evocative of internal organs. The diagonal lines crossing each sheet are reminiscent of veins or arteries and splotches of red and pink paint could be read as drips and splashes of blood. In this way the work might seem to suggest the fallibility of the body, with the infinity of the title referring to an experience after death. On the other hand, it might imply the continuation of life through family and reproduction as well as the artist’s body of work. Askew has also read the spirals of À L’Infini as symbolic of veins, umbilical cords and even of the double helix structure of DNA, the substance of which life is made. She writes
Bourgeois’s drawings in pencil and red paint expand and reconfigure the printed lines which recede against a dance of knots and spirals, blood-filled arteries and veins, umbilical cords, meandering rivers, threads and tubes, notations and indistinct texts, floating figures and bulbous, anatomical shapes.
The artist’s use of red in À L’Infini is characteristic of her work on paper. Bourgeois stated: ‘Red is an affirmation at any cost – regardless of the dangers in fighting – of contradiction, of aggression. It’s symbolic of the intensity of the emotions involved.’ The colour appeals to the motifs connecting the different sheets in the series, which look like veins and arteries in the body or the blood lines of a family.
The spiralling line is a symbol that features prominently in Bourgeois’s work, especially as a means to represent reproduction. Cyclical relationship is apparent in À L’Infini, with its depictions of the female figure hanging in space, a male and female couple embracing and infant figures suspended in womb-like sacks. Despite representing different stages in a life cycle, the work does not follow a straightforward narrative. Instead episodes cross over, intersect and are repeated and perspectives shift from bodies and limbs to microscopic shapes and textures. In this way À L’Infini combines the monumental with the everyday, presenting an intimate view in large scale.
This drawing was quiet interesting. Because interpretation of Tate Modern said that
"This is suggestive of both an unmapped expanse and a life cycle. The work might seem to suggest the fallibility of the body, with the infinity of the title referring to an experience after death. On the other hand, it might imply the continuation of life through family and reproduction as well as the artist’s body of work. "
I have thought over and over again, but I can't bring myself to agree with it. This body seems like Bourgeois herself and many eggs go out from her body. My interpretation of this drawing is the drawing express her experience of termination of pregnancy. From red circle, I can see her desire and heartrending.
Fallen woman 1981
Blue and red are like black and white to Bourgeois. They are opposite extremes-like calmness and passion, or creation and destruction, yet she saw them as continually coexisting.
Red is the colour of blood, Red is the colour of paint.
Red is the colour of violence.
Red is the colour of danger.
Red is the colour of shame.
Red is the colour of jealousy.
Red is the colour of grudges.
Red is the colour of blame.
What was bourgeois afraid of? What was she running from? Was she afraid of fear itself? She has said, "My early work is the fear of falling. Later on it became the art of falling. How to fall without hurting yourself. Later on it the art of hanging in there."
The fear of falling may be a fear of falling from grace, falling in love, falling ill, falling pregnant, falling into a trap, etc... The art of "falling without hurting yourself." is about developing a skill. I think as an artist, we have to learn from this to be confident in one's ability to express oneself, remaining strong despite the vulnerability of continually revealing inner thoughts, desires, feelings or motivations. it's about making habit of creating, continuing to develop everyday.
Untitled 1950
Untitled 1950
In a small ink and charcoal drawing dating from 1950, Bourgeois presented a little face peeping out from behind two long curtains. When asked about this drawing, she replied, "That's fear. The person isn't watching or spying, it's someone hiding. The curtain is like the shutters in the South of France, which keep the sun out, but you're hidden from view." Like an actor who takes a quick look at the audience before the curtain rises to reveal the stage set, Bourgeois's little character is in the position of power, hiding, yet checking what is out there, who the audience is and how they will be soon.