Louise Bourgeois - Notes from a Tate Modern Course, 2007

TRANSFORMATIONS - Louise Bourgeois' Art about Life

19th Nov. Tate Modern

Surrealism and Existentialism

Many people have likened Louise Bourgeois' work to that  of the Surrealists.

She has repeatedly rejected this approach, as, for example in her
declaration in an interview:

"I was not a Surrealist. I was an Existentialist. That is the magical word"
[Herkenhoff interview, in Storr et al. ed. Louise Bourgeois, Phaidon, p.14]

There are several reasons why she might be thought to be a Surrealist in a loose sense (she was never formally recognised as a Surrealist by André Breton an co., so couldn't be a Surrealist in the strong sense). Here are some:

• she lived in Paris at the height of Surrealism
• she knew Surrealist artists and knew their work well
• uses biomorphic forms in her art
• her symbolism
• she has an interest in the psyche and in psychoanalysis
• her use of sexual and occasionally violent imagery
• her sense of humour
• her bizarre juxtapositions (e.g. guillotine and marble model of a house)
• her 'Femmes Maisons' resemble results of the Surrealist game 'Exquisite Corpse'
• her interest in the female figure and particularly in mannequin-like models and heads
• her interest in sexual symbolism
• her dream-like scale changes as e.g. Maman

BUT unlike the surrealists Bourgeois did not seem to leave things to chance, or automatism. She is in control of what she releases and her work does not feel like a bubbling up from the unconscious.

How seriously, then, should we take her claim to be an Existentialist? (We, of course, don't have to take artists at their word - their work is what we trust).

Existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre stressed human freedom. We are all responsible for what we are. How we view the past, which emotions we experience, our view of what happens to us, all these are our choices. We are not like a penknife, defined prior to existence. We first of all exist, and define ourselves afterwards, engaging in a struggle to resist other people's definitions and in danger of falling into freedom-denying Bad Faith, enacting other people's visions of what we are.

This does seem to fit with some aspects of Bourgeois' work, and certainly with her practice of holding up a mirror when she feels an interviewer is projecting his or her definition on to her.  It is surprising that no one seems to have taken her at her word on this point about Existentialism. True, she had left Paris by the time Existentialism came to the fore there in the immediate post-War period. But she read and admired the work of Camus and Sartre. One interpretation of her entire oeuvre is that she has decided to transform her suffering into art by an act of will rather than be its victim. Looked at from the viewpoint of Existentialism, too, for example, her Femmes Maisons images may show a woman struggling against a framework of domesticity imposed upon her.

Recommended: short video clip of Tate Modern curator Frances Morris interviewing Louise Bourgeois listen for her comments about transforming hate at the very end of the interview.

Earlier post on Louise Bourgeois with links to reviews by Siri Hustvedt and Richard Dorment

Short podcast (mediocre sound quality, I'm afraid): Nigel Warburton on Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism

Audio interview with Mary Warnock on Existentialism from Philosophy Bites.

Notes from the other 3 sessions on Louise Bourgeois  and an entry about 'Fillette' can be read by clicking on the link below:

26th  Nov. Tate Modern

Experiencing Space

Many of Louise Bourgeois' sculptures and installations, particularly the Cells, use the enclosure of space to evoke emotion...

Two theorists of sensed space, the architect Ernö Goldfinger and the philosopher Gaston Bachelard have made interesting observations about how rooms, the textures of materials, the sounds, smells, shapes, and evocative objects contribute to our experience of real, imagined and remembers spaces.

Goldfinger on The Sensation of Space
In a series of three articles published between 1941 and 1942, Ernö Goldfinger gave his account of our experience of enclosed space - a sense that begins in the womb.  For him architecture is not a sculptural practice, but rather an art of enclosing. Architecture has to be experienced to be understood. The skilful architect can enclose space in such a way as to evoke a particular kind of emotion in the person experiencing it from within. Goldfinger's account is in some ways a gloss on his mentor, Auguste Perret's comment:

Architecture masters space, limits it, encloses it, circles it. It has this prerogative to create magical places totally the work of the intellect.

For Goldfinger our sensation of space is largely pre-conscious (i.e. we can bring ourselves to be aware of it). Like music it can affect us without our being aware of its details, or how it achieves its effects. Many different features contribute to our experience of space:

‘Memories and experience, not only of visual sensation but also of sound and touch and smell enter into it. The sound and vibration in a hall; the physical touch of the walls of a narrow passage; the atmosphere and temperature of a stuffy room; the smell of a damp cellar; all are, in various degrees, components of spatial sensation. Every element, plastic or pictorial, partially obstructing the view, and people in the crowd rubbing against you, are part of it’ Goldfinger ‘The  Sensation of Space’

So for Goldfinger the skill of the architect lies in his or her ability to enclose space in various ways in order to evoke emotions.

Bachelard on the Poetics of Space
For Gaston Bachelard, in Chapter One of his quirky The Poetics of Space, the early experience of a house, a bedroom, is rich and important. Our first house  becomes a source of emotionally charged symbolic imagery that we revisit in dreams and daydreams and carry into every experience. Inhabited space is the non-I that protects the I (in contrast with the usual formulation where the child distinguishes itself - the I - from a more impersonal non-I - the external world).

    ‘We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection’

As he puts it:

‘Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.’

Bourgeois' Cells
Bourgeois's approach to space in her Cells (e.g. Cell (Eyes and Mirrors)) which she produced in the 1980s, echoes some of these thoughts. Frances Morris described them in her book Louise Bourgeois: Stiches in Time as

'...theatrical spaces whose incumbent objects and memorabilia project enigmatic messages of former lives and significances.' (p.16)

The different materials (wire mesh, old wooden doors etc.)  contribute to an overall emotional effect or to a mood of each piece: some are low-ceilinged and filled with objects, some symbolic (such as the glass vessels), some literal (a child's desk). Some of the objects within the Cells are mementos; others are specially created sculptural transformations of the world of Bourgeois' childhood re-experienced through memory. She has declared that the cells all deal with different types of pain. The suspension of objects such as chairs or a resin tear, adds tension that needs to be resolved. It is almost as if we are entering the space of someone's bad dreams and mostly painful memories. Yet the fundamental security of a pre-lasparian room (the non-I that protects the I) is still often present or felt making the contrast with the pain of rejection symbolised in each space, even more acute.

TRANSFORMATIONS - Louise Bourgeois' Art about Life
notes from 3rd Dec. 2007

Memory and the Self

Memory is at the core of who we are. When we lose large amounts of our memory,  we lose parts of our self. Without memory all we have is bodily continuity, and that is not what make us an integrated and evolving person. The film-maker Luis Bunuel put this poignantly near the beginning of his autobiography:

'You have to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is not life at all...Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing...'
Luis Bunuel

In philosophy the Seventeenth Century thinker John Locke's notion of the continuing identity of a person over time turned completely on continuity of memory rather than on bodily continuity. He came up with a famous thought experiment of the Prince and the Pauper. Imagine a pauper waking one morning with all the memories of a prince; and, likewise, in his palace, the prince waking up with all the memories of the pauper. In such a situation, Locke believes, we would say that the pauper-bodied man is really the prince and the prince-bodied person the pauper. Although in life memories and bodily continuity go together, it is the pattern of overlapping memories that make us who we are far more than the contingencies of our ever-changing bodies as we age. For Locke the notion of a person was a 'forensic' term, concerned with who was morally responsible for which action.

For Louise Bourgeois memory plays a dual role.

First, and most literally, her work is obviously driven by memories. The inciting incident of Sadie's affair with her father fuels almost everything that she has done since. Her distant past childhood is alive for her in her work, and her links to this preserve her sense of personhood. She still is the person who was rejected. These memories drive her art and are transformed in it.

But, perhaps more interestingly, her later work in a metaphorical sense 'remembers' her earlier work. There are allusions, formal and thematic to earlier pieces, old subjects are re-visited and re-modelled. This is most apparent in the final room of the current exhibition where small pieces from different periods of her life are juxtaposed - there are remarkable continuities and subtle variations on what she had previously done. The femme maison, for example, recurrs as drawing, small sculpture, the spider as motif keeps coming back, as does the spiral. Like real memories, the echo of the earlier work makes us re-evaluate what has gone before. It also ties her apparently diverse work together and integrates it, so that it can be seen as all part of her artistic self.  And, like real memories too, the symbolic representations of past events, and past interpretations of events, involve transformations, transformations that take her work beyond therapy or outsider art.

Notes on the final session of Transformations, Tate Modern, 10th Dec. 2007.

On Sex and the Body

Many of Louise Bourgeois' sculptures allude to body parts, specifically to penises and to clitorises, and breasts - allude rather than represent in any direct way: Bourgeois transforms body parts into forms which are familiar yet strange. The strangeness is amplified by the ambiguity between male and female. Even something as apparently legible as 'Fillette', turns out on closer inspection to be ensheathed, and not so unambiguously and exclusively male.

In his book Sexual Desire, the philosopher Roger Scruton suggested that the sexual organs can act as a symbol of the body's eventual triumph over the will. This is because, unlike, say our hands, they frequently defy the will. We are to some extent passive in relation to them. They defy our rational control.

Bourgeois on a number of occasions has declared herself an existentialist (and had certainly read Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism - listen to my inadequately recorded podcast on this book here and an interview with Mary Warnock about existentialism here). In contrast to the existentialists' claim that we choose ourselves, decide on our emotions, and on how we feel about the past and the other elements of our facticity, even to the point of turning our own lives into universalizable exemplars of how people should live in our epoch, the body as described by Scruton reminds us, through our sexual organs, that much of how we are in the world is outside our conscious control. For Scruton, the  sexual organs are also a reminder of our own death, the final loss of bodily control. (In passing, we note that, where Sartre had us turning each of our lives into works of art through the choices we make for ourselves; Bourgeois through her art transforms the particularities of her own memories into symbols which resonate universally despite their specificity).

It is interesting in the light of this to think about Bourgeois' memory from her art student days of a male nude model looking at a female student and getting an erection and her reaction which was one of seeing his vulnerability: 'We are all vulnerable in some way, and we are all male-female'.

The reference to universal bisexuality could have originated with Freud's view that developmentally we are all bisexual. It may, though, have an earlier source in Plato's Symposium and the myth that Aristophanes tells of the stage when human beings had four arms and four legs, and were simultaneously of both sexes before being cut in two by Hephaestus and doomed to yearn for their (literal) other halves.

Listen to a podcast of Angie Hobbs on Plato on Erotic Love in the Symposium

As well as the presence of sexual body parts, there is a notable absence of heads. (a castration fantasy?) And where the heads are present, as in the uncanny tapestry and fabric heads in the penultimate room of the exhibition, the features are relatively indistinct. Where there is no head, we are sometimes observers of a scene, in some cases a primal scene. Where, as in 'Rejection', the head is present and is expressive, this is a clear invitation to adopt the stance of the one represented, rather than that of a viewer of what is represented.

The body in sexual interaction, then,  or the headless part-body seem to be objects of observation rather than of identification for Bourgeois. Much of her art can be viewed as a struggle to control through art and through revisited memories those elements of her past and of other people's bodies that were initially outside her control. In that sense she is an existentialist.

Overall the aim of this course has been to see Bourgeois' work through the lens of key philosophical ideas, to provide another aspect under which it could be understood and so stimulate and open up new ways of seeing the art.

Some thoughts on what Louise Bourgeois' 'Fillette' is about:

October 28, 2007

What is Louise Bourgeois' 'Filette' About?

The best-known image of Louise Bourgeois is by Robert Mapplethorpe with a penis-sculpture 'Filette' tucked under her arm. She grins cheekily at the camera.

But what is 'Filette' about? A version of it usually hangs in Tate Modern from a butcher's hook. Now you can see it in the current retrospective (there is a very useful room by room guide here).

At a symposium at Tate Modern yesterday the psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell suggested a number of readings. 'Filette' can be the cut of meat - hence the butcher's hook. It can be a little girl, and apparently there is a famous paper by Otto Fenichel on 'The Girl = Phallus' that gives this the Freudian context (roughly the idea of a young girl desiring to become a phallus as a kind of coping mechanism)  - not so far-fetched as an explanation of source as Bourgeois has a sophisticated knowledge of psychoanalysis as well as what Mitchell described as an unusual access to the raw emotions of childhood and infancy.

Although ostensibly simply a phallus, some people have seen this sculpture as ensheathed by female genitalia or even swaddled in a kind of security blanket. Most writers on Bourgeois have talked about phalluses and penises, but as Mitchell pointed out, many of the sculptural shapes are ambiguous between penis and clitoris, and this might fit with the idea that the inciting age for Bourgeois for her art was on which pre-dates an emphasis on sexual difference.

A key observation of Mitchell's is that the trauma that drives Bourgeois' work is the pain of rejection: the near-delusional jealousy that comes from the realization that someone else is loved more than her. This suggests to me a more violent interpretation (albeit expressed with a delightful sense of humour) that is consistent with her  piece  'Destruction of the Father'  (a fantasy of eating her father): here in 'Filette' her father's erect penis is strung up on a butcher's hook (the castration desire) and at the same time there is perhaps the wish to devour him (sexually?) implicit in the title that puns on her as the little girl and him as the piece of meat. 

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