Hilary Robinson
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As I have indicated, much of Irigaray's argument derives from her exploration of the specificity of the girl/mother relation, and in particular how this is made manifest through the gestural processes of the girl. As a context for her discussion, Irigaray refers back to Freud's observations of his grandson, little Ernst who devised what Irigaray describes as "an action designed to master" the absence of his mother (Gesture in Psychoanalysis,p.56). He did this with a reel and string, repeatedly throwing the reel away, then retrieving it with the string, accompanying this with noises interpreted as 'fort-da' - 'away-here'. Irigaray indicates in 'Gesture in Psychoanalysis' the gender specificity of the story; her point is firstly that Ernst is a boy, and nowhere does Freud suggest that a girl might act in the same Way. (He was a boy.It is important to be faithful to the text. Not every substitution is possible, especially when sexual difference is involved in Freud's text, the, the child is a boy. And Freud never wrote that it might have been a girl' (p.97). Irigaray also discusses the story of little Ernst in an earlier lecture reprinted in the same volume of essays 'Belief in Itself'(Sexes and Genealogies, p.23-53). The responses of girls to the absence of their mothers therefore merit some separate attention. Irigaray states that a girl could not have produced the same action:
'My hypothesis is that the child in the story couldn't have been a girl. Why?. A girl does not do the same things when her mother goes away. She does not play with a string and a reel that symbolise her mother, because her mother is of the same sex as she is and cannot have the object status of a reel. The mother is of the same subjective identity as she is " (p.97: Irigaray's French privileges the concept of gesture more strongly than the Gill translation, starting this passage 'Une fille ne fait pas les mêmes gestes' p.111)
Instead the girl:
''plays with a doll, lavishing maternal affection on a quasi subject, and
thus manages to organise a kind of symbolic space; playing with dolls is
not simply a game girls are forced to play, it also signifies a difference
in subjective status in the separation from the mother. For mother and
daughter, the mother is a subject that cannot easily be reduced to an
object, and a doll is not an object he the way that a reel, a toy car, a
gun, etc., are objects and tools used for symbolisation '(p.97)
Here we have an insight that might begin to aid our understanding of some approaches of women to making art works. Such an accounting would be located in an understanding of the girl's organisation of "a kind of symbolic space''. the subjective status" of the relationship which leads to play, and the fact that the thing played with "is not an object" in the way that the boy's toys are. This certainly differs from the approach of many male artists, male curators and the masculinist art market, which in its mainstream manifestation can verge on the anal: i.e. the insistence upon the production and showing of the object. Instead, Irigaray is offering, in this image of the little girl and her dolls, an approach where process can be stressed, where the importance of the art object as object is fundamentally compromised, and with it the notion of mastery . (It is noticeable that the concept of the integrity of the object and the construction of mastery and genius both mainstays of masculinist discourses have repeated come under fire from various feminist analyses. See for example, the cumulative work of writers such as Lucy Lippard and Griselda Pollock). It is an insight Irigaray gained from analysing an experience which is predominantly female, which is pivotal in the engendering of an 'appropriate' femininity in girls - Irigaray acknowledges the social coercion of play - and one which also reflects and makes manifest the girl's psychic accommodation of the social absence of her mother. Thus through this argument of Irigaray's we can propose a woman's relation to the art works she is making which is both specifically female and yet variable among women. Any such accounting would of necessity be embedded materially in particular practices. The practices of play (their processes and effects) are embedded in and understandable through social practices. Thus the embodiment of such play practices in art practices may well be discernible, but is by no means inevitable. This is a model which might, therefore, be appropriate for particular practices which are likely to sit uneasily in any mainstream (masculinist) discourses, yet also resist any simplistic collapse back into an essentialist discourse. It is also an insight through which we can begin to account for the desire of many women artists to work with representations of the female body or 'bodiliness' - if you like, an accounting which would refute charges of narcissism. Artists as diverse as Louise Bourgeois, Leonora Carrington, Geneviève Cadieux, Helen Chadwick, Mona Hatoum,Laura Godfrey Isaacs, Jana Sterbak could be discussed in this context. The Cell series is just such an instance. As I indicated, Bourgeois's work has proved highly resistant to co-option by any mainstream art discourse: it has also not provided openings for an essentialist discourse while clearly manifesting a 'bodiliness' .
Irigaray can aid our understanding of Bourgeois's bodily practice within the space of the Cell works. She proposes that dance is another way in which girls cope with the absence of the mother. and in particular a whirling or spinning dance:
"This dance is also a way for the girl to create a territory of her own in relation to the mother. [...] Among women, the relationship to sameness and to the mother in not mastered by the 'fort-da'. The mother always remains too familiar and too close. [....] the sexual movement characteristic of the female is whirling round rather than throwing and pulling objects back as little Ernst does. The girl then tries to reproduce around and within her an energetic circular movement that protects her from abandonment. attack, depression, loss of self. Spinning round is also. but in my opinion secondarily, a way of attracting. The girl describes a circle while soliciting and refusing access to her territory. She plays with this gestural territory and its limit. There is no object here, in the strict meaning of the word. no other that has had to be introjected or incorporated. On the contrary, girls and women often set up a defensive territory that can then become creative, especially in analysis." (p.98: Again there are some significant choices in the Gill translation . In Irigaray's original ,little Ernst has ' (un) geste de lancer et rapprocher'; Gill offers 'attracting' as the translation fro Irigaray's 'séduire'. The sentence 'She plays with this gestural territory and its limit is my own translation of the original 'Elle joue avec ce territoire gestuel et sa limite.' Gill offers 'She is making a game of this territory she has described with her own body' ).
This passage is quoted at length because it clearly adds to the earlier discussion of process. Here, there may be space for developing a model for performative aspects of women's art practices - actual making and doing, gestures in the studio, the physical negotiation of the work by artist and viewer alike - all of which anecdotally so many women artists hold in high esteem. In doing this it is important not to collapse the term 'perfornative' back solely into the category of performance as it might be commonly be understood in a visual art context, particularly as performance art by women has rarely been accommodated within feminist cultural theory, which has been dominated by the motion of both body and image of woman as Object of the male gaze (This can be found in strands of feminism as diverse as, on the one hand , the anti-pornography movement , in its activist form e.g Andrea Dworkin Pornography: Men Possessing Women London: Women's Press,1981 or in psychoanalytic film theory,particularly the line of enquiry engendered by Laura Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Screen Vol.16 no.3 pp.6-18.)
An Irigarayan model of a woman performance artist 'soliciting and refusing access to [....] this territory she has described with her body" could well begin to account for the resistant position many women performers feel themselves to be in with regard to both the male gaze and to this strand of feminist theory. Crucially, however,the way in which Irigaray uses the word 'gesture' - her constant description of gestures as being in some way performed (whether that performance is the reason for the gesture's being or whether the performance of the gesture is considered pragmatic, or a means to an end) - this suggests also that this is a specific concept through which we can begin consideration of the physical gestures of women artists in their studios, certain gestural structures they build into their work. their approach to the spaces in which their work is made public and the manner in which it is made public. In short, it suggests a space for analysis of what where and how the performative gestures of women artists are in their practices. As with the distinction I have just made of performance art from a notion of 'the performative', so too 'gestural' should be read as literally 'of the gesture' in the manner in which Irigaray charts the gestures of lying or sitting in the analytic scenario, and not gestural as used in relation to, for instance, Expressionism - this particular distinction is crucial, given the naming and over-determination of a particular form of gesture within the area of visual art discourse, and how it is redolent of patriarchy, modernism, essentialism and genius.
Irigaray rounds up this part of her essay by saying:
''Girls do not enter language in the same ways as boys. [...] They enter language by producing a space, a path, a river, a dance and rhythm, a song... Girls describe a space around themselves rather than displacing a substitute object from one place to another or into various places." (Gesture in Pyschoanalysis p.99)
To summarise: if the relation with the mother leads girls to a distinct relation with the thing that becomes the representation of the mother in her absence; if it leads them to particular approaches to the definition of space - space which is both a defensive space which speaks of the experience of loss, and a display at the same time; and if this is achieved through movement which is gendered, sexualised even, which is gestural, movement which attends to process rather than object - then I think we have a set of concepts which can facilitate a developing analysis of aspects of Bourgeois's practice. We have to return to Bourgeois's relation to her mother.
I think we can take it as read that all little girls at some point will miss their mothers, or have to come to terms with their mother's absence: it is part of the usual and inevitable process of separation. In 'Gesture in Psychoanalysis', Irigaray is not referring to particularly notable or extreme case studies; rather she is locating her discussion within a realm of 'usual-ness'. Louise Bourgeois would have experienced such moments. But for Bourgeois the experience of missing her mother would have been intensified by Madame Bourgeois's displacement from her position as mother within the family as a result of her husband's introduction of his mistress into the house. She no longer had a relationship to her husband which was clear and comprehensible to little Louise. There was also no longer clarity in the mother/daughter relationship, as the mistress was also tutor to the girl, in loco parentis in more ways than one. Madame Bourgeois was still physically present, but her position as mother was displaced; it is this removal that caused such pain, anger and anxiety in her daughter. The anger is expressed towards the father for doing what he did; and towards the mother for not being all she should have been. It is notable that in this story the father's position as patriarch of the family remains intact: in this respect he was still what he should have been although personally flawed and unethical in his relationships with these three women.
Bourgeois has frequently referred to her life history as the cause of her impulse to work. For example Deborah Wye quotes her as saying of some earlier works that they "had nothing to do with sculpture, they meant physical presences. That was an attempt at not only recreating the past but controlling it."(Deborah Wye 'One & Others' in Wye Louise Bourgeois,New York Museum of Modern Art,1982 p.19). Drawing upon the insights offered by Irigaray, I would like to argue that the past decade during which Bourgeois has been articulating in interviews the intensities and complexities of her feelings towards her mother has also been the period in which she has articulated this relationship through her work. Irigaray indicated that the girl missing her mother will (amongst other things) organise a symbolic space around herself . She produces a territory through gestures of spinning, sexuate, gender-specific circular movement. This performs three main functions for the girl: it protects her from abandonment, depression, attack, loss of self, it attracts; it refuses access. It is also a process in which there is no clear object in relation to the subject.
This is precisely the process I think Bourgeois has performed with her Cell pieces and related works such as Precious Liquids(1989). Constantly referred to by critics as installation pieces' these are rare among installation work for making manifest a self-determined, architectural, material description of the artist's own psychic space, rather than the artist making manifest their psychic(or intellectual or whatever) space within a given architectural space. Their role in protecting the artist from her childhood abandonment and loss of self is apparent from her own statements. Little in the work is reducible to object-status ; things in the works are never treated in a manner that can be identified as symbolic objects but retain an ambivalent status . Thus, for instance, marble 'sculptures', referring in both material and its working to a well-established tradition of object-making are placed in space or juxtaposed with other materials. Likewise, found objects, in the works are not placed to emphasise their Surreal nature or their usage as universal symbols or to encourage a reading of them as fetish objects: rather they are used as visual material with which an idiosyncratic narrative is being articulated. Viewers are attracted in to the Cells. but at the same time kept at bay through Bourgeois's description of this her symbolic space. She does this sometimes literally by making us peer in, while refusing us clear physical or visual access: sometimes she does this through her image. With what can be for the viewer a baffling lack of didacticism for such precisely selected or made things and such rigorously articulated space
The dimensions of the Cells are significant too. There is here an engagement with gestural territory and its limits and a spatial relationship to the human body. Their general title recalls on the one hand cells of incarceration or contemplation with their connotations of space in tight relation to body size and, on the other hand, evocations of body cells and implications literally of incorporation of experience. With the Cells, Bourgeois does in indeed 'produce a space, a path, a river, a dance and rhythm, a song'. One can almost imagine Bourgeois performing the Irigarayan dance, spinning around, arms outstretched, to find the dimensions that are appropriate. She has made many comments about the significance to her of spiralling, in a manner which equates with Irigaray's notion of spinning. For instance:
"There are a lot or spirals... but they are not automatic. The spiral is a vacuum it represents something... the void, the anxiety void, the void of anxiety ' (Meyer-Thoss op.cit.pp.72-73)
and
"The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos. It has two directions. Where do you place yourself ; at the periphery or at the vortex? Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing control; the winding in is a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance. Beginning at the centre is affirmation, the move outward is a representation of giving, and giving up control : of trust, positive energy, of life itself " (Meyer-Thoss p.179)
and
'The spiral is the beginning of movement in space. As opposed to the rigidity of the monolith, the subject is exploring space." (Kirili, op.cit. p.74)
The spiral anti the spinning figures can be found as a theme in many works earlier than the Cells. There it is in sculptures such as the Spiral Women of the late 1940s and early 1950s; Life Flower 1 (1960); Spiral/Summer (1960); Spiral Woman (1984). This last has a slate disc some three feet wide placed on the floor; hanging above it, at about head height, suspended on a wire and able to turn, is a small bronze of a female figure. Her torso and head arc surrounded by a thick coil of bronze: her limbs are positioned as if she were twirling round. In the terms of this discussion this appears to be a transitional work, somewhere between ,on the one hand, the earlier projection onto materials of what it is to spin and spiral, as in the earlier Spiral Women; and, on the other, in the subsequent Cell works, a manifestation through the performative manipulation of materials of that spinning, its causes and indeed its pleasures.
Robert Storr has looked back to what he calls "the whirling dervish figure" in plate 4 of He disappeared into Complete Silence (1947):
"When she [Bourgeois] comes round it is never to close the circle but to re-inscribe its course with a new emphasis, widening or narrowing its scope as she proceeds. [...] The animating force of her formal language and a self portrait, that figure is the direct spatial expression of an insatiable need. she is the spiral-woman, seeking but never finding the absolute core of her being, always advancing even when she seems to be retracing her steps, always restless because she has not reached her outer limits. Nothing in the psychic or aesthetic economy of Bourgeois's obsessions has altered these terms." (Robert Storr op.cit. 1995. p.31)
But Storr, for all his acute perception in his essay, also forgoes any account of Bourgeois's mother, despite mentioning both her father and his mistress. In doing so he also demonstrates the effect of this lack, by suggesting that the artist is "seeking but never finding the absolute core of her being". in missing the mother, and the little girl's relation with the mother, the void is, rather, in the centre of his discussion of Bourgeois: a void, that to use another Irigarayan concept, represents in a patriarchal structure "the horror of nothing to see." (This Sex which is Not One p.26). If however we accept the importance of the mother/daughter relationship, we can also explore in Bourgeois's work a specificity of form, body, and meaning which otherwise remains unacknowledged.
Copyright © : H.Robinson,1996.
N.Paradoxa: Issue 3, May 1997
This essay was first published in (ed) Ian Cole Louise Bourgeois MOMA,Oxford Papers Vol 1 1996.