Katy Deepwell
For Lippard, the work of these artists marked a new reconciliation between the art-as-art or the art-as-life positions, through their use of new synthetics as opposed to old sculptural materials and forms which were felt and seen as an ‘alogical visual compound’ or ‘obstreperous sight’. (17). These artists rejected 'the arbitrary in favour of a single form that unites image, shape, metaphor and association, confronting the viewer as a whole, an undiluted aesthetic sensation, instead of as a bundle or conflicting or balanced parts.’ (18) She then went on to attribute the work’s ‘near visceral identification with form’ as characteristic of its embrace of as form of ‘body ego’:
‘Body ego can be experienced two ways: first, through appeal, the desire to caress, to be caught up in the feel and rhythms of a work; second, through repulsion, the immediate reaction against certain forms and surfaces which take longer to comprehend. The first is more likely to be wholly sensuous while the second is based on education and taste, the often unnatural distinctions between beauty and ugliness, right and wrong subject-matter’ (19)
Although in 1965, she rejected the identification of the work with genital imagery in ‘Eccentric Abstraction’, Lippard developed her arguments about ‘bodily identification’ as a specifically feminine aesthetic in From the Center which also significantly included a recent Artforum essay on Bourgeois. In From the Center she describes how Judy Chicago’s and Miriam Schapiro’s ideas of core imagery as a ‘feminine aesthetic’ have contributed to the debate about women’s art in terms of identifying recurent forms and elements. These included, in her infamous definition:
‘a uniform density, or overall texture, often sensuously tactile and reptitive or detailed to the point of obsession; the preponderance of circular forms, central focus, inner space (Sometimes contradicting the first aspect); a ubiquitous linnear ‘bag’ or parabolic form that turns in on itself ; layers,strata, or veils, and indefinable looseness of handling; windows; autobiographical content; animals; flowers; a certain kind of fragmentation; a new fondness for the pinks and pastels and ephemeral cloud colors that used to be tabu unless a woman wanted to be accused of making ‘feminine’ art’.(20)
Bourgeois’ work could be described as possessing all or any of the above elements , depending on which pieces of her work were under discussion. The association of her work with ‘a feminine aesthetic’ was developed through the inclusion of the essay in the same book. But it is probably more important to draw finer distinctions between Bourgeois’s work and the arguments advanced by Lippard on ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ and ‘biomorphic abstraction’, for Bourgeois’s work is not identical either with feminist definitions of core imagery (except in so far as the some of the general attributes in the list above could all apply to individual pieces by Louise Bourgeois) , nor a new surrealist tendency. Nor, as Robert C. Morgan points out, is it the same as arguments surrounding another current identified by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1987 as ‘post-mimimalism’ (which Pincus-Witten identifies as a development beyond ‘eccentric abstraction’) nor does Bourgeois's work represent a ‘transitional case’ between these two forms of sculpture for a younger generation of sculptors (21).
While Bourgeois’ work clearly alludes to an erotic it cannot be reduced, (as if all discussion of women’s eroticism could !) to another example of core imagery. Bourgeois makes clear her own identification with Lippard’s thesis on ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ as well as her distance from 1930’s forms of modernist identification with geometric and non-geometric abstraction, when she was asked by Cindy Nemser in 1970, if some of her forms had male and female sexual connotations,:
‘No, I don’t see that at all. I’m not conscious of that at all or not even unconscious. I’m aware they can be thought of as that even in the process of making them, but I’m not saying that....I think the circle is very abstract, I could make up stories about what the circle means to men, but I don’t know if it is that conscious. I think it was a form, a vehicle. I don’t think I had a sexual, anthropomorphic or geometric meaning. It wasn’t a breast and it wasn’t a circle representing life and eternity.’ (22)
Lippard’s own commentary on Louise Bourgeois by 1975, however, reverses this impression and speaks frankly about the sexual assocations and connotations of her work. It is this clarity about the sexual imagery combined with a psychoanalytic vocabulary that then becomes important in how Bourgeois’ work may be read. Lippard also quotes Bourgeois’ 1974 statement that ‘If we are very very compulsive, all we have at our disposal is to repeat, and that expresses the validity of what we have to say. This is so important to me that all I can find is to repeat and repeat and repeat’ (23). Repitition combined with pyschoanalytic reading have become predominant as a theme in postmodern work and a means to creating a critical discourse about contemporary work, but apart from the identification of neurosis or pyschosis, this vocabulary also fails when confronted by the experimentation and repititions which Louise Bourgeois’ work manifestly demonstrates. This, I believe, is due to the current paradoxes presented by both feminism and modernism when speaking about a woman avantgarde artist whose work slips between all ‘normative’ accounts of modernist/postmodernist discourse.
The problems presented by the paradoxical relationship of feminism and modernism can be usefully reconceived in relation to Theresa de Lauretis’ theory of ‘technologies of gender’. Here gender is represented as a set of constructions maintained and produced by all practices, institutions and discourses. In patriarchy and, for the purposes of this argument, in mainstream modernist thought, gender relations are always asymmetrically constructed against a (masculinist) norm. Feminism and feminist resistances appear as a form of ‘space-off’ - a view askance, a space apart, where combinations of difference and explorations of contradictions and polarities start to multiply (24). De Lauretis’ account emphasises the importance of gender as a relation which is traced, critiqued and analysed as the result of any given formation. For feminists, the necessary critical negativity which is produced is affirmative in so far as it emphasises that power (moving from passivity to activity) is what motivates an individual’s investments in specific discursive practices. This theory is in opposition to gender as ‘difference’ : as opposition defined in terms of pure difference. It is also in opposition to ‘writing’ as woman , even to devenir femme and the French feminist emphasis on écriture feminine. De Lauretis insists upon feminist theory continuing its radical critique of dominant discourses on gender ; asking questions about how particular constructions are developed in relation to particular interests. Here, this involves asking why and in whose interests are certain ideas of Bourgeois’s project maintained in art criticism and repeatedly circulated as ‘orthodoxies’, for example, why is autobiography and the artists’ personal memories emphasised rather than a feminist reading of the ‘personal as political’. The second related question from de Lauretis is : in whose interests are any de-re-constructions effected? In de Lauretis’ terms, the ‘subject of feminism’ refers to both the outlining of the historical condition of a particular construction offering resistance to dominant technologies, a ‘reading against the grain’, and the theoretical conditions of its possibility in :
‘a movement back and forth between the representation of gender (in its male-centred frame of reference) and what that representation leaves out and more pointedly makes unrepresentable. It is a movement between the (represented) discursive space of positions made available by hegemonic discourses and the ‘space-off ’ , the elsewhere, of those discourses, those other spaces,both discursive and social that exist...in the margins...’between the lines’...’against the grain’ in the interstices of institutions, in counterpractices and new forms of community.’ (25)
From a feminist viewpoint, heteronomy is emphasised to demonstrate that the principal ordering of the world (even modernist canons and definitions) is neither monolithic nor fixed and thus subject to change. While modernism offered a means of representation, it could not account for aspects of women’s experience, which as they entered the frame, became incomprehensible. They remain as part of the ‘space-off’ the looking askance that women’s work represents in malestream thought. Male critics find it hard to comprehend or sustain a potential feminist reading of Bourgeois’ work , except through a negative ‘totalising’ view of feminism as an inversion of male values or as an expression of woman’s desire to ‘have’ the Phallus. Donald Kuspit , for example, in ‘Where Angels fear to Tread’ Artforum,1987, can only use the Freudian term ‘penis envy’ to name Bourgeois’ project .
‘She wants recognition of her share of natural power, which man, in a political act of expropriation, and in a materialist act of literalism, has claimed entirely for himself ’...‘her power to give birth in order to ground and guarentee his own sociopolitical power by hoarding all power, the ‘penis envy’ at its deepest can be understood as woman’s demand that her own implicit ‘phallicness’ be explicitly recognised’ (26).
While Kuspit notes that in Bourgeois’ work the ‘power of men and women integrate violently yet seamlessly’ (27), he has to find other ways to ‘master’ his subject. So she becomes a ‘handworker rather than [a] literary artist. She models or shapes or, let us say ‘masturbates’ it to find the phallic in it’ and this activity is ‘not strictly a sexual wish, but a more inclusive wish for metamorphosizing merger’ (28). Kuspit has difficulties (particularly here in the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis) in explaining what is going on in her work. The binary oppositions of abstract/ figural, radical subjectivity / public sculpture, inside/outside, damage/reparation, fear/mastery, order/chaos reappear with one term privileged over the other, rather than producing a situation in which the very binary oppositions are themselves challenged or undermined. While recognising themes as pregnant, phallic, and fecal, the language breaks down when trying to explain the multiply phallic, clitoral and multi-breasted forms except in terms of a repetitive, serial or minimalist character.
A refreshingly different reading is provided by Mignon Nixon writing in Parkett about Louise Bourgeois ‘La Fillette’ and the photographs taken by Robert Mapplethorpe of Lousie Bourgeois where she holds this latex sculpture as a ‘prop’ in a photography session (29). Louise Bourgeois calls ‘La Fillette’ (little girl) her ‘little Louise’ - a ‘child self with a lost state of self-love’(30) . It is simultaneously her and the projection of and display of her own desire. It is both a self-representation and an object-made for psychic use. She projects herself onto the object and it remains a substitute for what is lost. The security of the sculpture as doll/infant/girl’s desire is made multipally ironic by its excessive representation as overgrown Phallus (31). It is the projection of little Louise’s desire but it also represents the fragility of masculinity when for the photograph in From the Center it was displayed hanging on wire hook. Her play with the object as she is being photographed marks its representation as both toy, penis and baby - Freud is turned potentially on its head and his conception of women’s desire for control as ‘penis envy’ placed in question. Lacan’s idea of woman ‘being’ the Phallus, desiring to have the Phallus is another possible interpretation or this scenario, but here Bourgeois consciously and ironically acts out Lacan’s structure for the unconscious. Nixon follows sequence of photos by Mapplethorpe discussing how Bourgeois holds ‘La Fillette’, cupping , stroking, clasping or supporting the sculpture: ‘acting out attraction, fascination, attachment, pride but also manipulation, control, discipline and power; that is, she represents the Mother’s double fantasy of seduction and dominance. The distinction, however,obvious, between a portrayal of mother and baby, which Bourgeois; is not and the scenario she does play, between mother and doll, defines her representation not only as a fantasy, but as a strategy.’ (32) Nixon details how MOMA took Mapplethorpe’s photos for publicity in 1982 - cropping them and removing ‘La Fillette’ from view - leaving only a headshot of the artist. A detail, where the ‘appropration of desire by [a] female subject’ is denied or attenuated’ (33) and the codes of artist’s portrait are then confined to facial expression.
Bourgeois herself repeatedly makes the point in interviews that it is necessary to move from the passive to the active, from the recognition of what oppresses you, be it your fears or the overwhelming emotions provoked by desire in order that you find a way to come to terms with these emotions. Her work embraces complex reversals of emotion in seemingly paradoxical forms (neither completely phallic nor an expression of core imagery). For example, in her sculpture of a pregnant woman who is frightened but projects a defensive image of being frightening , whose interior ‘life’ is marked by the contradictions of her ‘external’ appearance. Or ‘Mamelles’ where the attitude of a man to whom all women are objects to be sucked dry appears as multi-breasted, vaginal pink, horizontal form. The complexity of these kinds of reading, however, is at odds with her assimilation into current categories of ‘post-minimalism’ , the abject, or forms of postminimalist abstract sculpture by contemporary younger women artists which are marked by the use of ‘negative feminine spaces’ (e.g Rachel Whiteread’s ‘Ghost’ or ‘House’ , Janine Antoni ‘Wean’ , or Helen Chadwick’s ‘Piss flowers’).
I believe, it is necessary to distinguish feminist as opposed to non-feminist critical or formalist readings. For it is in the attention to the visibility and viability of feminist readings in or against those circulating in the mainstream where one can find the woman-centred perspective in Louise Bourgeois’ work and where her considerable appeal to other women lies.
Notes
17) ibid p.35
18) & 19) ibid p.34
20) Lippard From the Center p.49.
21) R.C.Morgan ‘Eccentric Abstraction and Postminimalism’ Flash
Art No. 144 Jan/Feb 1989 pp.73-81.
22) quoted in Broude and Garrard The Power of Feminist Art p.19
23) quoted in Lippard From the Center p.240.
24) T.de Lauretis Technologies of Gender : Essays on Theory,Film and
Fiction (Macmillan,1987) see pp.1-26
25) ibid.p.26
26) Donald Kuspit ‘Where Angels fear to Tread’
Artforum,1987Vol.25 pt 7 March 1987 p.115.
27) ibid.
28) ibid p.116
29) Mignon Nixon ‘Louise Bourgeois’ Fillette’ Parkett 27
1991 p.49-51
30) ibid,p.49
31) ibid,p.50
32) ibid p.51
33) ibid,p.50.
Copyright © : Katy Deepwell,1996.
N.Paradoxa : Issue 3, May 1997
This essay was first published in (ed) Ian Cole Louise Bourgeois MOMA,Oxford Papers Vol 1 1996.
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