Hilary Robinson
"It is difficult to find a framework vivid enough to incorporate Louise Bourgeois's sculpture. Attempts to bring a coolly evolutionary or art-historical order to her work or to see it in the context of one art group or another, have proved more or less irrelevant. [...] Rarely has an abstract art been so directly and honestly informed by its maker's psyche.'' (Lucy Lippard 'Louise Bourgeois. From the Inside Out' ArtForum, March 1975 p.27.)
So wrote Lucy Lippard in 1975. Twenty years later the same case can still be made. Reading various articles and essays about Louise Bourgeois, I have been struck by the continuing search for frameworks within which her work can be discussed and tested but also how writers come to terms with it. While the commentators have not had violent arguments with each other, their lack of unity is notable. Thus one writer will account for Bourgeois's work within expressionism; another will call it formalist. One writer will say it is materials-led: another that it is shaped by the artist's life story. One will describe it as symptomatic of a dysfunctional family background: another, as symptomatic of Bourgeois's involvement with Surrealism. The one thing that the writers do all seem to agree upon is that the work is somehow something to do with the body and with sex - though whether it is descriptive symbolic, metaphorical. representational or evocative in its relation to the body is not something about which there seems to be any consensus. Likewise, the writers exhibit similar ambiguity about the work's relationship with sex - extending to lack of clarity about whether its apparent sexiness is related to the body of the artist; whether it is a result of its relationship to their bodies: whether it is gender-specific; etcetera. The cumulative effect of reading the extant literature on Bourgeois is that in general the terms body' and sex', in the discussions of her work, remain remarkably unproblematised as if in and of themselves these words are universally understood and experienced and can be used as some form of benchmark What I would like to do here, far from supplying any overall key to Bourgeois's work, will probably add to the stirring and muddying of the waters. I want to supply a partial reading of some of Bourgeois's works through a partial reading of some of the writings of the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray. I am doing this for quite pragmatic reasons: Bourgeois is an artist to whom I have long been drawn, but with little clarity in my reasons for responding to her work. The invitation to contribute here has arrived whilst I am in the middle of a research project on Irigaray and I have found some of my work on her has given me clearer insight and understanding of Bourgeois. in particular. I have come to an understanding of the more recent Cell series.
There is a paradox in this, and I think it important to outline briefly the aspects of Irigaray's writing which are of use in such a discussion. After all, Irigaray tends to locate visual pleasure within the realm of the male (particularly in her earlier writings) while locating female pleasure within the body and more specifically within touch. In an often-quoted passage she states:
''The predominance of the visual ...is particularly foreign to female eroticism. Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking and her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation" (Luce Irigaray This Sex which is Not One Ithaca Cornell University Press,1985 (trans. of 1977 text) pp.25-26).
This would imply a closure for a discussion of work by a woman artist. Further. it is the passages of her writing which touch upon sexuality, ethics and criticism that can be most easily extracted and worked upon, not her discussion of the visual. Thus her work can most easily (but I think misguidedly) be seen as having more relevance for her discussion of either the ostensive subject matter of artworks or for the broader contextualising and frame of reference that an artist might construct; and as having less relevance for the material practices of making art works, looking at them and understanding those processes. Yet it is precisely the latter not the former which drew me to recent work by Bourgeois. While thinking about the Cells I have found passages in Irigaray which have aided my understanding of and accounting for. particular practices involved in them. In the reading of Irigaray I offer here I will concentrate on the essay "Gesture in psychoanalysis" (Irigaray Sexes and Genealogies New York: Columbia University Press (trans G.C. Gill) pp.89-104. French edition in Sexes et Parentés, Paris , Les Éditions Minuit 1987, pp.103-118)
In this essay Irigaray explores two sites of gesture from her experience of the psychoanalytic scenario - gestures which are particular to the analytic scenario and those which originate beyond it, but which she has uncovered as a result of her participation in it. Irigaray begins her paper with a long discussion of the gender-specific experiences of the classic analytic scenario as embodied through physical gesture - the lying down of the woman the unseen-ness of the man who sits behind her. Irigaray's subsequent discussion of gestures from beyond the analytic scenario (but discussed within it) is then reflected back upon this initial discussion to re-enforce from other viewpoints her original contention that this is a gendered experience readable through physical expression. It is this aspect of Irigaray's essay - her findings of gestures and their practices which, although uncovered during analysis are in fact extra-analytic - which is of particular use to the present discussion. Much of Irigaray's argument derives from her exploration and understanding of the girl / mother relation and in particular from her insight into the ways in which the little girl comes to terms with her mother's absence. I wish to argue that the gestural practices Irigaray has located in this process of the little girl may also be discovered resonating within a strand of Bourgeois's practice cumulating in the Cell series and related works.
But how does this concentration of Irigaray upon the girl/mother relation aid our understanding of work by Louise Bourgeois? After all Bourgeois is now famous for making work which stems from her feelings about her father not her mother. As Robert Storr has written describing conversations he had with Bourgeois:
"It was while preparing a slide show autobiography for her 1982 MoMA exhibition [...] that she first told in full the story of her father and the mistress which has since become myth of origin for much of her work.''
However. he does go on to complain:
"Enlightening in many respects, in others this story has restricted the interpretation of what she has done to narrowly personal of archetypically Freudian sources.'' (Tate Gallery Magazine, no.6. Summer 1995 p.29)
In our eagerness to hear another version of the Freudian family romance - in this case. the charming, philandering, autocratic and ultimately intolerable father, whose mistress is not only the daughter's nanny. but who is also moved by the father into the marital home - it becomes easy to focus on the daughter-to-father emotion; the anger, the desolation of the daughter, the young Bourgeois. It becomes manifest in the work: and indeed is of great importance for it. Bourgeois herself helps us focus on this through her own words, providing a moving, at times devastating, account of her autobiography: "My father betrayed me by not being what he was supposed to be... It is just a matter of rules of the game, and in a family the rules of the game are such that a minimum of conformity is expected" ; and "My father provoked in me a continual loss of self-esteem" (Christine Meyer-Thoss Louise Bourgeois: Konstructionen Für den Freien Fall: Designing for Free Fall Zurich,Amman,1992). She has also stated that when her mother died, her father ridiculed her grief (Deborah Wye 'The Drama of the Self: the Prints of Louise Bourgeois' in Wye and Carol Smith The Prints of Louise Bourgeois New York,Museum of Modern Art, 1994 p.18).
But this dysfunctional father/daughter relationship has functioned as a 'suitable' subject for critical voyeurism. Among the commentators on Bourgeois. Julie Nicoletta has written:
"The story of this affair [...] has taken on the aura of myth. No one interested in Bourgeois's work has looked beyond this Freudian idea of a traumatised childhood to see what other factors may have inspired Bourgeois." (J.Nicolette 'Louise Bourgeois' Femmes-Maisons' Women's Art Journal, Fall/Winter 1992-3)
Nicoletta's option is to follow a Lacanian model in a discussion of Bourgeois's Femme-Maison series - which may or may not be a way out of this particular family romance. But what struck me when reading the literature on Bourgeois was the lack of discussion of Bourgeois's relation to her mother. For instant Mira Schor has written
"[Bourgeois's] insistence on the source of her work residing in psychological wounds inflicted on her by her father contravenes any formal theories of art and yet embodies the Oedipal crisis that psycholinguistic theory interprets as the entrance of human beings into the Symbolic Order of the Father. Bourgeois obsessively returns the critical audience of her work to its motivating source the murderous rage of a betrayed daughter. Her admission to the symbolic order has been warped by her father's open affair with her governess."
She then continues the paragraph:
"[Bourgeois's] link back to the Imaginary (completeness of relation to the Mother) is damaged by her mother's presumed complicity." (Mira Schor 'From Liberation to Lack' Heresies Vol 6 No. 4 1989 p.20)
However, she does not develop this. Donald Kuspit does propose an argument about the importance of Bourgeois's mother:
"Bourgeois's entanglement with her mother, not her father, is becoming clear as the inner content of her work. She has filled the void of mother/artist in spirit as well as substance, an Oedipus replacing the mother instead of the father, a Sphinx whose Secret is that a story about a relationship to a father is really a story about a relationship to a mother." (Donald Kuspit 'Louise Bourgeois: Where Angels Fear to Tread' Artforum,1987 pp.120-121)
This, however, is the conclusion. rather than the starting point, of his article and a theme which does not appear to have been taken up by anyone else. Maybe a girl's relationship with her mother is seen as having less potential for scandal and tragedy, less glamour, and less scope for critical voyeurism. Bourgeois herself however, gives us plenty of prompting to take her relationship with her mother seriously. To give just three examples:
"These titles are informative. 'Blind Vigils' is like 'Blind leading the Blind'. Blindness came from the blush I experienced at the side of the people around me, everybody. As I say, my father was promiscuous. I had to be blind to the mistress who lived with us. I had to be blind to the pain of my mother." (Alain Kirali 'The Passion for Sculpture: A Conversation with Bourgeois' Arts Magazine March 1989 p.71)
"When I was afraid of my mother dying, a challenge I could not meet, the warding off of her death, not to let her disappear, I made a vow. I swore to myself if my mother survived that morning I would give up sex." (Meyer -Thoss op.cit)
'The material was there taking all that room and bothering me. bothering me by its aggressive presence. And somehow the idea of the mother came to me. This is the way my mother impressed me, as very powerful. very silent, very judging, and controlling the whole studio. And naturally this piece became my mother. At that point, I had my subject. I was going to express what I felt toward her... First I cut off her head, and I slit her throat ... And after weeks and weeks of work. I thought. if this is the way I saw my mother, then she did not like me. How could she possibly like me if I treat her that way? At that point something turned around. I could not stand the idea that she wouldn't like me. I couldn't live if I thought that she didn't like me. The fact that I had pushed her around, cut off her head had nothing to do with it. What you do to a person has nothing to do with what you expect the person to feel toward you... Now at the I became very, very depressed, terribly terribly depressed." (Mignon Nixon 'Bad Enough Mother' October No.72 Winder 1995 p.87).
I find it interesting that these comments of Bourgeois have surfaced in recent years, and I would like to link them to a strand in her work which, although it can be traced back, has also emerged in a particularly notable manner over the past decade in the Cell works and other related pieces. In these we can find Bourgeois's embodiment through particular manipulation of space through materials, of her earlier interest in the spiral and circling movement. This is manifested in earlier works in a more straightforwardly representational manner. We also find a blurring of subject/object relations: the Cells are not easily containable art objects as such, and neither- are the 'objects' comprising them clear in their object status to either the viewing subject or to Bourgeois herself. These aspects of Bourgeois's work can be brought into focus with the aid of the Irigaray essay "Gesture in Psychoanalysis".
Copyright © : H.Robinson,1996.
N.Paradoxa : Issue 3, May 1997
This essay was first published in Ian Cole (ed) Louise Bourgeois MOMA,Oxford Papers Vol 1 1996.