Katy Deepwell
This paper explores why and how Louise Bourgeois is so celebrated , loved and admired by many feminists, including myself, and the ways in which her work has been read by feminists. For, how Louise Bourgeois is discussed as a major woman artist appears to suggest not only the diversity of feminist approaches to her work but also some of the familiar differences between American and British feminist approaches both in art criticism and art history.
It was Lucy Lippard who, in 1975, first described Louise Bourgeois as a woman artist who ‘despite her apparent fragility’ had ‘survived almost 40 years of discrimination, struggle, intermittent success and neglect in New York’s gladatorial art arenas. The tensions which make her work unique are forged between just those poles of tenacity and vulnerability’ (1).
This theme of survival coupled with commitment to her own practice, both within and apart from critical neglect, is emphasised in many accounts of Bourgeois’ work. While Bourgeois had been known to many artists in New York through public exhibitions since the 1950’s and from the 1970’s as a teacher, a woman artist who has survived to see a turnaround in her own reputation (and one which has been fuelled by feminist research and curatorship) is a phenomenon to be celebrated. However, it has been feminist art historians who have consistently drawn attention to the ways in which women artists have been routinely neglected,ignored and discriminated against in terms of exhibition and the writing of histories of art.
Ann Sutherland Harris in 1989 argued that Louise Bourgeois ‘entry’ into the mainstream in the 1980’s bore closer examination because of the ‘criteria’ upon which such judgements were made. She asked the question : what forms of public exhibition, critical reception or scholarly enquiry did it take for women to be recognised in the mainstream?
‘Her award for distinguished achievement from the Women’s Caucus for Art [in 1980]? Carrie Rickey’s review in Artforum and John Russell’s in the New York Times in December 1979? Eleanor Munro’s chapter on Bourgeois in her book, Originals: American Women Artists? Or was it perhaps the honorary degree from Yale in 1977? In 1980, Bourgeois had not yet had an exhibition at any public or university gallery which gave her more than a brochure. Many people first discovered Bourgeois and had a chance to savour her work when the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA) gave her a one-person show with a proper catalogue in 1982.’ (2).
Ann Sutherland Harris’ questions draw attention to the institutional parameters for notoriety, success in terms of recognition by institutions alongside critical acclaim. She highlights the links between museum curation / collection policies and the dealer-system. For, it is only since the MOMA New York exhibition in 1982 that Louise Bourgeois has acquired an international reputation. However, Ann Sutherland-Harris’ commentary about what it takes to acquire a reputation as a ‘mainstream’ artist do not fully address another interesting aspect to Bourgeois’ lifetime of public exhibitions, her participation in numerous feminist and women only shows during the 1970’s (roughly 18 of the exhibitions between 1972-1982, listed in Deborah Wye’s 1982 book (3)), e.g. ‘13 Women Artists’ organised by the New York Women’s Ad-Hoc Committee in 1972. ‘American Women Artists’ Show’ organised by Gedok, at the Hamburg Kunsthaus, ‘East Coast Women’s Invitation Exhibition’ in 1974 at Philadelphia Museum, etc . Bourgeois’ willingness to show with other women certainly increased her reputation amongst other women artists even while it may have contributed very little to her achieving a ‘mainstream’ status in the international dealer/critic/museum system. I am calling attention to this aspect of her exhibitions (alongside a life-long commitment to sending works to fundraising exhibitions for a range of social and political causes e.g. her protests against the exclusions of the Whitney Museum in the 1970’s) because it contributed to her visibility amongst women and because it is often neglected in discussions of her critical reputation.
Her outstanding Achievement Visual Arts Award by the Women’s Caucus for the Arts in 1980 is also significant in terms of the level of recognition she has amongst other women. WCA is the largest organisation for women artists and art historians in the USA. In 1980, WCA awards were also given to several other ‘survivors’ of both longstanding neglect and recent recovery in the New York art world: Lee Krasner, Anni Albers, Caroline Durieux and Ida Kohlmeyer. WCA honours have no equivalent in Britain though the Gabrielle Munter Preis, administered by the Frauen Museum might qualify, and this is in spite of the many women artists in Britain who might qualify for an award recognising more than twenty years of consistent achievement. The honours awards are one means through which American feminists have made links with an older generation of women artists well-established in the commercial mainstream, promoting and honouring their professional activities in newly formed women’s organisations.
Another strategy can be found in the groundswell of research, publications and interviews with a large number of women artists by feminist art historians. Amongst British feminists, where links with earlier generations have not been so widely sustained, even shunned by one or other party, where ‘art world’ forms of feminism have appeared less of a phenomenon, (and the politics of recovery subjected to all kinds of valuable methodological revision), feminism appears as the product of specific generational groups rather than a broad-based alliance.
With regard to Louise Bourgeois this is not the same question as whether or not Louise Bourgeois is or calls herself a feminist and what kind of feminist she might be nor does it reduce to simply a question of whether or not she intended her work to be ‘read’ as feminist statements. It does however indicate a political sympathy with feminist platforms in the 1970s and that recognition of her work as emanating from her specific experience as a ‘woman’ is important to the context in which her work should be seen, namely, that the ‘personal’ in her work is always part of a broader set of ‘political’ commitments. The tribute she received in the speech given for the 1980s WCA honour awards’ indicates two further important points about Louise Bourgeois’ significance for other feminists:
‘You say in form what most of us are afraid to say in any way. Your sculpture defies styles and movements and returns to the sources of art - to the cultural expression of communal belief and emotion’ (4)
Louise Bourgeois work is firstly read as representative of ‘communal’ and shared beliefs among women. She is praised for ‘speaking out’, that is to say, for finding a visual form for experiences which are shared by many women. Her work although motivated by personal self-examination and self- reflection is read as a political message. The speech also offers a reading of Louise Bourgeois’s work in individualist terms, as a major avantgarde figure who cannot be slotted into or comfortably accommodated by the version of modernist art history which relies upon definitions of styles and movements. A similar argument had been advanced by Lucy Lippard in 1975 when she wrote that:
‘It is difficult to find a framework vivid enough to incorporate Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture. Attempts to bring a cooly 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. Any approach...and any material....can serve to define her own needs and emotions. Rarely has an abstract art been so directly and honestly, informed by its maker’s psyche’ (5)
The recognition of her ‘individual’ contribution and the difficulties of finding adequate terms to describe it ,while keeping a feminist perspective in view, underly the case made by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard in The Power of Feminist Art about Louise Bourgeois’s image of the ‘Femme-Maison’ (6). This image is frequently read by women as a representation of the ‘abolition of identity’ for women in home and family and a deliberate ‘cry for help’. In this respect, Bourgeois’s image (drawn in 1946-7) anticipates and alludes to the ‘problem with no name’ that Betty Friedan identified in the 1960’s as the dissatisfaction, the lack of fulfilment, of women who embarked on ‘careers’ as housewives and mothers in modern suburbia. However, as Whitney Chadwick points out ‘although Bourgeois pointed to the home as a place of conflict for the woman artist, critics [at the time,1946-1947] read the paintings as affirming a ‘natural’ identification between women and home’ (7). And it is here where the difficulties of discussing Bourgeois’s work and the lack of attention to feminist readings of Louise Bourgeois’ work start that many male critics (e.g. those mentioned below) read her work as proping up stereotypes about ‘woman’ or domesticity rather than challenging them. Broude and Garrard , for example, draw attention to the ways in which women-centred aspects of Bourgeois art are being submerged by mainstream critics who want to bend her into being a ‘link’ between masculinist movements, citing Michael Kimmelman who argued that Bourgeois ‘deals’ with sexual identity’ and her work is about polarities ‘male and female, aggressive and passive’ (8). Broude and Garrard suggest that much critical discussion of Bourgeois today often positions her work as a means of proping up dualism and phallologocentrism rather than demonstrating a challenge to it as some feminist readings of her work since the 1970s have argued.
Art critic’s difficulties with discussing Louise Bourgeois’ project as that of an avantgarde artist have to do with the paradoxes of both feminism and modernism. Nicole Dubroeuil-Blondin, in an essay tracking Lucy Lippard’s work as a feminist critic, argued that in the 1980’s ‘we can sense...the formation of a new and forceful alliance whose complexity has not yet been thoroughly examined and which at first sight seems to have found a paradoxical formulation’(9) in the renewed attention to the work of avantgarde women artists. Her essay raises four options whereby a modernist woman artist could to some extent be historically re-accommodated :
‘[1] Must the woman-paradigm be considered as the model rupture, the total ‘other’, the definite subversion that will reconcile aesthetics and politics? [2] Does its forceful arrival on the contemporary art scene mark an assault on an enemy territory that must be conquered and rebuilt on better foundations? [3] Or is not the avantgarde itself undergoing profound changes in its post-modernist phase, its new configurations corresponding exactly to the problematics of women’s art? [4] Will that art be simply another chapter - albeit a chapter particularly rich in plastic propositions - of the dominant art that is now creating history?’ [my additions] (10)
The feminine problematic for modernism is not an ‘inversion’ of the male-dominated tradition , a shadow , an alter-ego or even a differend , a signifier of pure free floating difference. Nor can the problematic of women’s art practice in modernism be shown as a separate and ‘Other’ tradition. Exploring the problematic which women artists represent in modernist discourse might, however, mark a means to a new formulation or a potentially a reformulation of the terms of reference in modernist debates and it is here that the critical readings which develop of an artist like Bourgeois provide such an interesting case study. If we return to Dubreuil-Blondin’s appraisal of Lippard’s project between 1965-1975 some key elements in how she first read Bourgeois’s work in modernist terms start to emerge.
Lippard, in spite of her defence of Minimalism, positioned herself against Greenbergian modernism and Fried’s formalism because of the ‘indices’ of modernist evaluation they had developed. She was interested in broadening aesthetic experience through ‘any sort of deviation that threatens the regularity of structure or that opens up paths other than the consideration of medium specificity’ (11). Her curation of ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ was an explicit challenge to the then dominant current of formalism which had defended a rigid often purely geometrical abstraction, on iconographic, material and socio-political levels.
‘Eccentric Abstraction’ held at the Fischbach Gallery,New York in 1966 had included Bourgeois along with Eva Hesse, Alice Adams, Lindsey Decker,Keith Sonnier, Bruce Nauman, Jean Linder, Gary Kuehn, Don Potts, Frank Lincoln Viner, and Kenneth Price. In an article ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ in Art International </(1966), Lippard draws some important distinctions between surrealism and the movement she names as ‘eccentric abstraction’. Surrealism, she argues, was based on the ‘reconciliation of two very distant realities whose relationship is grasped solely by the mind’ (e.g. Man Ray’s work As Beautiful as the Chance Encounter of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella on a Dissecting Table). Eccentric abstraction, by contrast, was based on the reconciliation of different forms , or formal effects in a cancellation of the form-content dichotomy (12). This, Lippard argues, results in a ‘complete acceptance by the senses - visual, tactile and visceral’ in the absence of ‘emotional interference and literary pictorial associations’ (13). The artists included pursue this in different and individual projects but ‘object to the isolation of biological implications and prefer their forms to be felt, or sensed, instead of read or interpreted. Sensual aspects are perversely, made unpleasant or minimized. Metaphor is freed from subjective bonds...Too much free association on the viewer’s part is combatted by formal understatement, which stresses non-verbal response’. This, Lippard argues, results in the viewer’s 'complete acceptance by the senses', of the 'visual, tactile and visceral' qualities of the art object, in the absence of 'emotional interference and literary pictorial associations'.(14)
Their work is unlike most modern sculpture since the 1950’s. It is ‘a non-sculptural style’, closer to abstract painting than to any sculptural forms in so far as it is neither assemblage, ‘which incorporated recognizable objects’, was additive and conglomerate in technique nor is it like minimalism which seeks to ‘activate’ the space or site (15). Lippard also remarks upon the artists’ refusal ‘to eschew imagination and the extension of sensuous experience while they also refuse to sacrifice the solid formal basis demanded of the best in current non-objective art’ (16) Lippard defines eccentric abstraction as a ‘non-sculptural style’ which is closer to abstract painting than to either of the two then dominant currents in modern sculpture. It is neither Assemblage ‘which incorporated recognizable objects’ and was additive and conglomerate in techinque, nor Minimalism which sought to ‘activate’ the space or site.
Notes
1) Lucy Lippard ‘Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside Out’
reprinted from Artforum 1975) in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s
Art New York: Dutton,1976 p.249
2) Ann Sutherland Harris ‘Entering the Mainstream: Women Sculptors
of the 20th Century’ Galerie Vol 2 pt 2 Fall 1989 p.8
3) D.Wye The Prints of Louise Bourgeois (New York, MOMA,1982)
4) D.Wye,1982 p.110
5) From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art p.238
6) N.Broude and M.Garrard The Power of Feminist Art New York: Harry
Abrams,1995 p.20
7) ibid
8) ibid
9) Nicole Dubroueil-Blondin ‘Feminism and Modernism:Paradoxes’
in B.Buchloh,S.Guilbaut,D.Solkin Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver
Conference Papers Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Press,1993 p.197
10) ibid,p.195
11) ibid p.200.
12) Art International Lugano Vol 10 No. 120 1966 p.28
13) & 14) ibid p.39.
15) & 16) ibid p.28
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.