Louise Bourgeois

"My childhood never lost its magic, never lost its mystery, and never lost its drama."

Her father would draw Louise Bourgeois' outline on the skin of a tangerine and cut it in the shape of a naked girl. When he finished, he would mock: "Look, Louise does not have anything there...." However, her father, in competition with her mother, bought her clothes, such as the ermine collar and hat which were not appreciated by the four-year-old child. Today, this behavior is interpreted by the artist as the loss of innocence. On October 25,1923, Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary: "I wake up late and go to Paris with Father who is going to buy me a coat, another coat and a hat of leather ".

Louise Bourgeois was the middle child, between her sister and her brother. This position gave her a sense of instability. Unresolved conflicts and ambiguous memories from childhood were retained as memories of a family in which the mother was the protective figure. The father, the authoritarian figure, became the lover of Sadie, the family's tutor. Science debates how the death of a father impacts a person's psychological structure or maybe this is mere fiction created by ethnologists. Bourgeois leads us to ambiguous and conflicting images of her father as in The Destruction of the Father (1974). The family home, the network of relationships among the members of the family, and the child's anguish make up the "childhood motivations" which are the basis of her art. "The corpus of my work," stated Louise Bourgeois, "is adjusted to my recurrent identification with Eugénie Grandet, a Balzac character, who was never given a chance to grow up and the daughter in Père Goriot, who never grew up.

"Father would go with Pierre and me to the school full of boys, watched me .... I got dressed in the afternoon and went to play under the cherry trees. Sadie and I were wearing father's pants."

Her father had a tapestry restoration business, a craft which acquires a symbolic meaning in her work. The sewing room was the ideal place to discover secrets, such as sex, which were denied her. While she mended Mr. Bourgeois' pants, the seamstress answered the questions raised by young Louise about the parts of the body. The garment codes were the rules of desire. Therefore, in this house, the seamstress and the mistress managed sensuality. The artist links:

SEAMSTRESS
MISTRESS
DISTRESS
STRESS

Analogous with the blades used to mend tapestries, the guillotine is a symbol of the physical time of instantaneousness. The fabric of the childhood relationships, symbolized by the family home in the work Choisy, is cut like a memory, in the abrupt falling of the guillotine's blade. "The present guillotines the past," she concludes. In a new Choisy, Bourgeois created another kind of execution, an old electric chair which "had became a useless object, since it is no longer used." Bourgeois reasons, "This radical form of punishment emerged in the fight between two men over a woman. Thus, the brothers became rivals in the crime of passion. It goes beyond reason. It is insanity, itself." Art guarantees sanity, she once wrote.

"I am a scientific person. I believe in psychoanalysis, in philosophy. For me the only thing that matters is the tangible." Louise Bourgeois developed a logic of instincts and it is important to link her art to the greater themes of knowledge or literature, rather than to the systems of art. It is better to speak about materials extracted from repression, the life struggles as abandonment and anger, desire and aggression, communication and the inaccessibility of the Other. In the constant confrontation between the instincts of death, anguish, fear and the instincts of life, the work of Louise Bourgeois is a painful and triumphant affirmation of existence illuminated by the libido. In this biographical and erotic work, to transform materials into art is a physical conversion, not in the religious sense, but like the conversion of electricity into power, she affirmed.






Spider 1996. Bronze # 26. Photo: Robert Miller Gallery

In the XXIII Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, Louise Bourgeois showed a series of works in which she debates femininity. Unlike her father's business of mending tapestries, a spider weaves its web. The huge Spider signifies labor, giving, protection and foresight. The potency of the web is in either welcoming or entangling us as if we were prey. "Domesticity is very important. I think it is overwhelming. It has to be practical, patient and skilled." The affectionate memory of motherhood is present in several sculptures. The fertile, generous and working woman was already present in such works as Woman with Packages and Breasted Woman, or more recently in Nature Study, Pink Fountain. In a 1986 drawing, of a mother and a daughter, a large pair of scissors protects a smaller pair. Here are both protection and menace, as well as the cutting of the umbilical cord. "My knives are like a tongue-I love, I do not love, I hate. If you don't love me, I am ready to attack. I am a double-edged knife." Fallen Woman shows an unstable body facing gravity, like the unpredictability of desire. Femme Couteaumay be the piece which opened the way for Giacometti's Femme Égorgée. It is the blade which mutilates and beheads, activating fantasies of castration.

In Louise Bourgeois' work, we are often faced with the presence of subjects who desire, and who desire sexually . They are not immediate figures of desire but they position themselves clearly as operations of desire. Bourgeois' vengeance on the constraints of the "wish to know" is to create the disorder of the forbidden. The right to know is my birth right. We also find an abundance of phallic Venuses and Venusian phalluses, like Fillette, Harmless Woman , or Fragile Goddess. They are ancestral images in the story of mankind and of the provisions of sexuality. Louise Bourgeois unveils men as Picasso unveiled women. However, the actuality of desire makes dispenses with myths.

Some of Bourgeois' sculptures seem to exhale the sweat of erotic work. Others have extremely tactile forms, like the sensuality found in Degas' sculptures. Mamelles, a colony of rubber breasts, speaks of a calculated symbolic reference. The eroticism of matter acts as the freeing of libidinous energy. If we speak of the plasticity of the libido, Bourgeois' work seems to be a phantasmagoric conversion of physical energy into libidinal energy. The work imposes itself with such physical presence that it requires a hepatic view, the possibility and desire for an erotic touch. The world of Bourgeois' sculptures is that of tangibility. In opposition to Mamelles stand End of Softness and Trani Episode, with their sensual shapes of breasts in bronze or stone. All oral erotic appeal of the shapes is abruptly broken by the end of malleability, by the loss of organicism in the cold temperature and in solid matter.

In the artist's studio, we found practical manuals (The New Dressmaker, La Revolte des Passements, Manuel Méthodique et Pratique de Couture et de Coupe), organized according to their size, as if they were the articulation of concepts, methods, and an order of sculpture. They are books on the science of tailoring, and sculpturing is to cut in three dimensions, states the artist. As diagrams of the body and living memories, the clothing emerges in her prhase: "To me, a sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture." The fabric is a skein of threads and a producer of eroticism. Structure and unreason articulate the weave, the fashion design, the architecture which uses reinforced concrete, the manufacture and work of garments, and seduction.

"This is not mere 'parole antique.' I work with the present. Eternal, universal and ever-present emotions. Especially the emotions of violence, jealousy and fear." "The most eternal present is a perfume by Gerlain", says Louise Bourgeois, as she opens an empty flask.

By Paulo Herkenhoff (edited from the XXIII Bienal Internacional de São Paulo Show)