Author(s): Rosette C. Lamont Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 24, No. 1, Woman: The Arts 1 (Spring, 1983), pp. 229- 236 Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25089412 . Accessed: 29/03/2014 09:35 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . The Massachusetts Review, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Massachusetts Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 182.185.206.108 on Sat, 29 Mar 2014 09:35:34 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LOUISE BOURGEOIS: SCULPTURE AS HAPPENING Rosette C. Lamont at the age of seventy-one, Louise Bourgeois, who spent her entire life working as a sculptor, has become at last what the French like to call "une gloire nationale." She is not, however, their "gloire," but ours. Born in Paris on Christmas Day 1911, this Frenchwoman is in the most profound sense an American, even a New York artist. Now, after her first comprehensive retrospective at the Museum of Mod ern Art (November 6, 1982-February 8, 1983), it is compellingly clear that Bourgeois, although rooted in French tradition, possesses an open, eclectic approach which critics do not associate with today's European art world. Although Louise grew up on the banks of the Bi?vre River in which the weavers who worked for her father and mother washed the Aubusson tapestries that were restoring, she herself spent the major part of her mature life "in a country which has convinced itself that the past is not a river from which everything flows, but a giant supermarket, from which one can pick and choose, and even plunder. . . ." If Bourgeois's extraordinary freedom, even boldness, can be ascribed, in part, to her Surrealist beginnings, it seems evident that, having settled in New York as the result of marrying the distinguished scholar/critic/curator Robert Gold water, Louise benefited from her uprootedness. The creative shock of displacement and estrangement brought her to the realization of Albert Camus' painter-hero, Jonah (the protagonist of one of Camus's finest short stories), that "solitaire," and "solidaire" are not necessarily antithetical states of existence; that, in fact, there is great value in removing oneself from "the art scene" in order to delve deeply into one's psyche. And delve she did. Bourgeois has indulged in public confession only recently, to the accompan iment of projections of family pictures. Not that she tells all?she is essen tially a shy, private person?but, not unlike Rousseau (Jean-Jacques, not Le Douanier), she enjoys teasing her audience's mind with outrageous revela tions about her father's British mistress, Sadie, and her own secret desire to strangle this woman, her governess, and to devour the pater familias. These Note: The major part of the interview with Louise Bourgeois was taped at her home on Monday, November 6, 1982. 1 Michael Brenson, "New York Vs. Paris: Views of an Art Reporter," The New York Times, Sunday, January 16, 1983 (Arts and Leisure Section), p. 1. 229 This content downloaded from 182.185.206.108 on Sat, 29 Mar 2014 09:35:34 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Massachusetts Review Freudian musings have crystallized into strangely erotic pieces of sculpture. As Louise's private spaces went public, some of those pieces doubled as props for bizarre happenings. Louise's gallery shows are often pieces of performance art. What are some of the characteristics of performance art? In the Premiere issue of the short-lived but fascinating journal, Performance Art, we find the following statements: Laurie Anderson: . . . theatre tends to be linear and narrative . . . Performance is freer to be disjunctive and jagged and to focus on incidents, ideas, collisions . . . Dick Higgins: Most of my work is "intermedia" as opposed to "mixed media." Joan Jonas: . . . Persona is made with masks, costumes, and described by objects as symbols.2 These descriptions apply to Louise Bourgeois's "Destruction of the Father," and, even more to her "Confrontation." Both environments dramatize a childhood cannibalistic reverie. When Louise Bourgeois came to the Gradu ate Center of the City University of New York on April 30,1979 as one of the keynote speakers of a series of symposia on American Women in the Arts, she stunned her audience by declaring: This piece is basically a table, the awful, terrifying family dinner table headed by the father who sits and gloats. And the others, the wife, the children, what can they do? They sit there, in silence. The mother, of course, tries to satisfy the tyrant, her husband. The children are full of exasperation. We were three children: my brother, my sister, and myself. There were also two extra children my parents adopted because their own father had been killed in the war (the First World War). So there were five of us. My father would get nervous looking at us, and he would explain to all of us what a great man he was. So, in exasperation, we grabbed the man, threw him on the table, dismembered him, and proceeded to devour him.3 Bourgeois delivered this last statement in her caustic, casual manner, not at all as if this were an account of a childhood fantasy, but as the retelling of an event that actually had taken place. In his fine introduction written for the recent catalogue, "Bourgeois Truth," the art critic Robert Pincus-Witten, quoting the above passage in his own text, says: "It is as direct and potent as the conclusion of a children's fairy tale."4 2 "What is Performance Art?" Performance Art 1, Premiere Issue (Performing Arts Journal Inc., 1979), p. 23. 3"American Women in the Arts: Public and Private Spaces, An Interdisciplinary CUNY Forum," Monday, April 30, 1979, ed. by Rosette C. Lamont, Centerpoint, A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Volume 3, Number 3/4, Fall/Spring 1980, p. 16. 4 Robert Pincus-Witten, "Bourgeois Truth," (Robert Miller, New York, 1982). The catalogue has no pagination. 230 This content downloaded from 182.185.206.108 on Sat, 29 Mar 2014 09:35:34 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Louise Bourgeois: Sculpture as Happening There is indeed an evil witch in Louise Bourgeois's story: Sadie, the young girl interviewed in London by her father, and brought over to be the children's English teacher. The nanny became the father's mistress. Louise never got over what she calls "child abuse," the title of the photographic essay she put together for the December 1982 issue of Artforum. In it she declares: "This is child abuse. Because Sadie, if you don't mind, was mine. She was engaged to teach me English. I thought she was going to like me. Instead of which she betrayed me. I was betrayed not only by my father, damn it, but by her too. It was a double betrayal. . ."5 The above statement illustrates one of Louise Bourgeois's most lyrical and disquieting recent small marble pieces, "The Fallen Woman." It is a classical, almost Greek, head of a lovely woman whose neck thickens into a phallic cudgel. This androgynous instrument could be used as a murder weapon. Is "The Fallen Woman" this bizarre creature, beautiful and monstrous at the same time, or does she represent little Louise, struck down by the fatal blow of this smooth night stick? "The Fallen Woman" could indeed be the portrait of the two accomplices: Sadie, and the phallocratie father. "Did your mother realize what was going on?" I asked Louise. She answered without hesitation: "Of course. My mother tolerated this situation for ten years." Of course, in the France of La Belle Epoque, the institution of "the Mistress" was one of the facts of middle-class life; and Louise's mother was much older than her husband, who had married her against his family's better judgment. "My mother's health had deteriorated," Louise explains, "and she had to leave home, and her work, to go South for a rest cure. Sadie was very young and strong, not much older than my eldest sister." Bour geois's feelings in regard to her companion were full of ambivalence: fascina tion, dependence, hate. Her full wrath, however, was vented upon the father. Speaking of her family, she says: "The men in the family were good for nothings, des charmeurs. I always knew that it was up to women to take care of men. When I was growing up I mothered my younger brother, helped him wash, dress, get ready for school. He loved me and followed me everywhere. As far as I was concerned, women were the strong sex. My own mother directed the atelier, and twenty young village girls worked for her. Very early in life, when I was about eight, I was entrusted with the work of restoring Aubusson tapestries. I drew the pictures of the missing parts of the tapestry, usually at the bottom. This is how I made my apprenticeship as an artist." This is also how Louise Bourgeois became a feminist. First, she learned it from the mother she worshipped. "My mother's heroine was the anarchist Louise Michel, one of the heroic socialist women during the Commune. So, 5 Louise Bourgeois, "Child Abuse, A Project," Artforum, December 1982, pp. 46-47. 231 This content downloaded from 182.185.206.108 on Sat, 29 Mar 2014 09:35:34 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Massachusetts Review one could say that my father married a feminist." "What about your own feminism? How did it come about?" I inquired. Louise answered: "I would like to say that there were three phases to my feminism: two in France, and one in the United States. In France, when I was a child and working with the twenty girls at the atelier, I came to realize that they were expecting some thing from me. They were immensely proud of me because I was a good student, and they were certain that I was fated to go on to something important. In a way they identified with me, but they knew that I would do what they could never hope to achieve. When I entered the Lyc?e F?nelon in Paris, and did very well?I graduated at the top of my class?they were genuinely happy. All that time I was conscious of not wanting to disappoint these girls who had placed their faith in me. After my bachot I went to the Sorbonne to study geometry. This was very hard work, and I no longer had any time for drawing. Then I entered art school, La Grande Chaumi?re. I was one of the few women students there. I became massiere, that is the assistant to the workshop's director. One of my duties was the recruitment of models for the painters. Mostly the models were women, for life classes. These girls were prostitutes, but there was nothing servile and low about them. In fact I was struck with their pride, their sense of self. They were proud of their beauty, of their bodies, of earning their bread, of being what they were. I was very young, very naive and shy, but paradoxically, I was in a position of power since it was up to me to select the girls. They needed all the extra work they could secure, just to make ends meet. Life was extremely hard for women who were poor. While the girls I had selected were waiting to be sketched, we talked. They were very kind to me, maternal. They protected me, and also teased me, sweetly of course. I never paid any attention to my appearance, so they would make jokes: 'You really ought to comb your hair, at least once a week.' Or they'd call my attention to a spot on my dress. We were friends. I never forgot them. Like the weavers of Antony they were proud of me, proud perhaps that I could do something that was not woman's work. In their memory I created my work 'Coyote.'" C.O.Y.O.T.E. stands for "Come off your old tired ethics." In his catalogue introduction, Robert Pincus-Witten describes the piece in the following manner: This wooden comb-like structure rests unsteadily on legs of extremely slender triangles some of which don't even reach the floor adding to the tenuous posture of the work. The latterare the "short legs" of short-sighted prostitutes who failed to respond to Margot Saint James, the American social reformer and friend of the artist, who in a tract called C.O.Y.O.T.E. attempted to impose upon prostitution a reasonable worker-like organization.6 6"Bourgeois Truth." 232 This content downloaded from 182.185.206.108 on Sat, 29 Mar 2014 09:35:34 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Louise Bourgeois: Sculpture as Happening Like the "Maisons Fragiles," perched on their spindly legs, and the early "Femmes-Maisons," "Coyote" is a witty, profoundly tender symbolic representation of the precarious condition of womanhood. The comb-like structure suggests a group of hookers walking on pin thin high heels; their balance is off but they are quite unaware of it. "Coyote is imbued with comic pathos." Louise Bourgeois's third feminist phase sprang from her life in New York. As a young European artist in America, Louise met other expatriates. The avant-garde painters in the late thirties had just begun to absorb the Surreal ist and Dada manifestoes. To cast off their middle class origins, and the bourgeois credo ofles gens comme il faut, they turned to the liberating realm of eros. Bourgeois was approached by a gallery that specialized in showing erotic art, and with the fearlessness that was to characterize her whole production she took on the challenge. From her readings of Breton, Apolli naire, Eluard, as well as from her contacts with the Surrealists who had settled in New York, Bourgeois learned to connect erotic exploration with the freeing of the subconscious. The principal task of Surrealism was to free the imagination from the bonds of Cartesian logic, and to unleash the secret, sacred forces of nature. In the wake of Fourierism which had inspired Baudelaire's famous sonnet, "Correspondances," the Surrealist poets and painters sought to synthesize antinomic principles, to reach through their use of analogy and symbol a supreme kind of harmony. Love, "l'amour fou," celebrated by Breton, was to serve as the path to the mysterious shrine of these modern Eleusinian rites. Woman are no longer merely an object of desire, but the guide, or anima able to open for the artist the gate leading to the realm of dreams. Thus, erotic art was treated with high seriousness; like automatic writing, it seemed to lead to something otherworldy. The cult of eroticism confined to its very opposite, asceticism, and the erotic adventure, for the Surrealists, was above all a spiritual quest in which the senses were used as the humble servants of the mind. Louise Bourgeois had not met with the Surrealist milieu in Paris where she led a sheltered, studious Ufe. "I was a blue-stocking," she admits, "and at La Grande Chaumi?re I never thought of the male students as possible boy friends, but as rivals." It was when she came to New York, the wife of Robert Goldwater, that she discovered her fellow artists, and came in contact with the European Surrealists settled in America. Bourgeois explains: "Femi nism, at that time, had overtones and undertones of eroticism. I belonged to a group of artists who declared that women were not to be ashamed of their bodies, and of the physical. My third feminist phase was erotic art." Although Bourgeois's work is deeply marked still by this orientation, some critics have discovered an ambivalence in her more recent pieces. Kay 233 This content downloaded from 182.185.206.108 on Sat, 29 Mar 2014 09:35:34 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Massachusetts Review Larson writes in her essay, "Women by a Woman": "Surrealism delighted in alchemical transformations of mind and matter, and it gave her [Louise Bourgeois] a visual code for a similar transformative system based on her understanding of how the self can be trapped by the anxiety of embodiment ... By getting 'inside the skin' of her sculpture, she discovers an anxiety that comes straight from the trauma of being."1 It is obvious that much of Louise Bourgeois's art testifies to a fundamental unease, a divided consciousness. Her numerous representations of "Femme Couteau" ("Woman Knife") suggest a peculiar combination of vulnerability and angry defensiveness. Deborah, Wye, the curator who put together the Museum of Modern Art retrospective, writes in the catalogue: "Chameleon-like, the woman turns herself into a knife and demonstrates a potential for anger, violence, and cruelty because of her need for self-protection and retaliation."8 A pregnant belly stretched out upon a knife, such is the image Bourgeois presents for our meditation. It is as primitive as an archaeological find, the contents of an imaginary pyramid built to contain the remains of the Magna Mater. The sensibility, however, that informs these smaller, jewel-like pieces is modern. Bourgeois, the feminist, also sets about to demystify the Freudian myth of female penis envy. There is nothing reverential about her depiction of male private parts. Whether in bronze or latex they are suspended from butcher hooks, or dangle from the ceiling, like limp pinions cut from flight. The double ones in particular suggest standards wrested from the ranks of a defeated army. Ironically entitled "Fillette" ("Little Girl")?a reminder per haps that in French the male organ has a female gender?the latex family jewels are suspended from the penis's tender tip, like a piece of rotting meat in the display window of a bankrupt boucherie. Lady Chatterly's lover would shudder at this show. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Bourgeois is the classic castrating female. The tender mother of three sons, widowed from a hus band she loved and admired all her life for his profound intelligence and gentleness of spirit, the sculptor has no need for vengeance. Flesh is flesh, flesh is form, flesh will perish, form will stay, is her message. Her art, both delicate and raw, is unflinching. It is always a statement, and an enactment. Louise Bourgeois's performance art is a natural outgrowth of her aes thetic. In a sense the pieces become animated, they step out into space to move, to gesture to us their secret message. "My happenings have to do with hostility," Louise stated in private conversation. "They have to do with men, 7 Kay Larson, "Women by a Woman," New York Magazine, November 22, 1982, p. 74. ?Deborah Wye, "One and Others," Louise Bourgeois (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982), p. 28. 234 This content downloaded from 182.185.206.108 on Sat, 29 Mar 2014 09:35:34 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Louise Bourgeois: Sculpture as Happening not with women. My mother, for example, does not appear in 'The Destruc tion of the Father.' My second happening could be described as a fashion show of body parts. The tone of the performance is ironical; it is a lampoon of fashion, of the art scene, of art criticism. As you know I designed the costumes worn by my friends for the happening, body masks with bulbous shapes, like breasts. Women wore them, but also men. The men of course looked very funny, but they did not seem to mind. Men are very vain creatures, you know, and these men, who held important positions in society, were very pleased to be part of the happening. In 'Confrontation' the 'actors' walk around a long table upon which one can see the remains of two dismembered bodies, that of an older person, and the other belonging to someone younger. A struggle has taken place, a passionate encounter. All passion culminates in death, and this is what is left, the remains of passion. There is an ironic contrast between the terrifying scene in the middle, and the mincing fashion show going around it." At the present moment, Louise Bourgeois is working on three objects: two large pieces of sculpture to be exhibited outdoors (Chelsea Square in New York, and Wave Hill on the Hudson), and a happening. "What will this be about?" I asked. "Again hostility, but this time it will enable my students to vent their hostility vis-?-vis their mentor. Moil It's made up of a whole lot of small desks, each one representing a student. We're still putting it together. The environment is done, but the enactment itself has to be worked out." "I thought your students adored you," I ventured. Louise cut me short: "Per sonally, I think they are fond of me. In fact, feminism has altered the erotic scene drastically. Now, an older woman can be surrounded by younger men, which was unthinkable in France when I was growing up. In France older men only looked at young girls. But, when it comes to teaching, young artists have no patience with masters. And that's very different from the way things were. I want to know why this is so, and that's the reason for the happening. A happening is not a show I put on for other people, it is a way of finding a truth, of getting closer to something that puzzles me." "What will the title be? It sounds like 'The Destruction of Louise Bourgeois.'" From the eyes of my companion I could see that she was not ready to be destroyed. Louise Bourgeois is a very resilient woman who worked in solitude and against the current for over forty years. Her emergence into the limelight testifies to what she defines herself as, "a singular singleness of purpose backed by a good deal of energy." When I asked her the obvious: "Why are there so few women sculptors, even today," she answered with a wry smile: "Because it takes work." Then she added: "Most women are discouraged. There is, after all, the question of storage, and the fact that the work does not move easily, does not sell." After a moment of silence, she concluded: "Of 235 This content downloaded from 182.185.206.108 on Sat, 29 Mar 2014 09:35:34 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Massachusetts Review course all this has changed for me now." A masterful litote. As a former colleague of the late Robert Goldwater at Queens College, I could not resist asking Louise whom I had not met at that time (back in the fifties) what her husband's attitude had been in regard to her art. She answered with great warmth, and her usual wit: "Robert was just like the weavers who worked for mother: he had complete faith in my work. So, I just knew I mustn't disappoint him, just as I could not have disappointed these twenty girls who identified with me. Of course I am not comparing Robert to the girls; I thought he was un type ?patant (a fantastic fellow). He was witty, with an uncanny sense of precision. He had a profound respect for the world of ideas, of pure thought, and a total allegiance to intellectualism. We were very different: I was not an intellectual, I was an artist. I always thought, and still do that the most wonderful thing to do is to write, to be a fine, perceptive critic. That's what Robert was. He never completely fathomed what I was about, but we remained for one another during the whole course of our life together, de merveilleuses ?nigmes (wondrously enigmatic beings). As I left my friend Louise, I thought that in speaking of the great love and reverence between herself and her husband, she had also given me a key to the reading of her work. The "trauma of being" mentioned by Kay Larson is superseded by a sense of wonder in regard to Being. To communicate this child-like wonder, Louise uses marble, stone, bronze, plaster, wood, latex. Matter shaped into form is but an extension of her senses and her psyche. As Eugene Ionesco wrote in his illustrated autobiography of his awakening to life, D?couvertes: "To see is to understand, after another fashion."9 To reach understanding, and bring others to that same illumination, is perhaps the supreme form of enactment, the deepest and most meaningful kind of "happening." 9 Eugene Ionesco, D?couvertes (Geneva: Skira, 1969), p. 73. 236 This content downloaded from 182.185.206.108 on Sat, 29 Mar 2014 09:35:34 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States
Thirteenth Annual Report of the Beaurau of American
Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution
1891-1892, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896
pages 3-46