Trauma in Blue: The Confessional Art of Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin

Poltern, Newsletter 003 Trauma in Blue: The Confessional Art of Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin1

By Kate McBride In the contemporary era of visual art, artists are subverting traditional art historical tropes typically associated with the white male canon through explicit dissection and display of trauma.

The color blue, paired with depictions of suffering and survival, is used brazenly within the work of artists Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin. Both artists are acclaimed, multimedia meddlers with confessional melancholia. In their work shades of blue are repeatedly used in unambiguous portrayals of personal trauma and experiments with recovery. As a conventionally masculine signifier both in art and gendered culture, this usage of blue by Bourgeois and Emin is compelling, radical, and potent.

Within the framework of misogyny, melancholy, and mental health — historically the domain of the masculine majority — it is necessary to examine the way that contemporary female artists eschew expectations with blue tinged deep dives into their own painful minds. No longer relegated to ‘hysteria, hypochondria, and neurasthenia,’ or in further rejection of these problematic histories, Bourgeois and Emin push color and representation to extremes.2 No subject, no injury, no narrative is off-limits.

The feeling of blue is everywhere. It stretches beyond time and place, through geographical boundaries, from the verbal to the visual, from the religious to the depressive, the biological, the infinite, the art historical. Once you start thinking about blue it surrounds you. It’s written about exhaustively. It is metaphysical, symbolic, divine, but it is also quotidian; a color you couldn’t choose to avoid in your daily life. At the axis of the mundane and the magical, blue is abundant in meaning. Color is temporal and perception is a process not a finite reality. In this way, color makes space to interact with our subconscious. Our eyes collect and apply cues about ambient light and texture to create our vision of the world, turning a scientific process into a philosophical debate, ripe for interpretation from an art historical perspective.3 1

An excerpt from this piece was featured in a Poltern newsletter, published on April 29, 2021.

Topp and Blackshaw ‘Scrutinised bodies and lunatic utopias,’ p.18.

3 St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour, pp.13-15 2

We can trace blue through the lens of physics, place, geology, capitalism, colonialism, culture, creativity, linguistics, religion, and, while these pathways provide poignant stories, we will still never get a clear answer of what it means. As William H. Gass says, ‘So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that.’4 Or as Maggie Nelson describes, ‘You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.’5 What we can say only is that it holds significance, it makes us feel.

Overwhelmingly, blues are a ubiquitous reference to sorrow, laden with moodiness, solitude, memory. As Carol Mavor says, ‘…like the sea and the sky, like the gloomy contentment of a melancholic, the nostalgic who is joyful-sad.’6 Historically this powerful signifier has been used by male artists to express their angst and – in conjunction with the rise of psychoanalysis and the burgeoning conversation on mental wellness that was in practice only a man’s purview – dive into the depths of blue to explore and express their inner worlds. From a semiotic and feminist lens, it is less important to focus on the rules and roots of blue, but instead to center on what it suggests.

Color has shaped art history and played a crucial role in its progression, from the possibilities created by pigments, to academic debates on color’s place in artistic hierarchy, to the impact of language surrounding perception itself.7 8 When the subject of the art historical blue is suggested, the same handful of references arise. Giotto’s bright blue swept chapel, the Virgin Mary’s royal blue robes, Picasso’s mourning period, the color of Joan Miro’s dreams, Yves Klein’s dedication to a hue. In the early twentieth century, blue allowed men to express their feelings: the color became a code of representation through the lens of the masculine gaze on the world. Color theory becomes more psychological than material as we move towards modern and contemporary moments, blue is utilized to convey depressions and anxieties.

The use of blue in the contemporary confessional model by female-identifying artists is a symbolic seizing back of art historical and psychological discourse, both of which have 4

Gass, On Being Blue, p. 7.

Nelson, Bluets, p. 4 6 Mavor, Blue Mythologies, p.20.

7 Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color, p.147.

8 St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour, p. 35 5

historically made little room for feminine perspectives and contributions. As Gass explores this subject he explains, ‘Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet thick dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm; blue moves easily among all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.’9 Neither Bourgeois nor Emin deal solely with blue, but when they do, they reclaim the color, pairing anguish with endurance. The representation of trauma in this manner is an actionable demonstration of agency; a rejection of the masculinization of the canon and the misogyny of mental health.

In Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin’s works the enigma of blue comes to life, the ‘joyful-sad,’ the eternity of trauma that women must endure.10 Bourgeois begins in blue with early works like The Dream from 1939, a crude woodcut in shades of navy and cobalt, depicting a woman leaning over a vase of flowers while male figures lurk in the background. Throughout Emin’s oeuvre there’s electric blue neon, cerulean ink, an ultramarine rug in a figureless bedroom scene, a muddy blue tent filled with embroidered names, Egyptian blue gouache, like an ink spill, invades countless self-portraits. Both artists, similarly, make work about familial trauma, personal histories, and their experiences as women, mothers, lovers, as victims. They have both been equally transparent about this autobiographical subject matter in their writings, the text featured in their images, and their titles. Sketches of their subconscious appear in scratchy drawings and recognizable handwriting. From sweet and hopeful sadness to desolate and self-deprecating, their works are relatable, bodily, feminine, wistful, anxious, and desperately blue.

As Maggie Nelson says of Joni Mitchell’s Blue, ‘…its greatness lies in the fact that no woman had ever said it so clearly and unapologetically before: I’m so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad. Progress!’11 Perhaps the same can be said of Bourgeois and Emin’s work – maybe no woman has ever said it so ‘clearly and unapologetically’ before. Nelson continues: ‘And we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head.’12 With Bourgeois and Emin we feel the scorch.

9

Gass, On Being Blue, p. 75.

Mavor, Blue Mythologies, p.42.

10

11 12

Nelson, Bluets, p. 16.

Nelson, Bluets, p. 23.

Bourgeois began making work in the late 1930s, and despite being an artist who didn’t reach critical acclaim until late in life her oeuvre is remarkably consistent. The same lines, themes, subjects, and materials appear again and again until her death eighty years later. Through psychoanalysis and writing Bourgeois processed disquieting themes privately and publicly, which she attributed to her desire to make art.13 This narrative has ‘taken on the aura of myth,’ from her father’s affair with her tutor, to her mother’s tapestry career, the death of her father, to her anxieties around motherhood, many of these traumas and triggers come to life in blue.14 While many of Bourgeois’ works co-mingle the blues with rosy flesh tones and deep reds, certain works focus only on the color. Poignant creations such as Blue Confrontation, a gouache painting that, in typical Bourgeois fashion, there are multiple iterations of, plays only with this palette. Abstracted figures reach up from the bottom of the page, long tubes lined in pencil and filled imperfectly but wholly in shades of blue. A second line of figures, also blue but this time squatting and overlapping, sit above. Occasionally the blue bleeds beyond the lines, like a child’s coloring book clumsily completed, at other times the color is smeared, or dripped, the artist’s hand visible. A small blot of red sneaks into the left-hand side, the sole occurrence of anything but blue. Mostly pastel, one stripe of electric blue streaks down the side of a shape on the top right, like an accident, a twitch, a spur of emotion. In the top right, a blot of the same bright blue appears outside the plane of the figures.

The image is claustrophobic, as if creatures or feelings are crammed into too small a space. These expressionless, nebulous blobs are full to the brim. The title reminds us this is a fraught space, that negative emotions are being expressed, or contained, within the work. Again, because of the color choice, the metaphor reaches for trauma, for hardship, for heartache. As Bourgeois said, ‘Color is stronger than language. It’s a subliminal communication.’15 However, the soft shapes, the lack of aggressive gesture, make the image a feminine one, subverting the male connotations typically associated with both blue and confrontation. The image is subversive in its insistence on melancholy but lack of violence and anger.

13

Müller-Westermann, Louise Bourgeois: I Have Been to Hell and Back, p. 57 Broude and Garrard, “Louise Bourgeois’s Femmes-Maisons: Confronting Lacan,” p.361, 366 15 Meyer-Thass. Louise Bourgeois: Designing for Free Fall. pp.178-9.

14

A celebrated work by Bourgeois, Untitled (I’ve Been to Hell and Back), uses blue embroidery on a patterned blue cloth to insinuate a long history of angst and adversity. The text reads, in all capitals, ‘I HAVE BEEN TO HELL AND BACK. AND LET ME TELL YOU, IT WAS WONDERFUL.’ The second sentence is a hopeful or ironic climax depending on the read.

The choice of color, a baby blue thread, situated on a faded robin’s egg blue fabric with teal corners, combined with the use of cotton cloth speaks to youth, albeit a wistful one when paired with the well-worn material that has been visibly folded as if pocketed or stowed away for years on end. Bourgeois wrote in the illustrated book, Hours of the Day, ‘I am on the other side of despair / and this happens to me 4 times a day / I am fed up / I want to give up and see no one / Finish, hopeless, good evening.’ This concept of passing through distress to reach the other side is a consistent theme of her work, there is always an element of determination and endurance, but tinged with pain. One can’t help but see the same here, persistence, survival, alongside unrepentant suffering. The choice of blue perpetuates this feeling of despondency, despite a potentially triumphant conclusion. Works with the same text created in shades of red and pink do not carry the same poignancy. The gendered and melancholic significance of blue renders the attention on the first sentence rather than the potential hope offered by the latter.

Though born fifty years after Bourgeois, Emin’s work explores similar themes of love, longing, torment, lust, sorrow, femininity, claustrophobia, expectation, and fear. An overlap in subject matter is present as well, a solitary body afloat in a blank universe, the repetitious self-portraits as if worrying at a wound, the physicality and anxiety of womanhood and the body expressed ad nauseam. Bourgeois and Emin display both brazen rejection of expectations of gender combined with self-flagellation and despair.

Blue traces through Emin’s deeply confessional autobiography Strangeland from the beginning. The color appears in early instances of childhood sexualization and bodily harm, from her brother’s ‘blue nylon Aertex underpants pulled tight,’ to the brand new ‘petrol blue mac’ she was wearing on the New Year’s Eve when she was raped as an early adolescent.16 It appears in early scenes of an unstable home, the ‘juke-box and the Blue Room, where we used to dance’ at the Hotel she lived in with her family until it went bankrupt, the Margate coast she found solace in with ‘that strange blue only seen when day meets night. Twilight time, walking alone for miles 16

Emin, Strangeland, p. 9, 23

and miles,’ a near death experience with a wave. 17 And again, the sky during a suicide attempt, the blue pills her brother and his friend dealt shortly before the latter’s murder, the “Prussian blue light” in dreamscapes searching for a way back to love.18 Blue appears in dreams of her aborted child, ‘She is holding a blue and white ball and walking towards me,’ or ‘wearing a little hand-knitted jumper in Prussian blue.’19 Emin’s text-based works refer to autobiographical writings such as these, and it becomes impossible to separate the two. Given blue’s prominent position in her visual art, the text contributes to imbuing the color with an aching significance.

A perfect example of these mournful blues appears in Emin’s Dark head, one of many abstract portraits, presumably self-portraits, in blue. In the work a blue figure stretches across the page. There is no sense of placemaking, no background or architecture, but implied nudity creates intimacy, as though one has stumbled upon a private scene. The figure’s face is obscured with a deep royal blue, the figure lays legs spread, but alone. This blue that covers the figure’s face pours down onto her chest, with one strong final gesture reaching her pubic area. The brushstroke is visible, the paint built, smeared, as if done at the end, in rejection or representation of painful workings of the mind. The remainder of the body, a torso with an arm stretched by its side, perhaps resting on the thigh, two spread legs with one bent in the air and resting on a foot, is more graceful. This blue is cerulean, almost translucent and line focused, rather than dense and cumulative. Each stroke of paint is a single delicate gesture that would suggest a body in calm or reverie if not for the bulbous blot. At the bottom of the canvas the words ‘Dark head’ appear in pencil in Emin’s recognizable but almost illegible script, followed by her signature.

This work in blue is persuasive in its vulnerability. It speaks to the art historic and semiotic significance of blue, but makes it eagerly, aggressively, unapologetically feminine. It reads as a processing of patriarchal damage and an attempt to push through to the other side, a raw communication of pain. This is a blue that relies on symbolism but does not appeal to the canon, instead creating discomfort and tenderness with its honesty about misery. This deceivingly simple work could have been created in black, in fact the blue imitates a neutral color in its monotone. But it crucially is not, and as such, it makes a larger point.

17

Emin, Strangeland, p. 5, 15.

Emin, Strangeland, p. 97.

19 Emin, Strangeland, p. 165, 202.

18

In 2010 shortly before Bourgeois’ death, the two artists collaborated on sixteen works, forming the series Do Not Abandon Me.20 This relatively shocking project, as neither artist has been prone to collaboration, was initiated by Bourgeois.21 She painted figures, abstract, headless, armless bodies pregnant or erect or puddled in watered down gouache and passed them onto Emin. Emin then painstakingly added her discernable figurations, her recognizable scrawled handwriting, her morose seeking’s of meaning and healing.22 Upon completion they were then printed on fabric cloth. The combination brings to fruition the many similarities between the two artists, a seamless collaboration.

Blue returns, alongside analogous themes present in both artist’s individual oeuvres. In Deep Inside My Heart, number six of sixteen from the series, a figure occupies the majority of the page, a naked torso visible from the neck down with breasts and a protuberant, presumably pregnant belly, on display. A blue blot takes precedence inside the stomach, filling in the space, leaking into its surroundings, immediately drawing the eyes’ attention from the rest of the soft fleshy pink body. Reminiscent of the blue smudge in Emin’s Dark head, it is intrusive, intense, sticky, seeping, significant. One can not help but again think of Gass’s musings on blue: ‘…we grow slack of feature in our melancholy, and the blue which marks the change is heavy, thick as ooze.’23 Emin has added a thin black outline, giving the figure nipples, a collar bone, and a delineated waist. Her tell-tale text is featured at the bottom, legible capitalized letters reading, ‘DARK BLACK LONELY SPACE.’ Above, in mirror-image script, is the less legible text, ‘Deep inside my heart I came to you.’ Again, the multifarious blue. Though other colors are considered in this work, it is the blue that takes priority, that speaks to fear, pain, growth, loss, womanhood. ‘…blue gives way to darkness – and then how, without warning, the darkness grows up into a cone of light’ says Nelson. 24 In this work, blue is a life-giving darkness, a depth of healing only reached through excavation, anguish, suturing, processing. All the more poignant, as these were some of the last works Bourgeois would create before her death. Even still, we see the familiar

20

Hauser & Wirth, ‘Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin: Do Not Abandon Me.’ Akbar, ‘When Tracey Emin met Louise Bourgeois.’

22 Hauser & Wirth, ‘Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin: Do Not Abandon Me.’ 23 Gass, On Being Blue, p. 90.

24 Nelson, Bluets, p. 56 21

influence of blue, the unrestrained tête-à-tête with grief, guilty, loss, the female body, sex, and memory. The blue is the damage and the possibility, the fear and the potential.

Bourgeois and Emin uncover themselves and their pasts for us, delving deep into the unspoken existential anxieties of womanhood. Through their use of blue, they play with previously male territory to tell untold stories. They take back the narrative of humanity, the trajectory of the canon, and recenter both on a broader range of experiences and identities. They give new meaning to a ‘blue period’ and a new perspective to trauma. The result is powerful.

Bibliography Akbar, Arifa. ‘When Tracey Emin met Louise Bourgeois.’ 2011. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/when-tracey-emin-met-lou ise-bourgeois-2214957.html. Accessed 26 th November 2020.

Beckenstein, L. 2020. “Listening to Color: A Set of Propositions on Pain as Feminist Aesthetic.” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 2017, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 283–300.

Broude, Norma and Garrard, Mary D., “Louise Bourgeois’s Femmes-Maisons: Confronting Lacan,” Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. pp. 360–371 Chalif, David J. M.D., ‘The Death of Casagemas: Early Picasso, The Blue Period, Mortality, and Redemption,’ Neurosurgery, Volume 61, Issue 2, August 2007, pp. 404–417.

Emin, Tracy. Strangeland. Hodder and Stoughton: London, 2005.

Gass, William H. On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. New York: New York Review Books, 1976.

Hauser & Wirth. ‘Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin: Do Not Abandon Me.’ 2011. https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/3666-louise-bourgeois-tracey-emi n-do-not-abandon-me. Accessed 26 th November 2020.

Larratt-Smith, Philip, ed. Louise Bourgeois: Return of the Repressed. London: Violette Editions, 2012.

Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Color in the French Classical Age, trans. Emily McVarrish. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Mavor, Carol. Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour. London: Reaktion Books, 2013.

Meyer-Thoss, Christine. Louise Bourgeois: Designing for Free Fall. Zurich: Art Data, 1992. pp.178-9.

Müller-Westermann, Iris, ed. Louise Bourgeois: I Have Been to Hell and Back. Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2015. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized by and presented at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, February 14–May 17, 2015.

The Museum of Modern Art. ‘Do Not Abandon Me.’ 2020. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/series/153422. Accessed 26th November 2020.

Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Seattle: Wave Books, 2009.

St Clair, Kassia. The Secret Lives of Colour. London: John Murray, 2016.

Topp, Leslie, Blackshaw, Gemma, ‘Scrutinised bodies and lunatic utopias: Mental illness, Psychiatry and the visual arts in Vienna, 1898-1914’, from Gemma Blackshaw, Leslie Topp, eds., Madness and modernity: mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna 1900, Farnham, 2009, pp. 15-37.