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Visual Arts desire and fear, anger and remorse, isolation and connectedness. In the recycling and reconstruction of her clothing and collected textiles Bourgeois intensified her work’s expression of the human body and of life’s episodes (those as daughter, wife, mother, woman, artist). The materiality of these works testifies to the impression of Bourgeois’ past on her psyche and on reparative acts of making through which her past was reconciled in her present. The beauty of the past for Bourgeois resided in the nurturing, repairing, fortifying and protective tendencies of her mother, which she aligned with the processes of stitching and assembling.
Louise Bourgeois UNTITLED, 2002 Tapestry and aluminum 43.2 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth
Blue Days (1996) is one of a number of works in which Bourgeois suspended, stuffed and shaped her dresses and shirts, sometimes adding abstract sculptural elements like the red glass sphere that operates here like a nucleus around which the new sculptural bodies circulate. With its intimate relation to the skin and contours of the body, to time and seasons, clothing was used for its power to summon memory: ‘You can retell your life … by the shape, weight, colour and smell of those clothes in your closet. They are like the weather, the ocean, changing all the time.’ In other works Bourgeois’ fragmented figures and anatomical parts give physical form to anxieties rising from unfulfilled desire, acts of betrayal, losses or thwarted communication. Couple IV embodies the dark confusion of the child happening upon the sexual embrace of
Louise Bourgeois COUPLE IV, 1997 Fabric, leather, stainless steel and plastic 50.8 x 165.1 x 77.5 cm. Wood and glass Victorian vitrine: 182.9 x 208.3 x 109.2 cm. Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth
drawing lessons at the École National des Arts Décoratifs after an education interrupted by her mother’s illness with Spanish flu and the necessity for Louise to assist with her care. Her mother’s death in 1932 precipitated depression and the abandonment of her short but intense study of mathematics to study art. From this time until 1938, when she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater (1907–1973) and moved to New York, Bourgeois studied or worked in various institutions or artists’ studios in Paris. Fernand Léger encouraged Bourgeois to recognise that her sensibility was more attuned to working in a sculptural space than within the limitations of painting’s two-dimensional plane. From the mid 1940s Bourgeois worked primarily in sculpture, and in printmaking and drawing. In the making of her art Bourgeois
confronted the emotion, memory or barrier to communication that generated her mood and the work. Sculpture gave material form to a consuming problem, and in the sculpture’s resolution the emotion would be recognised, and at least temporarily freed. Female subjectivity and sexuality, expressed through the body, are overt concentrations in Bourgeois’ late work: ‘The fears of the past were connected with the functions of the body, they reappear through the body. For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture’. Around 1996, aged 85, Bourgeois began to mine her closets for the garments and textiles that she had worn, collected and stored over a lifetime, and use them to make sculpture and ‘fabric drawings’, continuing her lifelong recall and articulations of familial dysfunction,
the adults. The copulating, decapitated lovers appear as an encased ‘archaeological specimen’ and signal Bourgeois’ fraught obsession not only with the infidelities of her father, but also with sex itself. For Bourgeois there is ‘a fatal attraction not towards one or the other, but to the phenomena of copulation … I am exasperated by the vision of the copulating couple, and it makes me so furious … that I chop their heads [off ]. This is it … I turn violent. The sewing is a defence. I am so afraid of the things I might do. The defence is to do the opposite of what you want to do.’ Louise Bourgeois’ practice was an elaborate articulation of an existence in which the sculpting world and the living world were one. Her late works summoned the past and confronted the present, and the passage of time, by using the very garments in which the experiences of her life, loves and longings resided.
INFORMATION Jason Smith is Director & CEO, Heide Museum of Modern Art Louise Bourgeois: Late Works November 24, 2012 to March 11, 2013 Louise Bourgeois and Australian Artists October 13, 2012 to April 14, 2013 heide.com.au