[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: July 28, 2008]
Seventy years a New York resident, Louise Bourgeois found her life of making honored at the Tate Modern in London last year, where a particularly giant Bourgeois spider has previously done spells of guard duty in the converted power station's vast Turbine Hall. But now the generous retrospective has come home, spending the summer at the Guggenheim.
Not that Ms Bourgeois is sitting on her hands enjoying the acclaim. On the contrary, new works of unusual interest were on biew at Invieth House in Scotland earlier this summer. Working in gouache on paper, works created this year revolve as ever around themes of sex, blood, motherhood, the organs of the body, producing a confusion of breasts and erections and foetuses in rich shades of red and pink. Here, for example, is the vertiginous, anxious "Birth".
So she's still at it, and the substantial Guggenheim tribute (travelling to Los Angeles at the end of October, and D.C. in February next year) confirms she's been at it for years.
The biographical structure of the show, and intensely personal nature of Bourgeois's art, obliges one to scale the tedious Gugg ramp rather than take the elevator to the top and scoot down. And I'm reminded yet again how useless the main space of this beautiful building is as a gallery for easel art and plinth sculpture. In this show, some paintings are even hung - inadvertently? - at the angle of the ramp instead of straight, and many sculptures can be seen from the front only.
Ironically, the opportunity to present a monumental piece - a spider, I suppose - on the floor of the atrium goes wasted. One of the eight-legged horrors is present, but it's smaller than some and dwarfed by the height of the space.
The show begins with the mature Bourgeois living in America, having moved herefrom Paris in 1938, aged 27. Her exploration of the body - primarily the female body - begins with the "Femme Maison" series surrealist oil paintings, the woman encroached on, invaded by, metamorphosing into a house/home. Painting is quickly abandoned as a form, but there are some fabulously mysterious and funny drawings with wry accompanying texts: "He disappeared into complete silence" is a series which would make an enigmatic comic book.
Her engagement with sculpture begins with a series of tall, vertical pieces, almost abstract but always based on a concept of the human figure. Totems, one might say, reminiscent of some of David Smith's slender, spoon-headed creations, or of Giacommett's lanky, lurching figures. But Bourgeois quickly breaks these down, shortening the form, shrinking it to something which resembles sets of painted wooden skittled; these, in turn, more and more resemble non-specific organs - phalluses, breasts, eyes? It's hard to say. Organs without bodies.
Much has been made of the artist's childhood traumas, of her relationship with her mother and father. Passing through a surrealist milieu as a young woman, Freud must be an automatic part of her mental equipment. Looking at the actual works, however, it occurred to me that a Deleuzian interpretation of Bourgeois' art is begging to be written (forgive me if it already exists). She repeatedly retreats from any representation figure as a coherent, singular, human body, choosing instead to present indeterminate, fluid, ever-changing organs without bodies - functioning, interacting, eating, sucking, fucking, like the organic machines of Deleuze and Guattari's L'Anti-Oedipe.
Up to the elbows in ambiguous body-parts, Bourgeois breaks into new materials: plaster (the "Lair" series, essentially sculptures about holes, apertures). Marble too, which in her hands becomes paradoxially soft, almost liquid (although the plinth supporting the writhing form remains hard, chiselles, classical). At their most squishy, her forms become unmistakeably fecal.
Although gender is fluid and ambiguous in these works, the artist tends to favor recognizably female forms. The male generally subsumed within confusing forms which are simultaneously maternal and phallic. An exception is a startling suspended sculpture which resembles nothing more than a straining erection, absurdly dangling in mid air.
In 1982 a new studio allowed her to work on a much-larger scale. A series of her life-sized "Cell" pieces are awkwardly displayed on the Guggenheim's ramp. Whole, enclosed rooms; ramshackle, ruined, with damaged windows and cracked doors. Viewers are forced to shuffle around, lining up at the few vantage points from which the - somewhat corny - horror-movie interiors can be viewed. Broken toys, medical instruments, mirrors. These are tendentiously forlorn and threatening settings.
Threat is never far from Bourgeois' mood, and she has no hesitation in implying that her relentless creativity forms some kind of bulwark against psychological despair. Fittingly, the show closes abruptly at the top of the ramp with a vitrine containing stitched woollen figures, lovelessly copulating. The primal trauma, again, always.
For Bourgeois art has been, and apparently continues to be, more than an occupation. It is some kind of mode of survival;and clearly one which works for her. Her range of themes and forms may be finite, repetitive even, but they contain boundless energy.
The show continues through September 28: the Gugg has a noisily musical page about it here.