“Spider” Woman: Louise Bourgeois’s Retrospective at the Guggenheim

by Bronwyn

On entering Louise Bourgeois’s Guggenheim Retrospective (the museum, a spiraling stroll of four floors – like walking inside of a large conch shell is a perfect space for her work) one is greeted by a 30-foot, steel spider: “Maman” (1999). Typical of the ambiguous and contradictory emotions found in and elicited by her work, the spider (or mother) is simultaneously frightening, larger than life and devouring – representative of…well, mothers, and of the sustenance of life… the spider is also a weaver – of stories, social threads, interconnectedness; a spider’s web is both practical and beautiful to behold. To kill a spider is bad luck. Bourgeois, named by her feminist mother, after Louise Michel, an anarchist involved in the Paris Commune, has said “my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful as a spider.” A tapestry-repairer and a strong role model in many ways, her mother nevertheless tolerated a visible affair between Louise’s father and her governess, a self-described childhood ‘trauma’ that Bourgeois has revisited in her artwork through out her life.

Born in Paris in 1911, as a child Bourgeois helped her mother with repairs in their small factory, often drawing missing tapestry scenes onto fabric; later, she studied art at the Ecole de Louvre, the Academie des Beaux Arts and the Atelier Fernand Leger. In an early sign of the direction her work would take, she consciously rejected the traditional styles and techniques of the “masters” she was instructed in.

In 1938 she emigrated to the U.S. with her husband, an American art historian, and found solidarity in the more experimental leanings of artists and teachers at the Arts League in New York City. After Paris – which Bourgeois “associated with women [Maman typically employed around 20 women in her tapestry shop], memory and her mother,” New York City became “to her a more masculine, modern, professional, individualistic and creative culture.” She associated with European Surrealists, mostly anarchists, who’d immigrated to the U.S. after World War II. (Some critics argue she is more a Surrealist than an Abstract Expressionist due to the subversive nature of her art). This cultural shift of perspective is cited by critics, and Bourgeois herself, as a source of the ying-yang nature of much of her work.  In the 1940’s she turned to sculpture, mainly creating abstract, organic pieces in painted wood. One of my favorites, “Femme Volage” (Fickle Woman) 1951, both resists and understands a masculine perspective of women as contrary, difficult beings. Different-sized-shaped carved-wooden pieces swivel up and around a stable, grounded (sort of totemic, but mobile) pole, going every which way, reflecting the multi-tasking peripherality often necessitated by the many social roles women perform, as well as the desire for autonomy, to reject and be more than just binding socially static gender formulations. Simultaneously, she offers a portrait of how the male might sometimes perceive the female, as an overwhelming and hard to understand whirlwind of (at least to him) contradictory emotions and impulses. Such duality is characteristic of her work: amorphous masculine-feminine shapes that could be breasts or penises, images that are both sexually charged and reminiscent of childhood innocence, pieces depicting a stability and safety that can also be oppressive and dangerous. In the 60’s she expanded to work in rubber, bronze and stone and work of this period often juxtaposes the hard and the soft, the smooth and rough-textured. Later works often mix found objects, such as doors, windows, mirrors, perfume bottles, and beds, creating domestic prisons that, though confining, aren’t necessarily uncomfortable, cold or threatening. Work of the 90’s uses cherished family tapestries (everything and nothing is sacred) which are cut-up and then sewn back together to create human figures. A later work“Twosome” uses large discarded, phallic, gasoline storage tanks, one smaller than the other,  that pulse in and out of each other – a red light glimmering within, fusing the shapes together in the repetition of moving into and away from each other, reminding the observer of the attraction that draws us to others and the repulsion that pushes us away.
  
A big theme of her work is the dual nature of domestic comfort and confinement – the safety of the womb (and maybe also of the somewhat reclusive and artificial world of the artist– art is, after all, a form of domesticity – the safe space of the studio similar to a womb – a quiet place of creation) and the desire to break free of the oppression of the comforts of home and nurturance that can sometimes stifle, also necessary for creation and individual expression. (I remember the first time I saw a whole wall of my brother’s art work; the shock and recognition that he was this separate person from our family unit; it was scary and exciting ). For Bourgeois, the domestic and feminine represent strength and vulnerability, resistance and complicity, and one isn't necessarily valued more than the other.

Elaine Showalter’s ode to Bourgeois “Lumps, Bumps, Bulbs, Bubbles, Bridges, Slits, Turds, Coils, Craters, Wrinkles and Holes” (a good, visual description of Bourgeois’s work) describes how the artist defies some of the categories and difficulties female artists have often experienced (she is, I think, a powerful feminist role-model): “Traditionally female artists struggle to balance the scale and ambition of their creativity with their sexual and maternal roles, to their inevitable critical detriment.”  Bourgeois' work is monumental and assertive, definite in its form and artistry, allusive in meaning, and unafraid of depicting fear and anxiety.

Bourgeois, 97, still lives and works in New York City. After decades using a makeshift studio on her Manhattan rooftop, she relocated to a larger Brooklyn studio and continues to host Salons: informal forums of idea-sharing between younger and more established artists. She has described her busy and prolific career
as a way to keep her sanity; to address her anger towards her father for his treatment of her cherished mother, and anger at her mother for tolerating it. An insomniac, instead of struggling against wakefulness she uses it: in the midnight kitchen what materials are available? What tools can she use? (hammers? sewing needles? paints? awls?)  What can she make from her dreams and struggles and memories?

Louise Bourgeois’ Perspective is on view at the Guggenheim Museum on 5th Avenue at 89th St. in Manhattan till September 28. Pay what you can at the museum Fridays between 5:45-7:45. Megabus will get you to Penn Station for $6