Louise Bourgeois
“It is not an image I am seeking. It’s not an idea. It is an emotion you want to recreate, an emotion of wanting, of giving and of destroying.”
（her pieces are expressions of enduring truths about our universal human condition）
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois （25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressions and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.
Maman
Maman
“Maman is a monumental steel spider, so large that it can only be installed out of doors, or inside a building of industrial scale. Supported on eight slender, knobbly legs, its body is suspended high above the ground, allowing the viewer to walk around and underneath it. Each ribbed leg ending in a sharp-tipped point is made of two pieces of steel, and attached to a collar above which an irregularly ribbed spiralling body rises, balanced by a similar sized egg sac below. The meshed sac contains seventeen white and grey marble eggs that hang above the viewer’s head, gleaming in the darkness of their under-body cavity. Maman was made for the opening of Tate Modern in May 2000 as part of Bourgeois’s commission for the Turbine Hall, the grand central space of the museum. The sculpture was installed on the bridge, overlooking three tall steel towers entitled I Do, I Undo and I Redo, referring to processes of emotional development in relation to motherhood, a central theme in the artist’s oeuvre. ”
Bruvar's early paintings are full of three-dimensional sense, focusing on spatial relations. In 1947, he published the engraving series "He disappeared in silence", and began the theme that she often used afterwards-the body merged with the building or emerged from the building. In fact, this theme has emerged in its early painting "Woman-House" and is reproduced in "Smart Liar" (1983). In the 1950s, she widely used latex, rubber, cement and other special materials to create experimental works.
Bourgeois’s art oscillates between such dualities as abstraction and figuration, male and female, conscious and unconscious, pleasure and pain, architecture and the body, guilt and forgiveness, and revenge and reparation. Bourgeois’s diaries and writings, many of which were made during her long period of psychoanalysis, confirm the intensity and conflicting nature of her feelings, and the pervading sense of anxiety, guilt, and aggression which led to a constant need for reparation and reconciliation. In her work, such psychological polarities – passive and active, love and hate, murder and suicide – are given formal and symbolic sculptural equivalents.
Bourgeois has stated that many of her pieces express the relationship between self and other, or between the individual and the group. These dynamics originate in the primal bond between mother and child, which provides the template from which all future relationships develop. The emotional tension in Bourgeois’s work arises from the contradictory impulses, which are often held together within a single form.
structure
The body of the spider supports a rounded cage-like structure inside which is held a large white egg. The cage hangs below a cylindrical form, to which are attached eight thin legs stretching out to the floor. Each of the legs is articulated in three sections made of straight rods of bronze, with the exception of one of the legs, where the two sections are bent, creating a semi-circle. The lower parts of seven of the legs end in needle points where the sculpture meets the floor, while the eighth terminates in a small coil. The angularity of the thin legs and their different heights give the impression that the spider is crawling.
The friend (the spider – why the spider?)
“because my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and useful as an araignée. She could also defend herself, and me, by refusing to answer ‘stupid’, inquisitive, embarrassing personal questions.”
Spider (1997) – steel, tapestry, wood, glass, fabric, rubber, silver, gold and bone. Photograph: Maximilian Geuter/The Easton Foundation / VEGAP, Madrid
Cell (Glass spheres and hands)
(1990-1993)
glass, iron, wood, linoleum, canvas, marbleMeasurements(a-m)
219.5 × 218.8 × 220.0 cm (installation)
Identity and self-scrutiny, memory, and the inherent tensions of human relationships are the core of Louise Bourgeois’s art. Although Bourgeois often referred to her works as a means of processing memories of traumatic episodes from the past, it is the ongoing presence of the past in her memory, and the layers of her personal history and psyche that generate her diaristic art. Bourgeois is acclaimed as one of the most innovative artists to have emerged in the United States in the second-half of the twentieth century. She was especially prolific from the early 1980s, and from 1990 produced a vast series of ‘cells’ – cubic or cylindrical chambers into which she placed objects and smaller works found in and around her studio.
The industrial window frames of Cell (Glass spheres and hands) typify Bourgeois’s environments.
In this work the artist reconfigures her family, including her father’s mistress, each member represented in the form of a glass sphere closed off from the possibility of interpersonal communication. The clasped hands are Bourgeois’s self-portrait, and, like other fragments of anatomy that appear consistently in her works, embody anxiety, isolation and emotional intensity.
The Cell series revolves around the desire to simultaneously remember and forget. “You have to tell your story and you have to forget your story. You forget and forgive. It liberates you,” Louise Bourgeois once claimed. In this respect, the Cells contain references to individuals and experiences from the past. The needles, thread, and spindles incorporated in these works allude to the artist’s childhood and her parents’ work—Bourgeois’s mother restored valuable tapestries.
In and Out （1995）
Bourgeois focused primarily on sculpture, crafting biomorphic forms that curator Lucy Lippard has described as enacting the physicality of the body as experienced from within. Bourgeois’s suggestive organ-like contours and early use of unconventional materials (like resin, latex, and cloth) allude to a tension between quintessentially male and female forms. This recurrent interrogation of the male/female dialectic aligns Bourgeois with the Feminist movement, but her work has also been examined through the lens of Abstract Expressionism.
reflection
Louis gave me a lot of inspiration. I mentioned the concept of spider webs in the previous workflow / conversations. Every point on the spider web is the aggregation point of the universe. The spider web can remind people of the inextricable "connection" between things. After the last conversation, I think of Louis, a female artist who is famous for the series "Spider".
In the process of researching Louis, I found another interesting series of her "Cell".
The "Cell" series is like boxes of different sizes, they all have full of eggs made of glass wrapped in nylon tights, the Cell contains fragments of antique tapestries, hollowed bones and old Shalimar perfume bottles as well as a pendulous rubber form stuck with pins, brooches and old medals, all attached to the meshed walls, evoking a web full of trapped prey. small enclosed spaces into which the viewers may enter in some instances, but may also be excluded from, forced to peer between architectural features or through holes in glass. These boxes seem to contain Louis' personal memory, but they extend their tentacles to all humans. As she said, she doesn't want the image she wants, but wants the audience to rebuild their emotions. Many of her works express the relationship between self and others, or between individuals and groups. These motivations stem from the original bond between mother and child.
This gave me a good hint, maybe I can make a box-shaped thing. Take this box as a point on the net of relations, make this point radial, and continuously extend tentacles in all directions to express a kind of temptation and connection. Use this point to represent a general situation.
The Last climb (2008) – steel, glass, rubber, thread and wood. Photograph: The Easton Foundation / VEGAP, Madrid
Dangerous Passage (1997)
Bourgeois drew upon memories of her childhood, strewing a cage with symbolic objects: an antique child's swing on one side; broken bones on the other.
REFERENCE
Tel Aviv Museum of Art（2018）Installation view of “Louise Bourgeois: Twosome” at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art available at：http://www.bourgeois-tamuseum.org.il/（Accessed: 20/02/2020)
Morwenna Ferrier（2016）Louise Bourgeois – the reluctant hero of feminist art available at：https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/14/louise-bourgeois-feminist-art-sculptor-bilbao-guggenheim-women（Accessed: 20/02/2020)
Bilbao, Abandoibarra Etorb（2016）Louise Bourgeois. Structures of Existence: The Cells available at：https://www.artsy.net/show/guggenheim-bilbao-louise-bourgeois-structures-of-existence-the-cells （Accessed: 20/02/2020)