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[[Image]] [[Image]] Louise Bourgeois, Cumulous, c. 1969, latex. House Un-American Activities Committee. Her show at the stable Gallery in 1964 introduced the "lair" - a wholly different image, though still preoccupied with dependence and independence, enclosure and exclusion, the aggressive and the vulnerable, order and disorder. the lairs, made from plaster and latex, had their sources in some obsessively linear landscape drawings which also refer to skeins of wool, associated with the artist's mother; in one of these, the cave-tunnel made its first appearance. The hanging, nestlike bag forms merge inside and outside to return to the house-body images. Like the skeins of wool, they are "friendly; you can hide inside of them." Peering into the lairs is like walking through a rough-walled labyrinth. They "grow from the center, the more important organs being hidden; the life is inside .... which causes it to grow to a certain size."3 One lair continues ropelike to turn upon itself and is hollow; some are weighted in such a way that they rock on their bases and "eventually come to rest through their own stability." The latex pieces, hanging, folding, rising with a curious and sensual combination of limpness and stiffness, are the plaster pieces inside out. One has a slit into a viscous labial interior; another is a miniature landscape or viscerascape of shining flesh-colored undulations. Others are almost scatological; others hang like the memories of performances.4 Throughout Bourgeois's oeuvre, shapes and ideas appear and disappear in a maze of versions, materials, incarnations. She has used latex as the soft avatar of her hard forms. A shape may be made first from soft plaster (which turns hard), then cast in latex so that a permanently soft mould, or skin, exists independently, then made in marble, which is the final epitome of hardness. She thought at one point of having a performer dressed in a latex mold act out the piece's symbolic origins. The most recent and ambitious lair was a full-scale environment in Bourgeois's December, 1974, show at 112 Greene Street. Called Le Repas du soir (The Evening Meal), it was intended as a nightmarish comment on the family - the weights and pressures and anxious zones of close interaction. the space is claustrophobically squeezed between a field of hard domes' soft counterparts hanging bulbously from above with a Damoclean tension. Molds of chicken legs lie strewn around it and a male portrait head rolls in a dark corner. Both hard and soft forms were a pale color and, enclosed in a dark curtained box, they glowed eerily. The whole exhibition - Bourgeois's first in ten years - had a curious aura of loneliness and intimacy. In that vast shabby space, she placed her relatively small marble pieces without bases, almost at random (a tiny white marble female waist-to-knees figure was cast off on the floor by itself). Some were dimly lit, others not at all, simply holding their own in the gloom. One had to go very close to come into real contact with each piece. In a well-lit room they would have become conventional objects too small for the space. As it was, they fully inhabited it. Nature is an indirect, perhaps subconscious, source for many of these images. A large oval plaster relief with an amoeboid form pushing up as though into another medium has a strongly foetal imagery; its source is the tadpoles the artist played with in the river as a child. Another group of forms are almost literally alive, formed 30
