Viewing page 37 of 50

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[image]]
Louise Bourgois, Labyrinthe Tower, c. 1960. plaster, 29" high.

[[image]]
Louise Bourgois, Self-Portrait, 1965-66, wood and cement 25" x 15" x 7½". 

take on the weapon of the aggressor. But when woman becomes aggressive, she becomes terribly afraid. If you are inhibited by needles, stakes and knives, you are very handicapped to be a self-perceptive creature. These women are eternally reaching for a way of becoming women. Their anxiety comes from their doubt of being ever able to become receptive. The battle is fought at the terror level which precedes anything sexual.

One of the most pathetic manifestations of such a double image is a smalleFemme pieu of green brown wax which lies, again legless and armless, like a stranded turtle on its back, breasts and vulva and an abdominal wound exposed to all comers. Bourgeois used this piece as a pincushion, and the soft form is violated by large and small needles, suggesting some terrible fetish. She too connects the image with sorcery. As a child, she was attached to a furpiece held together by needles. The [[illegible]] was so effective and so small that it had a magic quality. You could hurt people and you could make things people liked. Its magic power has never quite vanished. It is partly a way to be appreciated, a desire to please."

Bourgeois makes certain types of work under specific emotional conditions. After her husband's death she turned to "aggressive" work - cutting and drilling bits of wood to be strung on metal rods - something she has done off and on for years, and considers "a kind of knitting." The thick wood is cut and bored,"dis-membered" - processes she finds "unbearable" and does "only under very strong anxiety. The aggressive ones make me doubt my femininity and I can't stand that. When reality is manageable then I can become a woman again and pour, make the feminine works." Plaster, wax, and latex, she sees as a friendly materials, and I prefer the work she does in these media to that in bronze (which she admits is "dead" compared to the "richness and live quality of plaster") or marble, though she likes its permanence. Equally at home with additive or subtractive processes, the flexible and the resistant, she has "never believed in the romanticisim of 'truth to material.' Some materials are fine for the pinning down of ideas, but they are not permanent and they do not take on a satisfactory surface." THe major function of her work is to follow the "inner necessity, to release anxiety into a formal perfection."

Bourgeois actually has a very literal imagination. Patrice Marandel points out that her sculpture, "though it is not figurative, develops nevertheless in an atmos-phere of figuration which engages the viewer in interpreting it on his/her own terms." Many of these viewers are put off by the prospect, preferring to deal with art at a more oblique angle. Bourgeois exists in the dangerous near-chaotic climate of Surrealism's "recon-ciliation of two distant realities." While some of her sculpture seems to be the results of random exploration with no immediate point in view, this is not a wholly a

32