Restless mind
Andrew Lambirth Louise Bourgeois Tate Modern, until 20 January 2008 For once a major blockbuster exhibition at I: the Tate justifies its size: the imaginative world of Louise Bourgeois is so potent and all-encompassing that a show of more than 200 works, from small experimental objects to large installations, seems not a fraction too extensive. Bourgeois, born in Paris in 1911, is famous — in this age of confession and determinedly autobiographical art — for her troubled childhood. Whereas most artists of this type foist their traumas on us raw, Bourgeois cooks hers to a turn. What is more, she has the imagination and creative vision to translate and transform her source material, transcending its personal impetus and making it universal. As we know from the plethora of bloody breast-beating that passes for art among so many of today's younger artists, the ability to transform experience is rare. In Bourgeois we have an adept of the art, with a restless and eclectic imagination, and capacity for a fertile invention. This display, spanning seven decades, represents a towering achievement.
Bourgeois grew up in provincial France, but moved with her American husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, to New York in 1938. It was there that her artistic career really began, though the complexion of her art remains resolutely European and looks back constantly to the country of her birth. The show opens with a group of 1940s paintings which explore the idea of the housewife, taking the word literally and making images which are half-woman and half-house. At once an enduring theme emerges: of containment and entrapment. The woman hides in the house, but also outgrows it; her body is part building which traps her, part temple which adorns her. Although these paintings are effective, it was towards sculpture that Bourgeois gravitated from the late-1940s, in order to make her art more real. In this first room is a much later environment or 'cell', a pink marble palace in a cage. It incorporates a guillotine blade ready to fall: the anxiety that hallmarks Bourgeois's work is blatantly but economically expressed.
Subtlety is not a keynote of this work, though ambiguity is. Her hybrid imagery draws heavily upon the surrealist strategy of juxtaposition (she plays an inspired game of Exquisite Corpse with the mismatching of bodyp arts), and alternates fruitfullybetween flesh and landscape, body and architecture. In the same way she uses a wide variety of materials, from plaster, latex and wax to marble and bronze, as well as found objects. Bourgeois is not interested in crowd-pleasing, and for a time in her early career even withdrew from exhibiting, though she does enjoy the attention her work now receives. She draws all the time, and an early suite of nine engravings (made with the masteretcher S.W. Hayter at Atelier 17 when it was in New York) called 'He Disappeared into Complete Silence' (1947), shows how important the discipline and lucidity of line is to her thought. A group of totemic wooden sculptures, like daggers or paddles or primitive African carvings (a specialism of her husband), in the second room of the exhibition, shows how her sculptural ideas were concurrently developing. Next come the impressive stacked 'Personages' (much akin to Brancusi) and the striking pink geometric sculpture 'The Blind Leading the Blind', assembled from leftover beams.
Organic imagery dominates the work from the mid-1960s, with suggestions of nests or lairs (entrapment again), and the vulnerability/aggression polarity which appears so frequently in Bourgeois's work. Rage can be productive. As she says, 'When I do not "attack" I do not feel myself alive.' The basic urges which animate her work — wanting, giving, destroying — form an uneasy balance in the spectator, helped out by Bourgeois's own drive towards peace and calm. 'I am free,' she says, 'because I use the aggression I am suffering from against the sculpture.' And she reminds us how art keeps the crime rate down: 'To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer.'
Bourgeois is good at the comic aspect of sex, typically combining male and female attributes in many of her sculptures, which are often both phallic and labial, and certainly explicit. But she cannot resist the temptation to disturb, piercing a vast penis and suspending it from the ceiling, or decapitating the beautiful male in 'Arch of Hysteria' (1993), the lithe acrobat in polished bronze who contorts himself into a wheel. In her infamous sculpture 'The Destruction of the Father' (1974), her childhood act of modelling a bread figure of her hated father and eating it is re-enacted in an installation of plaster, latex, wood, fabric and red light. Cannibalism is transcended but the trauma still bites.
From the late-1960s to the late-1980s Bourgeois concentrated on making sculpture in marble. In 1980 she moved to a large new studio in Brooklyn, and, as Tate curator Frances Morris writes, 'She was finally able to indulge her passion for hoarding, scavenging, collecting and mending'. From this studio emerged the powerful series of 'Cells', large-scale environments resembling a prison or an asylum in which Bourgeois could create her own architecture and explore even further her imaginative fantasies. Her big subject is our relationships with others, and her great skill is in the relationship of one object to another in her work. Thus the environments give full rein to her genius for juxtaposition, for eliciting new meaning and resonance from the bringing together of out-of-context objects.
Bourgeois possesses a highly developed access to her unconscious, as can be seen from the flowering of richly complex imagery in these 'Cells'. She says they focus on various aspects of pain — psychological, physical or emotional — and contain narratives that are explicitly autobiographical. For instance, the tapestry fragments to be seen here and there refer directly to the tapestry studio her family ran in the town of Antony on the banks of the Bievre river, while the weaving spider (even titled `Maman' in one instance) stands for the mother. Yet the ability to decode Bourgeois's imagery is not an essential requirement to responding to her work. The power of her imagination permeates the forms of her sculptures and drawings and can be felt without understanding its sources. In fact, Bourgeois's obsessional vision can be overwhelming. The Tate show is strong meat: I recommend more than one visit to assimilate (or confront) this extraordinary artist.
The substantial catalogue which accompanies the show is really a book and claims to be the most complete survey of Bourgeois's career in print. It runs to over 300 pages and contains 160 colour and 80 b&w illustrations. The text is cunningly arranged as an A–Z gazetteer of Bourgeois themes and interests, seasoned with provocative quotes from the artist (Art is the acceptance of solitude') and more lengthy entries and mini-essays by professional commentators. It's probably the best publication the Tate has produced in recent years, and at £24.99 in paperback is not excessively priced.
The exhibition tours to the Centre Pompidou in Paris in the spring of 2008, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in the summer, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in the autumn and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington DC in spring 2009. Meanwhile, there are two commercial exhibitions of recent work by Bourgeois, sculptures and works on paper at Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi, 15 Old Bond Street, W1 (until 17 November) and prints on cloth and paper at Marlborough Graphics, 6 Albemarle Street, W1 (until 2 November). Louise Bourgeois may be 97 years old, but her compulsion to create is undimmed She works every day with a seamstress and printmaker, and in her leisure time surfs the internet. An inspiration to us all?
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