Material Matters

Louise Bourgeois and the Question of Materiality

Dissertation submitted for the Special Degree of

B.A. Honours in History of Art

2010

Rachel May Walker

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Table of contents Introduction 3

1. Material Bodies 7

a. Louise Bourgeois and the Aesthetics of Touch 8

b. Second Skins: Flesh in Fabric and Latex 13

c. A Visceral Viscosity: from Eccentric Abstraction to Existentialism 19

2. Sex and the Medium 27

a. The Erotics of Carving 28

b. Sculptures in Fabric: Rewriting the Hierarchy of the Arts 31

Conclusion 37

Bibliography 39

List of Illustrations 43

Illustrations 45

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INTRODUCTION

An artist’s words are always to be taken cautiously. . . . The artist who discusses the so-called meaning of his work is usually describing a literary side-issue. The core of his original impulse is to be found, if at all, in the work itself.1

Louise Bourgeois

In the summer of 1982, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major

retrospective exhibition of the work of Louise Bourgeois – the first retrospective given to any living female artist at the institution. Perhaps even more surprisingly, this was the first time that Bourgeois, who by then was aged seventy and had been exhibiting her work for over forty years, had been awarded international recognition. One of the effects of having all of her life’s work presented simultaneously was to draw attention

to what would become one of the defining features of Bourgeois’s art: that is, her seemingly endless variety of sculptural materials and techniques, ranging from ancient and traditional to the most up-to-date and unconventional. Deborah Wye, who curated the exhibition, captured this aspect of Bourgeois’s sculpture when she wrote in the show’s accompanying catalogue:

Encompassing abrupt changes in medium and form, [Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture]

moves unexpectedly from rigid wood poles to amorphous plaster nests; from pliable

masses to stiff protrusions in rubber and plastic; from bulbous bronze configurations

hanging on hooks or chords to their reappearance in solid marble on sturdy bases,

from a tiny four-inch fetish pincushion to a room-size environment.2

For Wye, the main impulse behind the artist’s eclectic choice of media lay in her

affinities with Surrealism3. Though she moved to New York in 1938 after marrying the American art historian Robert Goldwater, Bourgeois had grown up in Paris, where she was born in 1911. As a student she lived above the Galerie Gradiva opened by Andre Breton as a showcase for the Surrealists’ work, and it is indeed likely that Bourgeois was influenced by the Surrealists’ formal vocabulary. Moreover Bourgeois,

despite having stated her dislike of being classed as a Surrealist4, has often explained her art in terms of unconscious drives rooted in an early childhood trauma, namely

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1 Louise Bourgeois, Deconstruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews

1923-1997, edited by Marie Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (London: Violette

Editions, 1998), p. 15. 2 Deborah Wye, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), p. 11. 3 The Bourgeois exhibition at the MoMA was held shortly after the museums’s Giorgio De

Chirico retrospective, and was succeeded, in the following year, by a retrospective of Joan

Miro, two important figures in French and Spanish Surrealism. It is likely that this timing

contributed to promulgating the idea that her art was inscribed within the Surrealist tradition. 4 Frances Morris (ed), Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing: 2007), p. 285.

Bourgeois’s main contention was based on the Surrealists’s somewhat sexist assumption that

women are more in tune with the unconscious and are thus to be held up as an exotic riddle,

or muse.

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her father’s ten-year-long affair with Bourgeois’s live-in English teacher, Sadie5. According to Wye, Bourgeois’s art can only be understood by tracing the artist’s personal themes, needs, and instincts, and her growing popularity as an artist should

be read as signaling an art public that had grown weary of the formalistic attitudes championed by the Minimalists:

The overriding emphasis on stylistic analysis, prevalent for so long, no longer satisfied

the intellectual and emotional needs of the art public. Instead, personal content and

deeply felt themes were sought and explored. Bourgeois’s work spoke directly of these

new needs (…).6

Though perhaps such a stance seemed appropriate at the time, Wye’s psychobiographical approach, which has since been adopted in much of the subsequent writing on Bourgeois, seems somewhat limiting in retrospect. As a critic

noted even at the time, ‘The revelation [of the artist’s childhood trauma] may or may not ‘explain’ the art but it sure snaps the dossier on Miss Bourgeois closed before it could be fully opened’7. A quarter of a century later, during a recent retrospective at the Tate Modern in London, the same criticism was being made: ‘The problem I have with Bourgeois’s work’, wrote a critic, ‘is its literalness, the indexical symbolism that has given her interpreters material for their academic frenzy’8.

Recent scholarship, however, demonstrates a renewed interest in the formal aspects of Louise Bourgeois’s work9. Consequently, her status has shifted from that of an ‘outsider’ operating on the fringes of modern and contemporary artistic developments to one which acknowledges the important position of her art within the major artistic debates of the twentieth century as well as its influence on a younger

generations of contemporary artists. The present study attempts to contribute to this reevaluation, to this reopening of the Bourgeois ‘dossier’, by focusing on an aspect of her sculpture which, whilst constituting one of the defining features of her art, has so far eluded serious investigation: materiality. If ‘material’ has often been a neglected category in the discipline of art history10, the present paper will argue that looking

more closely at the different materials in Bourgeois’s work can greatly enrich our

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5 In 1982 Bourgeois published an article in Artforum titled ‘Child Abuse’ (Artforum vol. 20 no. 4,

December 1982) where she revealed her father’s affair. The timing coincided with the

opening of her MoMA retrospective and was clearly aimed providing a psychobiographical

interpretation of her work. 6 Wye 1982, p. 11. 7 Vivien Raynor, ‘Art: Louise Bourgeois closes her own dossier’, The New York Times, December 3, 1982 (retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com). 8 Richard Dorment, ‘Louise Bourgeois: The shape of a child’s torment’, The Telegraph,

October 9, 2007 (retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk). 9 See, for instance the articles which appear in Frances Morris’s 2006 exhibition catalogue

(Morris 2006). The contributions of Robert Storr (‘L’esprit Geometrique’) and Alex Potts

(‘Hybrid Sculpture’) in particular indicate a conscious effort to move away from the

biographical. 10 If addressed, the physical constituents of art works tend to be approached from the

perspective of technical history, and these technical accounts usually content themselves with

economically valuable materials. See Jack C. Rich, The Materials and Methods of Sculpture (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1947) and Nicholas Penny, The Materials of Sculpture (New

Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993).

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understanding of her oeuvre. It will also highlight some of the common preconceptions about materials which affect this understanding, in an effort to revealing the mutual relationship which exists between materiality and artistic reception.

The paper is divided into two chapters. Chapter 1 will examine the

relationship between materiality and the body, both in the way the viewer’s body is engaged by materials and how materials themselves can be used as bodily metaphors. Chapter 2 will investigate the ways in which materials affect the gendering of sculpture and it processes, and the implication of this gendering with respect to the hierarchy of sculptural materials and of the arts.

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CHAPTER 1

MATERIAL BODIES

‘For me’, Louise Bourgeois states, ‘sculpture is the body. My body is my

sculpture.’11 The frequency with which this statement reappears in journals and literature on Bourgeois is testimony to an acknowledgement of the crucial place which the body occupies in Bourgeois’s art. And yet paradoxically, representations of human

bodies as we usually understand them – figurative and whole – rarely appear in Bourgeois’s extensive sculptural oeuvre. The body for Bourgeois is always either fragmented, deformed or completely metaphorical. Whilst a lot has been written about how formal aspects of Bourgeois’s work have suggested notions of embodiment (for example, through the recurrence of sexually suggestive contours), the importance

of materials in conveying notions of corporeality has been largely overlooked. Drawing on the texts of Johann Gottfried Herder, Donald Kuspit and Jean-Paul Sartre amongst others, the following chapter will explore some of the ways in which materiality can both engage the body of the beholder and act as bodily metaphors within the sculptures themselves.

a. Louise Bourgeois and the Aesthetics of Touch

Sculpture has long been considered a ‘visual art’. Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture,

however, is deeply tactile. ‘One wants to do more than approach the work’, reflects one art critic; ‘Again and again, one wants to touch’12. Bourgeois’s early transition from painting to sculpture emphasises the need for her art to express a tangible reality. ‘Painting’, she asserted, ‘doesn’t exist for me.’ What was important for her was ‘the physical aspect of sculpture’13, both its medium – its sensual and tactile character –

and its three-dimensionality and the stronger sense of reality that this made possible. For the viewer, there is also a fundamental difference between apprehending a three-dimensional sculpture and a two-dimensional painting. As Alex Potts writes, ‘a free-standing sculpture tends to activate a more directly physical and bodily engaged response from the viewer than a painting’14. Of course, this idea is not new. In

Sculpture: Some Observations on Form and Shape from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, Herder was the first to articulate the differences between encountering a work of painting and a sculpture. For Herder, the distinction could be grounded in the senses required in perceiving these media. The sculptural, unlike the painterly, elicits touch as well as sight, thus requiring a more physical engagement on the part of the beholder. As Robert Norton explains in his study of Herder,

Although we learn to regard sculpture in purely visual terms, it exists in the sphere of

tangible physicality; our first, original acquaintance with the basic elements of

sculpture comes to us not through the eye, but through tactile experience. . . . The

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11 Bourgeois 1998, p. 357. From an interview first published in 1998. 12 John Haber, ‘Do Not Touch’, 28 September 2008, www.haberarts.com 13 Bourgeois 1998, p. 184. From an interview published in the journal Arts in 1989. 14 Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven and

London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. ix.

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very material of sculpture does not merely ‘represent’ forms and figures, it actually is

these objects themselves, partaking in the space occupied by the person experiencing

it.15

Furthermore, Herder challenges the traditional view that beauty is restricted to objects of vision, instead maintaining that there is a specific concept of beauty accessible to the sense of touch, one that is quite different from the beauty of things

seen. Using the example of blind people’s perception of objects, he argues that they take ‘genuine immediate pleasure in beautiful touch’16.

Louise Bourgeois’s Blind Man’s Buff (1984) (fig. 1) echoes Herder’s effort at redressing the ‘optical bias’17 in our experience of sculpture by drawing attention to the tactile properties of the material. The work’s title refers to a children’s game in which a person wearing a blindfold chases the other players, guided only by sound or touch, and recalls Constantin Brancusi’s Sculpture for the Blind (c. 1916) (fig. 2), a work

originally displayed in an enclosed bag with two sleeves through which hands could enter, and so intended to be literally touched18. Though museum restrictions prevent us from touching Blind Man’s Bluff, the contrast between the rough surface of the unworked marble and the apparent softness of the phallic or breast-like forms burgeoning from the surface of the stone seems to visually recreate the dynamic of a

tactile exploration. While touching Brancusi’s sculpture would have drawn attention mainly to the object’s form, Bourgeois’s objects place a greater emphasis on materiality. Furthermore, the contradiction between the sensual contours of the protrusions and the cold hardness of the white marble appear to convey a sense of movement, which the sculpture’s helicoid dynamic further emphasises. This

concentration on the tactile and motor seems to almost literally bring the dead stone to life. It is, in David Sylvester’s words, a ‘haptic’ image, which though abstract ‘makes bodies look the way they feel’. The work’s physicality, its sensual quality, is further emphasised by its placement slightly under eye-level, which requires the viewer to bend down and thus invites a close, intimate viewing.

Bourgeois’s concern with the tactile dimension of sculpture is further displayed

in a work of the same period, the bronze Untitled (Fingers) (fig. 3) of 1986. Again, Brancusi is called to mind in the reflective polish of the bronze. Geist argues that Brancusi’s polish ‘recalls the movement of the hand’ but his highly, nearly obsessively polished bronzes seem rather to express the artist’s desire to transcend their materiality whilst denying tactile response on the viewer’s part - the slightest touch

would tarnish the polished surface. In Bourgeois’s work, however, the contrast between the dark, unpolished bronze and the shiny bulbs or ‘fingers’, as Bourgeois describes them, clearly attests to the process of touching, caressing and rubbing which the material has undergone. Like the monument to Everard 't Serclaes located in Brussels (fig. 4), of which certain parts have retained their shiny polish through

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15 Robert E. Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (New York: Cornell

University Press, 1991), p. 221. 16 Johann Gottfried Herder, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, ed. and transl. by Jason Gaiger (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2002)

(originally published in 1778), p. 14. 17 To quote Jason Gaiger’s expression, in Herder 2002, p. 14. 18 Brancusi apparently described this sculpture as ‘a revelation for the hands’; see Sidney

Geist, Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture (London: Studio Vista Limited, 1968), p. 56.

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tourists’ constant rubbing (which according to tradition brings good luck), Untitled (Fingers) visually elicits a tactile response - again emphasised by the title, as in Blind Man’s Buff - and thus engages the viewer at a bodily level19. As such, this work

demonstrates Bourgeois’s ability to exploit literal matter – in this case, bronze – in order to invoke the physical, material presence of sculpture and to create an interplay between the object and the person apprehending it.

So far I have only looked at works in marble and bronze, classical media par excellence which have long been associated with ancient sculpture and carry the same connotations of ideal beauty in art. Though Herder characterised touch as a ‘gateway to the beautiful’20, in Bourgeois’s work it is often not so much beauty as sheer curiosity

which seems to invite touch. The 1960s was a period of intense exploration into materials for Bourgeois: she experimented with plaster, resin, latex, plastic and wax. In her numerous ‘Soft Landscapes’ of the period, she often made these ‘soft’ materials appear hard whilst retaining aspects of their former liquid state, as with Soft Landscape I (1967) (fig. 5). This use of material as trompe l’oeil extends to Bourgeois’s most recent

work, with her 2007 ‘Echo’ series consisting of bronze casts of discarded clothing and fabric, stretched and draped into various forms (fig. 6). The bronze perfectly mimics the texture of the textiles from which these objects are cast which Bourgeois has further painted white, thereby disguising their actual material and confounding our

expectations of what they should feel like to touch. But perhaps one of the most intriguing instances where Bourgeois plays on viewer’s tactile associations can be found in her sewn and stuffed fabric pieces. Seven in Bed (2001) (fig. 7) consists of a line of pink fabric dolls, made from roughly torn-up patches of cloth sewn together and huddling on a simple white bed, which Lorna Collins likens to ‘a toy made by a child’

but also describes as ‘double-headed hermaphrodites writhing in orgy’21. The soft fabric of the dolls brings forth associations of childhood comfort, and yet the copulating figures are utterly unchildlike and quite disturbing. We see the traces of the artist’s touch in the rough stitches and the figures are also touching each other. As Collins writes,

This work comes forth from Bourgeois’s instinctive desire to express by palpating and

molding matter, which seems to gush out of the work as one looks. There is such

sensual poetry to the tactile – in looking one desires to touch, and seeing becomes a

different kind of perception, rather like squashing and fondling, just as those figures

act out in front of me.22

The reactions which ‘switch and interplay uncomfortably in one’s perception’ when faced with this work stem from the conflict between what we associate with soft,

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19 It could further be argued that the relationship between the viewer and the object is

rendered somewhat ambiguous by the suggestive nature of the forms, which have often been

described as phallic or breast-like. Geist noted about Brancusi’s work that ‘in most cases the

palping of sculpture is only a voyeurism of the hands’ (Geist 1968, p. 162). Whilst perhaps an

exaggeration when we consider Brancusi’s sculpture, this certainly seems to apply to much of

Bourgeois’s art. 20 Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Critical Forests: Fourth Grove, On Riedel’s Theory of the Beaux Arts’, in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, ed. and transl. by Gregory Moore (Princeton and

Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2006) (originally published in 1769), p. 210. 21 Lorna Collins, ‘The Wild Being of Louise Bourgeois: Merleau-Ponty in the Flesh’, Romance Studies, Vol. 28 No. 1 (January 2010), p. 50. 22 Ibid., p. 51.

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stuffed fabric and the sexually transgressive nature of the scene. Furthermore, the work itself is encased within a steel and glass vitrine ‘like a museum specimen’23 which is situated at eye level, and therefore the potential for tactility seems to be negated by

the presence of a physical barrier between the viewer and the work. But as Hilary Robinson notes, even the glass vitrines do not prevent viewers from feeling ‘a disquiet, almost an embarrassment in this encounter’ as the fabric piece does not benefit from the ‘distancing mechanism’24 which operates with other materials. To illustrate this idea, it is instructive to note the contrast between fabric works that revisit older themes

and their antecedents. The highly polished bronze in Arch of Hysteria (1993) (fig. 8) connotes a long tradition of figurative sculpture, and its reflective polish does not seem to invite touch. But looking at the later Arched Woman (1999) (fig. 9), where the theme of Arch of Hysteria has been translated into fabric, the tactile sculptures that we associate with dolls - the original purpose of which is to be handled and touched -

means that despite being presented within a curatorial context ‘they cannot be distanced as objects’ and instead ‘they only gain legibility as vital and present meditations of an insistent subjectivity’25. Robinson also points out that whereas the bronze sculptures situate us ‘safely in the realm of art’, the gesture and methods of production of the fabric figures ‘are at the furthest remove from those high art

practices’26. I will examine how Bourgeois’s use of fabric explores the dichotomies between art and craft at a later stage, but what remains clear for now is that the tactile qualities of materials can prove essential in determining the way we approach sculptural objects, and that Louise Bourgeois’s works, as well as operating visually, are also crucially concerned with an aesthetics of touch.

b. Second Skins: Flesh in Fabric and Latex

In the previous section I suggested some of the ways in which our sense of

touch can help inform our understanding of Bourgeois’s art, and how materials constitute an essential component in the process of tactile perception. Building on this idea, the next section will investigate how materials relate to what we must consider the corollary to touch, the principal organ of tactile perception: that is, of course, skin. In the hands of scholars, words like ‘skin’ and ‘flesh’ have often come to describe or

even act as substitutes for the materials from which the artworks are made. Thus Allan Schwartzmann describes how the ‘flesh tone’ of one of Bourgeois’s marble pieces ‘exudes a gentle warmth’27 whilst Robert Storr argues that the ‘skins’ of her fabric figures ‘suggest a race of Frankensteins’28. Lorna Collins explains that some of

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23 Frances Morris, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2007), p. 266).

Suprisingly, most photographs of Bourgeois’s fabric objects are cropped so as to cut out the

glass vitrines in which they are encased, thus removing what is surely an essential component

of these works. 24 Hilary Robinson, Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (New York: I.B.

Tauris & Co Ltd, 2006), p. 143. 25 Ibid., p. 144. 26 Ibid., p. 144. 27 Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff and Allan Schwartzman, Louise Bourgeois (New York and

London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2003) p.110. 28 Ibid., p. 88.

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her bronze pieces express a ‘most brute sense of flesh’29; Briony Fer describes the latex of Bourgeois’s 1960s works as ‘skin-like, mostly like a shed skin with raw unfinished edges’30. These analogies and countless others suggest some sort of metamorphosis

within the works themselves, where the material, whether marble, fabric, bronze or latex, somehow magically transforms itself into skin.

Donald Kuspit’s psychoanalytical investigation of the medium in his Psychostrategies of the Avant-Garde proposes an intriguing view of the processes behind this transformation. In his chapter ‘Identification with the Medium: The Consolidation of Matter’, Kuspit discusses the importance of skin in avant-garde imagery by drawing on the writings of French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu in his book The Skin Ego. For Anzieu the skin fulfils three functions:

The primary function of the skin is as the sac which contains and retains inside it the

goodness and fullness accumulating there through feeding, care, the bathing in words.

Its second function is as the interface which marks the boundary with the outside and

keeps that outside out … Finally, the third function . . . is as a site and a primary

means of communication with others, of establishing signifying relations; it is,

moreover, an ‘inscribing surface’ for the marks left by those others.31

For Kuspit, ‘the problem of avant-garde art’ is whether the skin can fulfill its function as a barrier between the self and the outside world, ‘whether the skin can stick to the body or whether it is ripped open by the world, so that the contents of the body – the psychical as well as physical body – spill out, in a general catastrophe of

disintegration.’32 But the body in avant-garde art has become broken, fragmented and ‘conspicuously unhappy’. The skin has failed to fulfill its function: it has become ‘hard and cold or mutilated and generally inhuman’, representing the artist’s lack of empathy for the body. The artist is now faced with repairing the damage:

The body and skin – separately or together – are clearly the ultimate avant-garde

medium, and avant-garde art increasingly becomes an attempt to resurrect a body

that is experienced as damaged if not dead, and give it a new skin that will function as

a boundary keeping the outside world out, once and for all.33

Bourgeois’s Three Horizontals (1998) (Fig. 10), like some of the previously discussed fabric figures, are made using roughly stitched, stuffed fabric. Three pink figures are laid out horizontally on a steel trolley, decreasing in size from top to bottom. The figures are stuffed to the brink, and the white patches showing on the larger woman’s surface make it look as if the figure’s insides are bursting through the seams. If the

‘rough stitching and vivid fabric recall muscles or flayed flesh’34, then this image provides a very concrete illustration of the ‘catastrophe of disintegration’ Kuspit had warned us about. Juxtaposing this work with Dorothea Tanning’s Nue Couchée of 1969-70 (fig. 11), further emphasises the effects of Bourgeois’s treatment of fabric as

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29 Collins 2010, p. 52. 30 Briony Fer, ‘Objects Beyond Objecthood’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2, Louise

Bourgeois (1999), p. 32. 31 Didier Anzieu, the Skin Ego (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 40. 32 Donald Kuspit, Psychostrategies of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University press,

2000), p. 141. 33 Ibid, p. 142. 34 Ann Coxon, in Morris, 2006, p. 286.

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mutilated flesh. While both artists use pink textile to represent skin, Tanning’s stuffed and neatly stitched pastel-pink fabric evoke a nude of surprising vitality and sensuality. Even though it is headless and only has two limbs, its ‘skin’ seems impermeable and it

retains a sense of wholeness and integrity which is completely absent from Bourgeois’s work. Furthermore, the stiffness of figures in Bourgeois’s piece makes them seem as though they were in a state of rigor mortis: this is dead skin on a dissection table. These stuffed figures and their flayed skin, as Linda Nochlin writes, ‘make us uncomfortable in our own skin, our human skin, which, these works remind us, are

only a temporary covering, after all, and a highly vulnerable one’35.

Of all the materials in Bourgeois’s large repertoire, latex is probably the one which is normally most closely associated to human skin. Adrian Rifkin clearly demonstrates this idea when he asks, in relation to one of Bourgeois’s latex works,

is the piercing, the tiny, ugly stretching of the latex round a needle, a different gesture

from the carving of wood and stone . . . ? For after all, if the needle is withdrawn from

the latex, it will close and heal, like human flesh, but without the pain, and unlike the

marking of a stone or a piece of wood.36

Of course, latex does not actually ‘heal’ when pierced, but this comment goes to show just how deeply entrenched is the common association of latex to human flesh. Perhaps it is the literalness of this association which makes us think of latex works as ‘ugly’ or ‘repulsive’ whilst marble, which has traditionally been used in sculpture for

its ability to mimic skin, is considered ‘beautiful’. To illustrate this, I would like to return to Herder’s previously cited text, to a passage where he discusses polychromy. Herder explains his opposition to the colouring of statues, which he thinks renders them ‘ugly rather than beautiful’, by asking a rather intriguing question: ‘Would Myron’s cow please us more if it were covered in hair?’ The answer is ‘no’, since this

cow would look too real for the artist and yet not real enough for the herdsman: it is ‘too like a cow and not like a cow, that is to say, a phantom.’37 The link between Herder’s argument and Bourgeois’s use of latex is made clearer when we observe Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous photograph of Bourgeois holding her 1968 sculpture Fillette (fig. 12), taken on the occasion of her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of

Modern Art, for a portrait intended as the catalogue’s frontispiece. Focusing on the bottom right corner of the image Mignon Nixon makes a very interesting remark:

The coarse, stubbled skin of the tip pushes through the V-shaped opening of a sleeve

fitted over the shaft, the ridges formed by its raised seam mimicking, in the pristine

limpidity of Mapplethorpe’s print, a crescent of skin traced out by the veins running

across Bourgeois’s fixed hand and elbow.38

Indeed, there is an uncanny resemblance between the raised seam of the sculpture’s shaft and the hand’s tracery of veins. This ‘rhyme of flesh’, as Nixon describes it, blurs

the distinction between material and human skin, or rather, makes the latex appear as though it were actually human flesh. Furthermore, Bourgeois’s gripping and touching

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35 Linda Nochlin, ‘Old-Age Style: Late Louise Bourgeois’, in Morris 2006, p. 188. 36 Adrian Rifkin, ‘Louise Bourgeois: Reading the Sexual for Something Else’, in Ian Cole

(ed.), Museum of Modern Art Papers Volume I: Louise Bourgeois (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art

Oxford, 1996), p. 35. 37 Herder 2002, p. 54. 38 Mignon Nixon, ‘Posing the Phallus’, October, Vol. 92 (Spring, 2000), p. 123.

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of the objects emphasises its tactile quality: not only does the latex look like human skin, it also feels (or appears to feel) the same. Confronting the actual work (fig. 13) with this photograph in mind, as visitors in 1982 exhibition were (and as many people

viewing Fillette in the MoMA today probably still are, judging by the celebrity of the photograph), we can almost imagine ourselves touching it. Alex Potts demonstrates how seeing the work can convey a sense of its tactile quality when comparing Fillette to Brancusi’s smoothly polished bronze Princess X (fig. 14) he writes that ‘By contrast . . . with the Brancusi, it does not have a reassuringly smooth surface – the latex in certain

areas coagulates in awkward lumps, in places even peels away from its core, as if its skin might stick to one rather than glide under one’s touch.’39 Again we are reminded of Herder who states that

Statues must be kept free of much finer things than varnish and cow skin, for these

repel our sense of touch . . . The veins in the hands, the cartilage of the fingers, the

knee-pan must be softened and veiled in the fullness of the whole. If not, the silent

sense of touch that feels things in the dark will register the veins as wriggling worms

and the cartilage as protruding growths. . . . The blue veins beneath the skin that

pulse with life and surge with blood are visible to the eye; as something felt they are

nothing but cartilage and bone, devoid of blood or animate life. A living death

pervades them.40

Hence the lumps and veins which appear in the latex of Fillette are analogous to the notional covering of Myron’s cow with hair: they are too much like skin, but they are not skin, and this ambiguity (and the fact that the object itself represents a castrated

penis ‘strung up on a hook like a piece of meat in an old-fashioned butcher’s shop’41) is in part what makes this object so disturbing.

c. A Visceral Viscosity: from Eccentric Abstraction to Existentialism

When Bourgeois began making and exhibiting her latex pieces in the 1960s, the corporeal quality of her forms and materials were sometimes interpreted as a response to the ‘rigid industrial’ aesthetic of minimalism. In 1966, she participated in the exhibition Eccentric Abstraction at the Fischbach gallery in New York. Curated by

Lucy Lippard, by then a respected and widely published art critic, it also showed sculptures by Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman and Don Potts, amongst others. Bourgeois was much older than any of the other artists included in her exhibition, and it has been argued that the ‘literalness’ of the work she exhibited, which was ‘not so much allusive as representational’42, set her works apart from those of other exhibiting

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39 Alex Potts, ‘Louise Bourgeois: Sculptural Confrontations’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2,

Louise Bourgeois (1999), p. 45 40 Herder 2002, p. 54. 41 Potts 1999, p. 44. 42 Richard J. Williams, After Modern Sculpture: Art in the United States and Europe 1965-70

(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 45. Williams argues that

Bourgeois was included as a ‘keynote’ in the exhibition and that the ‘explicitness of bodily

representation in her work was supposed to make such things more legible in the works by

other artists’, a somewhat dubious claim which I do not think applies to the works exhibited in

Eccentric Abstraction.

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artists, many of whose art would later come to be termed broadly as ‘Anti-Form’ or ‘Postminimalist’. However, looking at one of the works Bourgeois contributed to Eccentric Abstraction, Portrait of 1963 (fig. 15), we clearly have an abstract work which

certainly does not seem to fit into our conventional understanding of ‘portraiture’ and is certainly not ‘literal’. Like the later Fillette this piece is made of latex, and is actually the cast-off mould of one of her plaster torsos, a highly abstract work itself.

Still, Bourgeois seems to have occupied something of a ‘special position’ in the exhibition, which I think is more accurately accounted for in Briony Fer’s thoroughly thought-provoking article ‘Objects Beyond Objecthood’. Instead of dwelling on the question of whether the objects themselves in Eccentric Abstraction contained elements of

corporeality, Fer proposes to study the different ways these objects have of situating the subject or spectator within the field of vision. Comparing Bourgeois’s works to some of the latex pieces Hesse contributed, Fer argues that whilst Hesse’s work produces an effect of ‘detachment’ or ‘self-effacement’ where the subject is ‘both caught up and effaced’ in the work43, it is the way Bourgeois’s work ‘stages or

performs its disintegrating effects’ that mark her out. The treatment of materials and the different ways in which Bourgeois and Hesse utilise latex are central to Fer’s argument. Hesse applied latex on like paint, and liked the translucence of the material. For Bourgeois, on the other hand,

it was how the material seemed to perform – the viscosity of the pouring, the event of

its malleable action – of which she spoke: ‘The poured form is stretched from the

inside and obeys the laws of gravity’ or the way ‘hot wax poured into freezing water

will assume a unique shape’. In Bourgeois, latex does not so much bear the mark of

touch – it is not modelled – as act out its previous liquidity, of wetness, of bodily

secretions which make the skin [or] surface bulge and almost leak or seep out.44

The treatment of latex in Portrait exemplifies this ‘disintegrating effect’ in that it

displays the ‘quality of an inside of something’45. Michael Kelly echoes this observation when he writes that Portrait, ‘in its glistening viscosity and shapelessness, evoke[s] not the architecture of a body but the fluidity of its internal matrix’46. If the latex in Fillette is evocative of skin, in Portrait it takes on a much more visceral character. As Lucy Lippard had already commented at the time,

The internal-external, earthly-visceral aspects of Louise Bourgeois’s flexible latex

moulds imply the location of metamorphosis rather than the act. Her work is less

aggressively detached and more poetically mature than that of the younger artists, but

like them, she does not ignore the uneasy, near-repellent side of art.47

However, I would argue that it is less the ‘disintegrating effect’ of Bourgeois’s latex objects which make them ‘revolting’ or ‘repulsive’ than the very nature of their

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43 Fer 1999, p. 36. 44 Ibid, p. 32. 45 Ibid, p. 32. Fer notes how phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty once described how we

can imagine parts of the body that we have never seen and how certain people could

hallucinate ‘their own face seen from inside’ (Maurice de Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge: London and New York, 1962), p. 149.) 46 Michael Kelly, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Volume 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),

p. 306. 47 Lucy R. Lippard, exhibition announcement, ‘Eccentric Abstraction’, Fischbach Gallery

(New York, 1966), quoted in Deborah Wye, p. 24

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materiality. Fer touches upon this when she describes the behaviour of latex, its appearance as somewhere in between liquid and solid, and most importantly, its ‘viscosity’48. It was the existential phenomenologist Jean-Paul Sartre who, in his

seminal philosophical treatise L’Etre et le Néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943), first offered a theorisation of what he termed in French ‘le visqueux’, translated as ‘viscosity’, ‘stickiness’, or as is more often the case, ‘slime’.

But before embarking on a discussion of how Sartre’s concept of the visqueux manifests itself in Bourgeois’s work, it is worth making a few preliminary remarks. Although Bourgeois is often considered an American artist49, she was born in France and lived in and around Paris until the age of 26. We tend to forget that she was part

of the same generation as some of the great existentialist thinkers, including Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. She read many of their works and often cites passages of their texts in interviews when she talks about her own life and her art50. In a 1995 interview for the catalogue of an exhibition being held in Paris, when asked to comment on the iconography of one of her works Bourgeois replied:

It’s funny, you ask me what I think of it, but what counts for me is the effect it has on

others. . . . I’d like to tell you something – I’m sorry but it’s very important. Rosalind

Krauss, who is a great Francophile, has got it into her head that I’m a Surrealist.

[This frustrates me], because I’m bending over backwards to explain to you that I’m

an Existentialist.51

There are many ways in which existentialist theory manifests itself in Bourgeois’s art, and though not all can be discussed here, it seems that Sartre, in particular, exerted an

important influence. Of course she did not always agree with what he wrote52 but she engaged with his ideas, even naming one of her pieces, No Exit (1989), after one of his plays.

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48 The terms ‘viscous’ and ‘viscosity’ are very often used to describe Bourgeois’s latex works.

See, in addition to the previously cited examples of Briony Fer and Mark Kelly, Frances

Morris, Louise Bourgeois (p. 272). Mieke Bal has even described one of Bourgeois’s marble

works, Cumul I (1969) as visually representing viscosity (Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois’s Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing (Chicago and London: University of Chicage Press, 2001), p. 69.) 49 Bourgeois moved to the United States in 1938 after marrying the American art historian

Robert Goldwater. She became a US citizen in 1951, and her work is now included in most

surveys of twentieth century American sculpture. 50 During the war (and with the help of Marcel Duchamp) Bourgeois curated the exhibition

Document France 1940-1944: Art-Literature-Press of the French Underground at the Norlyst Gallery

which included works by Sartre. Sartre first appears in Bourgeois’s diaries in 1945 and Camus

the year after. Bourgeois called Sartre’s Les Mots (Words) ‘the most beautiful work I know’ and

often refers to passages in Camus’s L’Etranger (The Stranger). Of Simone de Beauvoir,

Bourgeois states: ‘I read Simone de Beauvoir and I approve. I feel like a sister. What she says

is true’. See Morris 2006, pp. 117- 118. 51 Bourgeois 1998, p. 302. The section in brackets is my translation; it appears in the text as

‘I’m a bit embarrassed by that’. However judging by the tone of the comment it seems fairly

certain to have been mistranslated from the French ‘embarasser’ which does not mean ‘to

embarrass’ but ‘to frustrate’. 52 For example, she opposed Sartre’s idea, expressed in Huis Clos (No Exit) that ‘Hell is other

people’. According to Bourgeois, ‘Hell is the absence of others – that’s hell.’ (Bourgeois 1998,

p. 143.)

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The next piece I would like to examine, Le Regard (‘The Look’ or ‘The Gaze’) of 1966 (fig. 16), bears the same title of one of the subsections of Being and Nothingness. This could of course be a coincidence, but the work seems to exemplify

Sartre’s notion of the ‘viscous’ which he discusses in one of the most famous passages of his treatise. For Sartre, the viscous (or ‘slime’) is a condition of matter that he analyses as neither liquid nor solid, but somewhere midway between the two. A slow drag against the fluidity of the liquid, this flaccid ooze may have some of the qualities of a solid but does not have its resistance; instead, it clings stickily to the fingers, sucking them in and compromising them:

I open my hands, I want to let go of the slimy and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks

at me. Its mode of being is neither the reassuring inertia of the solid nor a dynamism

like that in water which is exhausted in fleeing from me. . . . There is something like a

tactile fascination in the slimy. . . . But it is a trap. . . . To touch the slimy is to risk

being dissolved in its sliminess.53

Like Sartre’s slime, the latex in Le Regard is simultaneously soft and resistant, it is solid

but appears to act out its former liquidity. The latex has actually been poured onto cloth, and the fleshy texture of its brown bulbous shape protrudes folds and wrinkles as the latex sticks and slickens into the cloth’s threads, giving the impression of a ‘mucus membrane evoking the wet/dry interplay that constantly shifts as globules of thickness catch the light’54. A slit in the upper surface suggests ‘a labial interior’55

which like Sartre’s slime seems to want to suck the subject in like a leech. We notice there is something trapped inside it, as though in the process of dissolving in the object’s solidifying viscosity (‘I may dissolve in the slime precisely because the slimy is in process of solidification’56). But as its title makes clear, the object is primarily an eye which, by looking out at the subject and returning their gaze, heightens and

dramatises their experience of viewing. ‘Sartre and the existentialists were interested in experience’, Louise Bourgeois notes. ‘With words, you can say anything. . . . But you cannot lie in the re-creation of an experience’57.

As well as demonstrating the ambiguity between soft and hard or the inside and outside of bodies, materiality, in Bourgeois’s work, can also be used to represent bodily processes, which according to Bourgeois are analogous to the kinds of processes that materials undergo. As she writes,

Content is a concern with the human body, its aspect, its changes, transformations,

what it needs, wants and feels – its functions.

What it perceives and undergoes passively, what it performs.

What it feels and what protects it – its habitat.

All these states of being, perceiving, and doing are expressed by processes that are

familiar to us and that have to do with the treatment of materials, pouring, flowing,

dripping, oozing out, setting, hardening, coagulating, thawing, expanding,

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53 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, transl. and ed. by

Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1957), pp. 609-611. 54 Collins 2010, p. 52. 55 Lucy Lippard, ‘Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside Out’, Artforum, March 1927, p. 27, cited

in Morris, p. 242. 56 Sartre 1957, p. 610. 57 Bourgeois1998, p. 230.

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contracting, and the voluntary aspects such as slipping away, advancing, collecting,

letting go – 58

Her latex works of the 1960s and her numerous ‘Soft Landscapes’ in latex, plastic,

plaster, resin and wax clearly demonstrate Bourgeois’s intense interest in the behaviour of materials, but it was not until the 1990s that these material processes were explicitly linked with the working of the human body. The 1992 installation Precious Liquids (fig. 17), presented at Documenta IX in Kassel consists of a cedar-wood water tower, in the centre of which is a cast-iron bedstead surrounded by metal stands

bearing hollow glass vessels. Bourgeois has described the glass as ‘metaphors for the muscles of the body’: ‘when we are in a tense state, our muscles tighten; when they relax and the tension goes down, a liquid is released. Intense emotions become physically liquid – a precious liquid’59. But despite Bourgeois’s characterisation of these liquids as ‘precious’, the ‘sweat, blood, vomit, semen, urine, tears, milk’ that the

piece conjures up are, as Charlotta Kotik notes, ‘jarringly unprecious’60. Instead, they seem to announce the emergence of abject art, which gained prominence after the 1993 exhibition at the Whitney Museum Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art. Developed by Julia Kristeva in her 1980 book Powers of Horror, the concept of abjection focuses on bodily processes and disgust and emphasises female procreative

functions and the ambiguity between what is situated inside a body and outside61. Marie-Laure Bernadac has noted how the puddle of stagnant water on the bed in Precious Liquids evokes the amniotic fluid of birth62, which brings to mind Kristeva’s notion of maternal abjection and the primary rejection of birth when ‘one body is expelled from another’63. The contrast between the glass ‘muscles’ and the liquid

bodily fluid confuses the border which separates the inside and the outside of the body, and thus they correspond closely to ‘the preoccupations of contemporary avant-garde art which explores an aesthetic of bodily transgression, often symbolically enacted on the female body’64.

If Le Regard appears to look back to the existentialist theories of her natal

France, Precious Liquids demonstrates that Bourgeois’s art is still firmly rooted in the present and actively engages with contemporary concerns surrounding abjection and the female body. The next chapter will further investigate the ways in which Bourgeois uses materiality and material processes to address ideas of gender and sexuality.

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58 Bourgeois1998, p. 76. From notes for a lecture, late 1960s. 59 Bourgeois 1998, p. 235. From an interview published in1993 in Artforum, vol. 32 no. 1, pp.

86-7, 127. 60 Charlotta Kotik, Terrie Sulten and Christian Leigh, Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory. Works 1982-1993, exh. cat. (New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1994), pp. 65-68. 61 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, transl. by Leon S. Roudiez (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 12-18. 62 Marie-Laure Bernadac, Louise Bourgeois, transl. by Deke Dusinberre (Paris: Flammarion

Contemporary, 2006), p. 142. 63 Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-Bind (Bloomington and Indianapolis:

Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 12. 64 Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (New York and

Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), p. 135.

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CHAPTER 2

SEX AND THE MEDIUM

It has often been argued that one of the central issues in Louise Bourgeois’s work concerns the mutability of gender. The bulbous forms in works like Blind Man’s Buff have been read as simultaneously phallic and breast-like65, whilst Fillette, with its vaginal opening at the foot of the shaft and its title signifying ‘little girl’, has also been interpreted as representing a collapse of the opposition between male and female66. But how, if at all, does materiality affect our ideas about the gendering of sculpture? According to Nicholas Chare in his recent article ‘Sexing the Medium: Calling on the Canvas’,

Medium is never gender neutral. Both the artist’s and the art historian’s relationship

to the substances out of which art objects are crafted is, and probably always has

been, mediated by values and assumptions about the sexes. These beliefs are often

disavowed and unacknowledged in the writing of art history, yet have held

prominence for artists and critics in the past and continue to influence attitudes

towards artistic media today.67

By examining works in marble and fabric, the following chapter will explore the ways in which Bourgeois’s use of materials often subverts these ‘assumptions about the sexes’ whilst at the same time destabilising the hierarchical distinction between ‘art’ and ‘craft’.

a. The Erotics of Carving

Sleep II (1967) (fig. 18) is one of Bourgeois’s earliest works in marble. Presented on

a base consisting of two blocks of timber, its stacked, sloping cylindrical form resembles a phallus which has collapsed onto itself and has been described by Robert Storr as ‘a fairly straightforward representation of a limp penis . . . and as such, a rather tender portrayal by a woman of a man’s impotence or post-coital detumescence’. Material does not enter into Storr’s interpretation, yet further analysis

demonstrates that the marble should not be read as a simple vehicle of meaning but rather possesses meaning in its own right. Firstly, it is noteworthy that marble used in Sleep II, as in most of Bourgeois’s marble sculptures, originates from the quarries of Carrara in Italy which are famous for having attracted the likes of Michelangelo, Bernini and Canova, who prized Carrara marble for its special translucence. Marble

is generally associated with tradition and masculinity – it was, after all, the medium used by Myron and Praxiteles, whose works have come to embody the ideals of beauty and art. To represent a ‘limp penis’ out of such a ‘noble’ material which we

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65 Bernadac 2006, p. 125. 66 Morris 2006, p. 146. 67 Nicholas Chare, ‘Sexing the Medium: Calling on the Canvas’, Art History Vol. 32 No. 4

(September 2009), p. 667.

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have come to associate with some of the great (male) masters of sculpture can be understood as a provocation in itself. Secondly, relationship between form and matter has often been characterised as one of gendered opposition, where form is related to

the male and exists prior to its feminised complement, matter. Aristotle was the first to articulate this conception when he wrote that

Form is better and more divine in its nature than the Matter, it is better also that the

superior one should be separate from the inferior one. That is why wherever possible and

so far as possible the male is separate from the female, since it is something better and

more divine in that it is the principle of movement for generated things, while the female

serves as their Matter.68

In the context of sculpture, this viewing of form and matter in gendered terms is epitomised in the myth of Pygmalion, where the sculptor is represented as the masculine giver of form who animates the ‘female’ matter through the power of his creative genius. Placed within this context, Bourgeois’s Sleep II emerges, not as a ‘tender portrayal’ of a retreating phallus, but as a radical reversal of the Pygmalion

fantasy: in Bourgeois’s hands, the woman/artist becomes the creator of the phallus/man. The title, as well as referring to the flaccid state of the penis, can be interpreted as referring specifically to the material, thus implying the artist’s role in bringing the material back to life, as suggested by Bourgeois herself when she states that ‘[t]o talk about the sleep of the material is a wonderful image … you have to

wake it, to wake the material up’69. In a photograph taken during her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, we see Bourgeois in a gallery posing with her work, one foot placed on the sculpture’s wooden base, the other resting on top of the statue, with a terrific grin on her face (fig. 19). The photograph clearly conveys Bourgeois’s sense of triumph, as though she had defied gendered categorisations by asserting her female dominance over the marble and over the phallus.

Returning to Pygmalion’s myth, not only does it portray the distinction

between matter and form as feminine and masculine, it also demonstrates that the sculptural process itself has long been characterised as a masculine activity. As Nicholas Chave has brilliantly argued, historically when an artistic activity has required substantial physical exertion it has often been characterized as masculine. Michelangelo associated fresco painting with masculinity because it was a substantially

physical undertaking. By contrast, as Chare explains ‘in his life of Sebastiano Viniziano . . . Giorgio Vasari famously quotes Michelangelo as having denounced oil painting as ‘a woman’s art only fit for lazy well-to-do people’. So fresco painting in the Renaissance is a man’s work ‘because it requires endurance, strength, the ability to tolerate and transcend discomfort’70. As Chare notes, ‘the meanings impressed upon,

or within, these materials shift with time’71, but if painting has mostly lost the gendered associations which it carried in the Renaissance, carving has retained its status as a masculine activity well into the modernist period. For instance, British modernist sculptors’ characterisation of ‘direct carving’ as an exclusively masculine endeavour can be read as a continuation of this tradition. As David Getsy has argued,

‘[a]s modernist conceptions of direct carving were formulated around the works of

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68 Cited in Patricia L. Reilly, ‘The Taming of the Blue: Writing Out Colour in Italian

Renaissance Theory’, in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York: Icon Editions), p. 88. 69 Cited in Morris 2006, p. 174.

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Epstein, Gaudier Brezska, and Gill, the sculptor’s physical negotiation of the materiality of sculpture was depicted in gendered terms’72. Indeed, Eric Gill once described the physical exertion of carving as a substitute for the sex he was unable to

have with his pregnant wife73. Bourgeois has often described the process of carving as an aggressive attack on the material. In an interview in 1989, she stated that her decision to work in marble

stems form the fact that the aggressive side of my nature liked the resistance of the

stone. . . . [T]he resistance that must be overcome in stone is a stimulation; like the

fact that puritans attract me sexually because they’re a formidable challenge. It’s

almost playing with the impossible.’74

Bourgeois, like Gill, thus explains the activity of carving in sexual terms, in a radical reversal of roles where the female sculpture becomes the sexual predator whilst the stone takes on the role of the male object of aggression. Alex Potts rightly remarks that in practice, Bourgeois would often not have carved most of her finished works herself, particularly those in marble, so processes of aggression she had in mind ‘were often

more imagined than real’75. But the fact that she chooses to describe the carving process in these terms plays a fundamental part in highlighting and destabilizing the erotics of carving as they have been constructed historically.

b. Sculptures in Fabric: Rewriting the Hierarchy of the Arts

Throughout Bourgeois’s oeuvre, it is common to see early subjects reappear at a later stage in a number of different media, the interval between the versions sometimes extending over decades. When asked by William Rubin to state her

feelings about traditional materials like marble and bronze used for final versions and their relationship to the materials used in building up the works, Bourgeois replied that she prized bronze and marble for their ‘permanence’, but insisted that ultimately ‘the only thing that counts is whether the result has plastic validity’76. If Rubin’s

question illustrates the common conception that ‘traditional materials’ denote ‘finality’ whilst soft materials – plaster, latex, clay – are only used in ‘preliminary’ versions, in Bourgeois’s oeuvre all of these objects constitute works of art in their own right. Moreover, in the 1990s Bourgeois started producing new versions of her earlier works using a range of colourful fabrics and recycled fragments of seventeenth-century

tapestries - materials which are obviously less permanent than marble and bronze -thus reversing the usual soft-to-hard progression.

Despite the fact that these fabric works have emerged as the final outcome of a long series of material translations, whenever they are mentioned in scholarly texts

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70 Chare 2009, p. 675. 71 Ibid., p. 673. 72 David Getsy, Body Doubles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 185. 73 Ibid., p. 185. 74 Bourgeois 1998, p. 184. From an interview published in 1989 in Arts, vol. 63 no. 7, pp. 68-

75. 75 Alex Potts, ‘Hybrid Sculpture’, in Morris 2006, p. 261. 76 Bourgeois 1998, pp. 81-2. From an interview for an article published in April 1969 in Art

International, vol. 8, pp. 17-20.

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they are inevitably associated with a sense of weakness or frailty, not, as one would expect, because of their fragile nature, but because of the perceived fragility of their creator in her old age. Thus for Linda Nochlin, writing for the exhibition catalogue of

Bourgeois’s 2007 retrospective at the Tate Modern, Seven in Bed becomes as ‘spectacular evidence of the sexually powered inventiveness of Bourgeois’s old-age style’, comparable to Renoir’s series of late Bathers, the only other artist to infuse such amounts of ‘frustrated, displaced desire into pink, naked bodies’77. Others have seen Bourgeois’s practice of using textiles as a means of reconstructing memories of her

early life: for Marie-Laure Bernadac, they signify ‘a return to childhood’78. The medium of fabric is thus seen as either geriatric or regressive, and never as a sign of the vitality of Bourgeois’s ongoing artistic production. What this demonstrates is that textiles and fabric carry deep-rooted associations which clearly have an impact on the way these works have been understood and interpreted.

It is often accepted that painting and sculpture constitute ‘art’ whilst weaving, even when the object produced is non-functional, is ‘decoration’ or ‘craft’. According

to Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker in their 1981 Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, the art and craft division can appear on different levels: it can be read on class lines, but crucially for the present study, ‘there is an important connection between the new hierarchy of the arts and sexual categorisation, male-female’79. The

‘spectre of domestic art’ is menacing for women because ‘high art and the fine artist have come to mean the direct antithesis for all that is defined by the ‘feminine stereotype’’80. Art which is made of materials like thread and textiles and which uses processes like weaving and stitching which have long been associated with the domestic sphere face the danger of being relegated to the domain of craft. Isabelle

Bernier similarly observes how ‘in the modern Western ideology, an association with women . . . is almost invariably accompanied by a fall in the status of the art form’. Moreover, according to Bernier whenever an art form is practiced by both men and women ‘its supposedly superior mode is usually reserved for men while its ‘banal’ mode falls to women’. Bernier’s argument is convincing: she cites the culinary arts,

sewing and tapestry as some of the many cases where this phenomenon occurs, and shows how it is also exemplified in language constructs81. It is no wonder then that as Nochlin remarks ‘Claes Oldenburg immediately springs to mind’82 when we think of the modern tradition of sewn, soft sculpture, even though the women working with soft materials in the 1960s substantially outnumbered men83. Robert Morris also used

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77 Nochlin, in Morris 2006, pp. 189-94. 78 Bernadac 2006, p. 158. 79 Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, ‘Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts’, Old

Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 51. !80 Pollock and Parker 1981, p. 80. 81 For example, the word tapisserie in French is defined in the Petit Robert as two distinct kinds of

work: a work of art and a work done by women, thus implying that the two cannot coincide.

Isabelle Bernier, ‘In the Shadow of contemporary art’ (1986), in Hilary Robinson, Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology, 1968-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001), pp. 41-3. 82 Nochlin, in Morris 2006, p. 190. 83 See Dona Z. Meilach, Soft Sculptures and Other Soft Art Forms (New York: Crown Publishers,

1974). The book is mainly technical but it is interesting in that it identifies a large number of

disparate artists working in fabric and other soft materials in Europe and America in the

1960s, most of whom are women. Claes Oldenburg is often cited as an influence: it could be

the case that the example of a man working in soft media in a way ‘legitimized’ the practice

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felt … sculptures, yet as is the case for Oldenberg’s the use of these materials is accounted for on theoretical grounds84, and these objects have thus acquiring an intellectual validation which is absent from the ‘Old Age Style’ accounts of Bourgeois’s use of textiles.

According to Pollock and Parker, the ‘ideology’ which holds this gendered

system in place is ‘not a conscious process’ but its effects are ‘reproduced not only in the way art is discussed, the discipline of art history, but in the works themselves’. However, I want to suggest that Bourgeois’s works in fabric do not reproduce this ideology, but instead disrupt its very premises. As early as 1969, Bourgeois stated her attitudes towards the medium of fabric and its relation to sculpture in a review of the

exhibition Wall Hangings at the Museum of Modern in New York85. Asked whether she though the objects on show ‘reach[ed] towards the space of sculpture’, Bourgeois replied that they ‘fell somewhere between fine and applied art’:

I feel that though [the exhibition] showed very fine weaving, it could have been a little

wilder. . . . I could think, for instance, of all kinds of turned shapes – cubes or any

three-dimensional forms that could have been used. The pieces in the show rarely

liberate themselves from decoration and only begin to explore the possibilities of

textiles.86

In the same interview, Bourgeois explains her own childhood association with

tapestries growing up in Aubusson, where ‘the women wove and the men cut stone in the quarries’87. Taken together, these comments reveal that Bourgeois shared the same underlying assumptions delineated by Pollock and Parker and which equate sculpting to masculinity and art, and weaving to femininity and craft. But if at the time Bourgeois saw ‘the medium of weaving incompatible with the art of sculpture’,

thirty years later her attitude appears to have taken a drastic turn. In 2001, Bourgeois produced a series of monolith made up of cushion-like segments that were sewn, stuffed and deployed around hidden armature (fig. 20), thus giving concrete shape to the ideas she had put forward thirty years earlier and effectively turning ‘craft’ (woven materials) into ‘art’ (sculpture). Bourgeois had employed the monolith form in her

earliest sculpture for her Personages series, many of which bear significant formal similarities with the later ones (figs. 21 and 22). These early works enabled her to have her first solo exhibition at the Peridot Gallery in New York in 1949, and one of them, Sleeping Figure (1950), was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art shortly after, the first of her works to enter a museum collection. These early monoliths were therefore

key to Bourgeois’s emergence onto the male-dominated New York art scene, and the

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for women artists, although most of those mentioned in the book are relatively unknown

today. 84 Morris and Oldenburg’s soft sculpture are often seen as a theoretical attack on formalist

ideas of sculpture championed by Minimalism, and are thus interpreted as essentially

conceptual works. See Williams 2000, pp. 18-38. 85 Bourgeois 1998, pp. 87-91. From an article first published in March-April 1969 in Craft Horizons, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 30-5. 86 Bourgeois 1998, p. 89. 87 Bourgeois 1998, p. 87.

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acquisition of Sleeping Figure effectively signaled her entry into the canon of art history. The effects of translating these early sculptures into fabric half a century later, when her reputation as an artist has been seriously established, are thus rather

ambiguous. On the one hand, this can be read as a validation of the use of fabric as a sculptural material. But on the other, it can also be seen as calling into question the hierarchy of materials and the hierarchy of art forms: these works are woven but they are also assembled, they are tapestry as well as sculpture, craft as well as art. This is especially true of the pieces made using fragments of recycled tapestry. In Untitled (2001) (fig. 23), the battered state of the tapestry pieces, roughly sewn together using purple thread and clearly hand crafted gives it an air of domesticity which is discordant with the characters of tradition and monumentality we usually associate to the monolithic form. The object is also feminine and masculine: it combines the feminine activity of weaving and the phallic structure of the column.

The textile version of Fragile Goddess (fig. 24) similarly makes us question the distinctions between art and craft and between masculine and feminine artistic

production. The work, made out of pink fabric, is a reinterpretation of a bronze version of 1969 (fig. 25). The earlier Fragile Goddess is in itself a highly ambiguous work. The title is an obvious acknowledgement of the object’s source in the Paleolithic past, namely the Venus of Willendorf, a statuette which is held as evidence of a time

when women held leading positions in society and were worshipped as primary exemplars of the divine88. But Fragile Goddess is headless: it would appear as though the head of the Venus of Willendorf had been removed and replaced instead with a pointed-like, somewhat phallic top. According to Anne Wagner, the issue here for Bourgeois ‘evidently . . . is whether the notion of a female creativity as plenitude

somehow forces the return of phallic form as the vehicle for a new confidence’89. If this is the case, what happens when the object is transferred to pink fabric? The question remains unresolved, but the fact that it can be asked demonstrates that moving beyond a limited concern with a work’s obvious subject matter to engage with the import of its medium and technique can potentially offer great insights into the significance of gendered materiality in our understanding of sculptural works.

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88 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Godesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), p. 3. 89 Anne Wagner, ‘Bourgeois Prehistory, or the Ransom of Fantasies’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol.

22 No. 2, Louise Bourgeois (1999), p. 13.

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CONCLUSION

Now in her 99th year, Louise Bourgeois has an almost biblical lifespan of stories told, repeated, refined and recast. Their constant flux and ever-increasing proliferation have fostered a critical literature on Bourgeois that consists preponderantly, and to a detrimental effect, of recapitulations of and psychoanalytic commentaries on these stories. Their mesmerizing textuality has distracted people

from, and in some cases blinded them to, the manifest physical and perceptual realities of Bourgeois’s art. If, as Bourgeois tells us, ‘an artist’s words are always to be taken cautiously’, I hope that by sidestepping narratives and returning to her sculpture’s basic grammar – its materiality – I have demonstrated that meaning, or at least a meaning, can still be found within the work itself.

As we have seen, there are several reasons why Bourgeois’s oeuvre lends itself

well to a study of materiality. With respect to materials and the body, the huge range of materials which Bourgeois has made use of throughout her artistic career enables us to compare how different media and the ways in which they are used can operate on distinct, if interrelated, levels of corporeality. From touch to skin and from flesh to viscera, materials in Bourgeois’s art prove essential in engaging the viewer on a bodily

level. Though temporally and geographically disparate, the texts which I have drawn on throughout the first chapter have in common the fact that they emphasise the subjective experience of materiality. By relating them to Bourgeois’s work, I hope to have shown that these writings can yield new insight into how and why materials as varied as marble, fabric and latex affect us the way they do.

As the second chapter has shown, the significance of materials does not only have to do with their inherent qualities: it is also shaped by the social and historical

connotations which are attached to them, particularly in relation to gender. If the study of gender within art history has been predominantly structured around analyses of the sex of the artist, the sex of the audience, and sexed subject matter, materials themselves are never gender neutral. By translating the same subject into different materials, Bourgeois’s sculpture draws attention to their gendered nature, often

subverting it in the process. Thus in Bourgeois’s hands, carving marble becomes a mode of female aggression which is no longer associated with virility, whilst the traditionally feminine activity of weaving is freely incorporated into sculpture, forcing us to question the hierarchies of art forms and materials in their most fundamental sense.

As contemporary artistic practice demonstrates, the range of sculptural

materials has become almost as broad as art itself. New material technologies have enabled sculptors to pursue a relentless exploration into the possibilities of their medium. The study of sculptural materiality provides a fertile ground for investigation; I hope the present paper has provided an insight of some of the ways it can be addressed. If material clearly matters, ‘the question of materiality’ still remains an open one.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Anzieu, Didier, the Skin Ego (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989)

Bal, Mieke, Louise Bourgeois’s Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing (Chicago and London: University of Chicage Press, 2001)

Barnes, Hazel E., Sartre (London: Quartet Books Limited, 1974)

Bernadac, Marie-Laure, Louise Bourgeois, transl. by Deke Dusinberre (Paris: Flammarion Contemporary, 2006)

Betterton, Rosemary, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 1996)

Bourgeois, Louise, Deconstruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, edited by Marie Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (London: Violette Editions, 1998)

Cole, Ian (ed.), Museum of Modern Art Papers Volume I: Louise Bourgeois (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1996)

Crone, Rainer and Petrus Graf Schaesburg, Louise Bourgeois: The Secret of the Cells (Munich, London and New York: Prestel Verlag, 2008)

Geist, Sidney, Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture (London: Studio Vista Limited, 1968)

Getsy, David, Body Doubles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)

Herder, Johann Gottfried, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, ed. and transl. by Jason Gaiger (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2002)

Kelly, Michael, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Volume 1 (New York: Oxfor University Press, 1998)

Kotik, Charlotta, Terrie Sultan and Christian Leigh, Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory. Works 1982-1993, exh. cat (New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1994)

Kuspit, Donald, Psychostrategies of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2000)

Meilach, Dona Z., Soft Sculptures and Other Soft Art Forms (New York: Crown Publishers,

1974)

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge: London and New York, 1962)

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Morris, Frances (ed), Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing: 2007)

Morris, Frances, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1993)

Norton, Robert E., Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991)

Oliver, Kelly, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-Bind (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993)

Paterson, Mark, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Effects and Technologies (New York: Berg,

2007)

Penny, Nicholas, The Materials of Sculpture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993)

Pollock, Griselda and Rozsika Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)

Potts, Alex, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000)

Radford Ruether, Rosemary, Godesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press)

Rich, Jack C., The Materials and Methods of Sculpture (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1947)

Robinson, Hilary, Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2006)

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, transl. and ed. by Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1957)

Storr, Robert, Paulo Herkenhoff and Allan Schwartzmann, Louise Bourgeois (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2003)

Williams, Richard J., After Modern Sculpture: Art in the United States and Europe 1965-70 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000)

Wye, Deborah, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982)

Chapters and Essays in Edited Books

Bernier, Isabelle, , ‘In the Shadow of contemporary art’ (1986), in Hilary Robinson,

Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology, 1968-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001)

Didi-Huberman, Georges, ‘The Order of Material: Plasticities, malaises, survivals’, in Brandon Taylor (ed.), Sculpture and Psychoanalysis (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishinf LImited, 2006)

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Herder, Johann Gottfried, ‘Critical Forests: Fourth Grove, On Riedel’s Theory of the Beaux Arts’, Selected Writings on Aesthetics, ed. and transl. by Gregory Moore (Princeton and Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2006)

Reilly, Patricia L., ‘The Taming of the Blue: Writing Out Colour in Italian Renaissance Theory’, in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York: Icon Editions, 1982)

Rifkin, Adrian ‘Louise Bourgeois: Reading the Sexual for Something Else’, in Ian Cole (ed.), Museum of Modern Art Papers Volume I: Louise Bourgeois (Oxford: Museum of

Modern Art Oxford, 1996)

Sylvester, David, ‘Hard and Soft’ (1968), in John Wood, David Hulks and Alex Pott (eds.), Modern Sculpture Reader (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007)

Journal Articles

Chare, Nicholas, ‘Sexing the Medium: Calling on the Canvas’, Art History Vol. 32 No.

4 (September 2009), pp. 89-105

Collins, Lorna, ‘The Wild Being of Louise Bourgeois: Merleau-Ponty in the Flesh’, Romance Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (January, 2010), pp. 47-56

Fer, Briony, ‘Objects Beyond Objecthood’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2, Louise Bourgeois (1999), pp. 25-36

Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Informe without Conclusion’, October, Vol. 78 (Autumn 1996), pp. 89-105

Mieke, Bal, ‘Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bourgeois' Spider as Theoretical Object’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2, Louise Bourgeois (1999), pp. 101-126

Nixon, Mignon, ‘Eating Words’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2, Louise Bourgeois

(1999), pp. 55-70

Nixon, Mignon, ‘Posing the Phallus’, October, Vol. 92 (Spring, 2000), pp. 99-127

Potts, Alex, ‘Louise Bourgeois: Sculptural Confrontations’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2, Louise Bourgeois (1999), pp. 39-53

Wagner, Anne M., ‘Bourgeois Prehistory, or the Ransom of Fantasies’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2, Louise Bourgeois (1999), pp. 3-23

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Internet Sources

Dorment, Richard, ‘Louise Bourgeois: The shape of a child’s torment’, The Telegraph, October 9, 2007 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3668414/Louise-Bourgeois-The-shape-of-a-childs-torment.html)

Haber John, ‘Do Not Touch’, 28 September 2008 (http://www.haberarts.com/louiseb.htm)

Raynor, Vivien, ‘Art: Louise Bourgeois closes her own dossier’, The New York Times, December 3, 1982 (http://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/03/arts/art-louise-bourgeois-closes-her-own-dossier.html)

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Blind Man’s Buff, 1984 Marble 92.7 x 88.9 x 63.5 cm The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland

2 Constantin Brancusi, Sculpture for the Blind, c. 1916 Marble 28.9 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

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3 Untitled (Fingers), 1986 Bronze 10.2 x 21.6 x 47 cm Cheim & Read Collection, New York

4 Julien Dillens, Monument to Everard 't Serclaes, 1902 Brass Brussels, Belgium

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5 Soft Landscape I, 1967

Plastic 10.1 x 30.4 x 27.9 cm Cheim & Read Collection, New York

6 Echo I, 2007 Bronze painted white and steel 193 x 43.2 x 35.6 cm Cheim & Read Collection, New York

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7 Seven in Bed, 2001 Fabric, stainless steel, glass and wood 172.7 x 85 x 87.6 cm Hauser & Wirth Collection, Switzerland

8 Arch of Hysteria, 1993 Bronze, polished patina 83.5 x 101.6 x 58.4

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9 Arched Figure, 1999

Fabric, mirror, wood and glass 190.5 x 152.4 x 99 cm Private Collection

10 Three Horizontals, 1998 Fabric and Steel

134.6 x 182.9 x 91.4 cm Daros collection, Switzerland

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11 Dorothea Tanning, Nue Couchée, 1969-70 Fabric, wool, table tennis balls 38.5 x 108.9 x 53.5 cmm

Tate Modern, London

12 Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois in 1982 with ‘Fillette’, 1982 Gelatin silver print 50.8 x 40.6 cm Photo © 1982 the Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe

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13 Fillette, 1968 Latex and plaster 59.6 x 26.6 x 19.6 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York

14 Constantin Brancusi, Princess X, 1916 Polished bronze

58.4 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

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15 Portrait, 1963 Latex 26.6 x 17.7 x 7.6 cm

16 Le Regard, 1966 Latex and Cloth

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12.7 x 39.3 x 36.8 cm

17 Precious Liquids, 1992 Wood, metal, glass, alabaster, cloth and water 425.5 x 445.1 x 445.1 cm

Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris

18 Sleep II, 1967 Marble

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59.4 x 76.8 x 60.3

19 Louise Bourgeois with Sleep II at her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art

20 Installation view, ‘Louise Bourgeois: New Work’, 2001-2 Cheim & Read Gallery, New York

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21 Untitled, 2001 Rust and tan fabric and stainless steel 269.2 x 58.4 x 40.6 cm

22 Untitled, 1950

Painted wood and stainless steel 146 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm Collection Jerry Gorovoy

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23 Untitled, 2001 Tapestry and stainless steel

189.2 x 31.7 x 22.8 Private Collection

24 Fragile Goddess, 2002 Fabric 31.8 x 12.7 x 15.2 cm

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25 Fragile Goddess, 1970 Bronze, gold patina 26 x 14.3 x 13.7 cm

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