Why Louises?

I have thought a lot about Louise Bourgeois in the past few months after having seen the her retrospective twice now (once in August at the Guggenheim and once at LAMoCA in November).  Initially, I just admired her way of making things and how she was a genuine and hard worker.  She actually gives a shit.  I always thought her work seemed a little too obvious at times, though I liked her a lot more than Judy Chicago.  Judy Chicago was an artist who was living through the women's suffrage and I admitted that I would probably never understand that.  You aren't too concerned with subtlety when you are fighting something obvious.  She was stating a problem and certainly could serve as a figure to the 80s feminists that came after her.  I give her credit, just as I did Louise Bourgeois.  Plus, I do actually like Louise's art; I just never saw myself as someone following in her footsteps, like I have with Bruce Nauman.  I feel for a long time, he is to whom I have been responding.  I have worked off of him.

Where my feelings started to change for Louise (though I wasn't aware of it yet) was when I began reading Howard Zinn's "Artists in Times of War." Zinn mentions an early American feminist and anarchist, whom I had never heard of.  Her name is Emma Goldman.  When Zinn first mentioned Emma Goldman, my feelings towards her were like those I had towards Louise.  I didn't like what they were doing (the content), but liked how they were pursuing their goals.  I respected that.  A lot.  Upon coming across Goldman's name, I decided to investigate further.  I came across her autobiography, "Living My Life," but that was too massive for someone I just started reading about.  Instead, I purchased a shorter book about Emma, and started reading it.  It is interesting to note that Emma Goldman actually didn't join an early feminist movement in America--I want to say very late 1800s--because she thought their interests were inconsequential compared to her ideal of creating a localized America--that is, an America with many small approximately self-sufficient communities, as opposed to huge sprawling urban areas with a very wealthy upper class.  In any case, as I read, she impressed me more and more.  A Russian immigrant, who came to the states to escape her father and help start an anarchist revolution in America, was ironically a successful co-owner of a "mom and pop" ice cream shop with her lover, Alex (?) Beckman, who was trying to make enough money to go back to Russia for some reason regarding the spreading of anarchism.  Then there was a fiasco in Chicago with a "private army" killing some unionizers or something, and Beckman decided to go kill the owner of the factory or whatever it was, he shot the owner (Frick?), but didn't manage to kill him.  He went to prison, and the adventure just goes on and on with Emma working in a prisoner's hospital (which was a real treat because she had wanted to go to Medical School when she was living in Russia)... In any case, I am only half way through the book, I can't remember too much of it, and it's already fascinating.  (One last thing that I have to put in about Emma Goldman.  While talking to workers about the benefits of anarchy and worker rights and preaching to them that in the long run, their efforts would be rewarded, an older worker asked Emma a question that made her rethink how to go about achieving her beliefs.  The older worker asked quite simply, what is in it for me in the short run?  What does next year matter, if I die next week?)

After reading about Emma Goldman's futile struggles, sometimes joining the very system she cursed (this is obviously inevitable, but I imagine this was painful for her), I just completely reconsidered her stance.  I mean, she is a woman, who decided to run away from Mother Russia (she was no Socialist) in order to pursue her ideal in America in the mid-late 1800s.  That impresses me to no end.

Then when I saw Louise Bourgeois' show once more, the same feeling hit me.  I just realized on a whole new level the difficulties she faced just as a woman (even if she married someone wealthy--Adam Goldman, a Jewish art critic/historian).  Then I also thought about the obvious connection that they were both early American immigrant feminists (Louise is French, if you couldn't tell).  I realized that I didn't know too many early feminists, but another sculptor came to my mind.  Louise Nevelson, whose work is above right, was born 1900, 11 years before Bourgeois (though Nevelson died in 1988, and Bourgeois is still alive).

Currently, these are Kerry's Obsession of the Month (Oh yes, books about them made it to my Christmas list).  After doing some research at the Portland Public Library, I am starting to see some things Bourgeois has resolved that now challenge me.  The most pressing of my problems is where my figurative sculpture connect with my installations.  That seems to be the next big step that I must make in order to understand what I'm doing more.  Let's look at Bourgeois' "Spider" (1997).  If we were to make a rough formal analogy between my "Walker" and her "Spider," Allan (the figure carrying the stove) serves the purpose of the spider, and my ramp serves as her cage.  What was of immediate interest to me when looking at this piece was that an "egg sac" was inside the cage, dead center on the ceiling.  The spider's body looms right over this egg sac and it appears as if it may be attached to the spider itself.  But, I don't know.  The boundaries of the spider's body are lost there.  The egg sac looks as if it could belong to the cage or the spider.  The egg sac does not serve as a mediator, but it does play a liminal role.  It's inbetween, it makes me curious.  If I extend my "Walker"-"Spider" analogy, something else becomes clear: both Bourgeois' eg sac and my cupola in "Walker" are a major third element both of which can be easily overlooked.  But that's it.  I think that is one thing that makes "Spider" so amazing to me now.  With the egg sac, she gets the spider and the cage to mold together; she molds ideas of architecture and body, and how they inherently relate.  Now, I also realize that making a "Walker"-"Spider" analogy can be dangerous and seem pretentious or disrespectful; I realize too, that a giant spider looming over a cage already creates a stronger relationship than a man carrying a stove surrounded by a spiraling ramp.  I also have learned that her spiders really mess with scale and the idea of scale when they interact with a cage.  The cage is emblematic of architecture, and the spider a figure.  Wait, what?  But then the figure is bigger than the architecture!  All I have to say to Bourgeois is: **** ***!  Why the hell didn't I think of that?

Cites, Notes and Quotes

1) "Louise Bourgeois' Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing" by Mieke Bal

"imaginary subject sitting in the chair" pg 24

Egg sac molds architecture and body together

2)"The Early WOrk of Louise Bourgeois" by Josef Helfenstein

arch and body

working in the era of the masculine abstract expressionists who saw David Smith as their representative sculptor

"her scultpures were not kept in the neutral space of the studio" pg 19 (studio isn't neutral!)

"The ultimate goal [of "Personages"] was to make them able to stand on their own.  In order to achieve that, they had to be fixed at the most fragile point, since most of "Personages" come down to one or two narrow points at the bottom." pg20 (one "Personages" can be seen top right).

she leaned them against the wall--domestic/objects/everday

she saw herself as alienated from society (her parents family and her own family, both of which consisted of 5 members) "Quarantia"

skyscrapers, male and female genitalia, reductive figures

Adam Goldwater's "What is Modern Sculpture"

Private areas were preferred over public venues while she was working on "Personages"

Her methodic logic (traditionally male)

"Repetition, as the artist has stated over and over again, is the equivalent of emotional urgency." pg31

fragility is adverse to masculine monumentality

domestic objects (knife, paddle, needle), war objects (dagger), modern structures (skyscrapers) all make up "Personages"

Bourgeois' Artist statement in the book (pg31) which was originally published by Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis in "Design Quartly," no. 30,18 in 1954. "my sculptures might be called 'confrontation pieces'"--referencing 18th century painter's "conversation pieces."

She saw "Personages" as being "blind houses without any openings," "At best the artist does what he can rather than what he wants to do.  After the BATTLE (my emphasis) is over and the damage faced up to, the result may be surprisingly dull--but sometimes it is surprisingly interesting," and "The artist who discusses the so-called meaning of his work is usually describing a literary side-issue."