Primitive invocations that get beyond a litter of isms
Louise Bourgeois is certainly the least-known artist ever to get a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, an honor usually reserved for the Picassos or at least the Frank Stellas of this world. She is almost 71, French, a resident of New York City since 1938, and a mature sculptor by any conceivable definition of the word. Until quite recently not many people wanted to look at her work, and her recognition was slight, at least compared with the fame that surrounded that implacably durable Queen Bee of the art world, Louise Nevelson. Bourgeois belonged to no groups and was a complete loner; her work appeared to have a queer troglodytic quality, like something pale under a log, the vulnerable product of obsession but I with a sting in its tail.
That quality remains; but in the meantime, two things changed its status in the art world. One was the collapse of the idea that art had 1 only one way, the abstract track, forward into history. This made Bourgeois's idiosyncratic kind of late surrealism well worth examining. The second, which made it look more interesting still, was feminism. The field to which Bourgeois's work constantly returns is female experience, located in the body, sensed from within. "I try," she told an interviewer, with regard to one work, "to give a representation of a woman who is pregnant. She tries to be frightening but she is frightened. She's afraid someone is going to invade her privacy and that she won't be able to defend what she is responsible for."
This kind of subject is a long way from the normal concerns of sculpture, which impose themselves in a "masculine" manner on culture. What Bourgeois sets up is a totemic, surrealistic imagery of weak threats, defenses, lairs, wombs, almost inchoate groupings of form. Her work is by turns aggressive and pathetic, sexually charged and physically awkward, tense and shapeless. It employs an imagery of encounter to render concrete an almost inescapable sense of solitude. In short, it is physically, if not always formally, rich stuff, and one may be glad that the Museum of Modern Art and Associate Curator Deborah Wye have set it forth in such a detailed exhibition.
Bourgeois's most stringent and satisfactory works tend to be those based on either "primitive" totems or natural forms: coral polyps, breasts, clusters of buds and palps. The totemic pieces cluster sociably together in crowds, tall and etiolated, often made up of worn chips and fragments of wood threaded on a central armature, like shashlik on a skewer, and then painted. Bourgeois likes repetition with small variations: some of her larger pieces, like Number Seventy-Two (The No March), 1972, are composed of hundreds of marble cylinders, their tops lopped and slanted at different angles, clustered on a platform. They give an impression of preconscious liveliness—nature on the march. Their aura gets a little more sinister in a large carving, Femme-Maison '81, done in black marble: a waving cluster of long tubular shapes, frondlike rather than phallic, rustling and jostling against one another with a peculiar, irresistible energy, that rear up around a plateau on which reposes a small schematically carved shed.