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At the same time Bourgeois's imagination has a nasty side, as real acts of exorcism must. The fantasies her art expels into the chaste gallery space have as much to do with incest and cannibalism as with the more usual aesthetic satisfactions of MOMA. The most vivid of them, and the crudest, is a sort of grotto full of pendulous brown stalactites, lumpy and breastlike.
A banal red light plays over them; in the middle is a table, perhaps a sacrificial altar, and the whole cave is strewn with what seem to be mummified joints of meat. These are not identifiably human; if anything, they resemble small legs of lamb. But they suggest the dread cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus in the Odyssey, strewn with fragments of unspeakable meals. The title is The Destruction of the Father, 1974.
"It is a very murderous piece," Bourgeois points out in the cata logue, with some understatement, "an impulse that comes when one is under too much stress and one turns against those one loves the most."
The same imagery recurs, in a slightly more distanced way, in her big room environment, Confrontation, 1978. Here the viewer is excluded from the central table, which is strewn with breasts, remnants of latex-covered food and other morsels, by a ring of white wooden boxes. These taper toward the top and, like versions of the dolmens in archaic ritual sites, press to be read as abstracted effigies of the human figure: a ring of watchers, backs shutting out the audience, absorbed in an obscure ritual.
Some may find such imagery not merely archaic but positively oldfashioned: invocations of the chthonic and the primitive have been standard modernist fare for three-quarters of a century. But Bourgeois uses her primitive quotations to get past the conventional groupings of modern art history—the litter of isms that tells us so little about the real meanings of art—and to rummage painfully between the layers of her own makeup. What equivalents can art find for depicting femaleness from within, as distinct from the familiar conventions of looking at it from outside through the eyes of another sex? What can it say about inwardness, fecundity, vulnerability, repression or resentment? How can it furnish a different substratum of meanings for the body? It is to such questions that Bourgeois's sculpture turns itself, not al ways successfully, but with a striking consistency and intensity. Some of it looks "unheroic," deficient in fully realized form, even incoherent: but these are by products of her effort to describe, by surrealist means, experiences that are automatically left out of heroic art. For such operations, Bourgeois may be the wrong surname, but it is good to see such an artist getting her due at last.
—By Robert Hughes