An Unmissable Descent Into the Unique Artistic Labyrinth of Louise Bourgeois

An art world titaness whose career spanned seven decades, Louise Bourgeois looms over the contemporary landscape like one of her signature spiders, compelling and forbidding in equal measure. A show, devoted to the “abstract” works of Bourgeois is in its final weeks at Hauser & Wirth. That we know for sure. But to call the current works abstractions highlights a problem that dogged Bourgeois, who died in 2010, during her long and illustrious career: she is unclassifiable. Her drawing, sculptural and installation work inhabits a space that had yet to be opened in art: it is predicated on the anxiety evoked by the soft boundaries between semantic and natural categories. The psychic bleeds uneasily into the material, and the anthropomorphic blurs disturbingly into the biological. Her first notable collection of paintings from the 1940s featured women with houses for heads, an imagistic send up of women and their fraught relationship with domesticity.Later, as her work progressed into what became her characteristic biomorphic focus, she did indeed flirt with abstraction, joining the “Abstract Artists Group” which included Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. Yet, as the Hauser & Wirth catalogue suggests, her relationship to figuration and abstraction has always been purposefully left indistinct. Bourgeois favored the indeterminate and the liminal, hence the title of the show, “Wool Gathering,” taken from a work she created in 1990. Much of this indeterminacy is directed at the family, or rather her own. Bourgeois’s work is a psychic excavation of the traumas of her upbringing, among them a complex relationship with her mother and the discovery that her au pair was also her father’s mistress. What separates Bourgeois from the tepid genre of couch confessional art is her ability to dive into ambiguity, avoiding easy catharsis, anti-parental jeremiads, or tiresome emancipatory story arcs. She does rail against her mother, in her oblique way, but she also does not deny that she was also her best friend. As she said in a 1995 interview: “She was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as an arraignée.” Yet Bourgeois also asserts that she was terrifying. Trauma is presented not as an obstacle to address, but rather as a primary metaphysical condition. Witness the opening installation of “Twosome,” which features a giant metallic cylinder and a smaller, similar cylinder, which enters the larger one by means of tracks. The leitmotif of the mother appears again as both forbidding and sheltering presence, a mechanical allegory of birth and separation. The interior of the mother capsule glows red, a police light broadcasting maternal allure and danger in equal measure. Projected next to it is an excerpt of a Louise Bourgeois performance “She Abandoned Me”, sung by Susan Cooper at the Hamilton Gallery in 1978, far more dramatic than its monolithic sculptural counterpart. This uneasy tension extends in the next room to the natural world. “Mamelles” is a line of breasts cast in bronze spurting streams of water into a rectangular metal tray beneath it. The shifting line between the body and nature is invoked once again. In their irregular row the mammaries seem oddly geological, more dripping stalactite than anything else. The effect is disorientingly oneiric.The titular installation of the show, gathering wool, is the closest to an abstract sculpture, reminiscent of Isamu Noguchi. Six wooden spheres are arrayed in a circle in front of four patinaed steel slabs. It works through its material contrasts, the dialogue between its dried and cracked wooden balls and the monolithic steel slabs surrounding it. Once again, the feeling is unclassifiable but metaphysical. A gathering of some sort is being totemically evoked. It’s a murky and foreboding first floor of work, but second floor, from her Brooklyn studio in the eighties, are much brighter, illuminated as they are from the outside. These sculptural forms, many of them slender towers and stacks, are larger-scale, integrating material elements she found in her new working environment. These forms, including her stacked cabinets, are indeed leaning more towards abstraction, but never veer far away from the feeling of bodies. Many are inherently precarious. They are extensions of her long standing ‘Personnages’ series, which were her semi abstracted sculptural portraits of New York individuals she knew from her deep involvement in artistic and intellectual circles.Bourgeois enjoyed a distinctive career, when both psychoanalysis and the mystique of the feminine in its sublime and grotesque connotations held sway, and she was able to mine it fruitfully for a long time. Her continued fascination with materials compressed and molded by the strong forces of the unconscious make for an utterly unique chapter in the art of the twentieth century. For those yet to descend into the Bourgeois labyrinth, this thoughtfully assembled show is as good a place to start as any.

An Unmissable Descent Into the Unique Artistic Labyrinth of Louise Bourgeois

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