Louise Bourgeois

ArtUS, Summer, 2008 by Jill Conner

Film Forum, New York NY June 25 * July 8, 2008

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Louise Bourgeois's work has been the subject of over a dozen books as well as an infinitely larger number of exhibitions. The Art Kaleidoscope Foundation recently released Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach's film of the famous artist, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine, which works through a vast amount of information on the artist's life in only 99 minutes. Although critics and curators have been lured to the psychoanalytic implications of her admittedly Freudian sculptures, the on-screen interviews with the artist, her son Jean-Louis Bourgeois, and assistant Jerry Gorovory seek to dispel many of the myths that have built up around Bourgeois over the years, offering instead a very clear and practical portrait. It's what the old guy called resistance.

The first half of the film dwells on some of Bourgeois's more monolithic works from the late 1980s and 1990s, such as her Cell series and Red Room (1994). Early in her career, the artist said that she didn't consider her work feminist since it is more difficult to be a woman admired. This odd confession is contradicted later in the film when we hear MoMA curator Deborah Wye reporting that Bourgeois was very much in evidence at a feminist demonstration outside the Museum of Modern Art in 1972, contesting the under-representation of women artists in the museum. Bourgeois ultimately became an icon for the Guerilla Girls as well.

Yet despite having such a wide-ranging appeal and influence, Bourgeois insists that she has only ever tried to express her inner conflicts through the medium of sculpture. As we learn, many of the artist's objects have their origin in an unspecified childhood trauma, beginning around the time her mother abandoned the family after learning of her husband's long-term affair with the governess. To make matters worse, Bourgeois's father obliged her to accept his mistress as her mother. So it is not surprising that the artist's subsequent work often appears suggestive, even phallocentric, leading one to suspect deep incestuous currents. At the same time, any possibility of sexual abuse is quickly dismissed, the emphasis going instead to her native jealousy and contempt for authority figures. This anger surfaced again in 1941, three years after she moved to New York with her American husband, at which time the French Surrealists began arriving in droves from war-torn Europe. From her nettled point of view, these figures were both cliquish and condescending.

By the end of the movie we realize that the artist is still plagued by memories of her domineering father, even going so far with the identification as to impose her will on anyone entering her domain. Young art students enamored with her enormous stature have often flocked to her Sunday salons, although many of them soon flee in tears. At one point, Yale School of Art director Robert Storr admits that no one receives special treatment at these affairs, half-jokingly referring to the artist as his "little French mistress." Confrontations aside, the film admittedly spares little room for the brighter spots in her life, including husband Robert Goldwater (1907-73) and their three children. It concludes with the overwhelming response her Maman (1999) received in nearly every country of the world. Incidentally, the spider, the only association that Bourgeois ever came up with concerning her mother, was identified by Karl Abraham, for example, as representing and repressing in dreams the first relationship to the (phallic) mother.