A new exhibition, which features Louise Bourgeois's earliest work along with her latest, catalogues a career spent scaring people, writes Amy Redmond
Most artists never really retire, but few manage to sustain the momentum of their early career. At 92 years of age, however, Louise Bourgeois, the New York-based sculptor, continues to engage art lovers worldwide and an exhibition of her most recent work, juxtaposed with her etchings from as far back as 1946, has opened at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham, Dublin.
Long considered one of the most important living artists in the US, she captured the imaginations of thousands at London's Tate Modern in 1999 with her 30-foot towers, I do, I undo, I redo, alongside the famous 35-foot-tall bronze Spider, which was the first commissioned work of the sculpture series to mark the opening of the Turbine Hall.
Frances Morris, senior curator at the Tate Modern, co-curates this show with Brenda McParland at IMMA. It contains an extraordinary group of life-size sewn fabric busts, a series of cell-like vitrines, housing curious scenes of torture and ecstasy, and a small group of totemic figures, reinterpreting in fabric Bourgeois's very first sculptures of the late 1940s and 1950s. Morris says they are extraordinary pieces of sculpture to be alone with.
In all, over 20 pieces, most created in the last three years, and a selection of the artist's graphic work, including He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1946), a series of dysfunctional images of industrial buildings accompanied with one liners or stories.
Morris has dealt with Bourgeois for years, visiting her enormous studios in Brooklyn and her home in Chelsea. She describes her as mercurial, sharp as a button and highly educated.
She doesn't suffer fools and when she is unhappy with an interviewer she has been known to silently hold a mirror up to their face. On one occasion in the 1990s, Morris remembers Bourgeois taking serious umbrage over a comment she made, that as an artist her work had a dialogue with that of Rodin. Bourgeois promptly got up and walked out of the room, only to return five minutes later fully composed to finish the interview.
She thinks with her hands. Perhaps that is why she finds interviews "absurd, a pain in the neck" as she once remarked. Bourgeois has warned that: "An artist's words are always to be taken cautiously; the artist who discusses the so-called meaning of his work is usually describing a literary side-issue. The core of his original impulse is to be found, if at all, in the work itself."
Even now, with a career spanning over six decades behind her, she still works obsessively from her kitchen table, and if she isn't working on a fabric sculpture, she is constantly drawing. Because she is now too frail to travel, photographs of the new galleries in Kilmainham were initially sent to her so she could get an idea of the space and Bourgeois's assistant of many years, Jerry Gorovoy, acts as her eyes and voice when it comes to arranging the exhibition.
Although her beginnings were as an engraver and painter, by the 1940s she had turned her attention to sculptural work. By the 1960s she began to work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger, more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work - her childhood.
Morris chose the title Stitches in Time for this IMMA show because over time, Bourgeois has made different embellishments, developed multiple stories on this one core theme. After her father died, all the contents of family wardrobes was shipped from France to her Brooklyn studio and these old and fragile dresses, which seem to speak of an elegant past, are what she uses for the sculptures. Some of the untitled pieces consist of tall poles, upon which bones draped with garments, hang from meat hooks. These, Morris explains, are meditations on mortality. The cloth fragments represent the human figure, the exterior, what we put on; the bones are what is underneath.
She grew up in the French countryside where her family ran a prosperous tapestry-restoration business. Haunted by her father's philandering ways and overbearing presence, she had to escape. In 1938, she married American art-historian Robert Goldwater and left for the US. Once, when asked if her mother died before she came to live in America, she answered: "Yes; that is why I came to the United States. My father had lovers all the time. It was a family situation that I could not stand. I come from a dysfunctional family."
Her Sunday Salons in Chelsea are renowned in art circles, where she operates an open house for artists (though less frequently now) to present their work at her home. It is said many leave inspired by her enthusiasm, while the less fortunate are dismissed as "idiotic". Nevertheless, a powerful role model, she has paved the way for innovation with her use of materials, her sense of installation, and her tenacious narrative. She was one of the first artists in the 1960s who made it acceptable to speak about identity, especially female identity, and because of that she has been an enormous influence on artists of a younger generation, especially women artists, such as the American installation-artist, Ann Hamilton, whose work was featured at IMMA a few years ago.
A lot of Bourgeois's work has developed from her obsession with her father and his love affair with the family governess Sadie, who lived with them for 10 years. More recently, she has returned to her mother, a tapestry seamstress; the sewing work currently on show is a return to her mother's apron. The Tate Spider, now permanently in Bilbao, is a homage to her mother. For Bourgeois, spiders signify industriousness, protection, self-defence and fragility. But the spider is also the artist as mother.
Spiders provoke very different reactions. Spiders are something we love to hate. How is it that such tiny creatures instil so much fear? Morris explains that in a sense this is what Bourgeois delights in, scaring people.They are a metaphor for all her work, which tempts us to engage in that darker side of life; "Quand les chiens ont peur, ils mordent [When the dogs are afraid, they die\]." In her 92nd year, Bourgeois remains resolutely unafraid.
Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time opens at IMMA November 26th and runs till February 22nd, 2004