Safe As Houses Kolbe, Laura
The Virginia quarterly review,
10/2022, Letnik:
98, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Bodies Under Siege in American Art I DID NOT YET KNOW I was pregnant the day I saw Louise Bourgeois's Femme Maison series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the panels sat in the middle of the ...drably titled exhibition "Louise Bourgeois: Paintings." ...I'd walked to the museum straight from the office of a doctor who had reviewed my prior lab tests and ultrasounds and told me that I'd have an awfully hard time getting pregnant without a series of technological interventions. ...someone thinks she is on the ground floor of Modern and Contemporary Art, and I eventually reach the small warren of narrow, winding rooms in which her paintings have been situated. On one canvas, two headless female nudes try to communicate with each other, but one has a gigantic clapboard house shuttering her from the shoulders up, and the other has the whole top half of her body replaced by something between a dandelion seedhead and a puffball fungus, wearing its leaking seeds like punctuation marks but unable, clearly, to gin up much of a dialogue.
Worth-Stylianou explores how and why, unlike later midwives, French midwife Louise Bourgeois explicitly includes advice on conception and female infertility among a midwife's duties, and what this ...indicates about her perception of the authority of a midwife. Bourgeois's position might initially seem unremarkable, since in earlier centuries a midwife's role had encompassed care during pregnancy, and possibly advice on conception. However, infertility was an area, as Monica Green has shown, which throughout Europe was increasingly colonized by male physicians, from the fifteenth century onward.
L'ouverture des archives privées de Louise Bourgeois aux chercheurs a joué un grand rôle dans la découverte de l'influence de la psychanalyse sur son œuvre. Mais ses archives offrent des possibilités ...de découvertes en dehors du champ psychanalytique. En effet, dans les nombreux entretiens qu'elle accorde à partir des années 1980, Bourgeois racontera beaucoup d'anecdotes sur son enfance et sa vie en France. Ces déclarations sont devenues la source principale d'analyses et d'interprétations de ses œuvres. Mais, dans ses discours publics, Bourgeois est moins prolixe en ce qui concerne sa vie après son arrivée aux États-Unis en 1938 jusqu'à sa mort en mai 2010. En particulier lorsqu'on l'interroge sur ses œuvres sexuellement explicites ou sur ses liens avec le féminisme, elle devient très réticente. Une lecture approfondie de son journal intime, en particulier les carnets des années 1970, permet de combler ces lacunes. Dans son journal, Bourgeois inscrit méticuleusement son quotidien, ce qui nous permet de retracer ses activités à cette époque On y découvre notamment ses liens avec trois organisations féministes, Women in the Arts, Women's Interart Center et Fight Censorship Group, liens qui n'avaient jusqu'ici jamais été documentés. Elle y évoque également ses œuvres, parfois accompagnées de croquis, d'adjectifs ou noms différents de ceux qu'on connaissait ne laissant aucun doute quant à la portée sexuelle et érotique de certaines pièces. Plus que remplir des blancs, les écrits de Bourgeois nous renseignent donc sur ces liens avec le mouvement féministe, mais également sur la manière dont l'artiste perçoit elle-même ses œuvres.
Through a focus on ‘Moi, Eugénie Grandet’, one of the last exhibitions Louise Bourgeois worked on before her death in 2010, this article explores the artist’s writings, both public and private, and ...her interactions with writers, to assess the potentially literary nature of her written and visual works. Arguing that Bourgeois’s dialogues with Honoré de Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet is a contemporary and feminist response to a longstanding tradition of pictorial appropriations of Balzac’s work—from Paul Cézanne’s ‘Frenhofer, c’est moi!’ to Pablo Picasso’s illustrations for the centenary edition of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece—this article brings to light a literary intertext to Bourgeois’s visual works and contends that it is a crucial aspect of her œuvre. Reckoning with a growing critical interest in the artist’s archives and a rising number of edited volumes devoted to her writings, this article considers existing claims that identify Bourgeois as a writer and a poet. Aligning with Roland Barthes’s definition of the literary text as a ‘new cloth woven with old quotations’ and the figure of active reader developed in Barthes’s own dialogues with Balzac, this article contends that Bourgeois’s literariness is found in simultaneous writing, reading and visual practices and in the ambivalence—between dependency and resistance—towards the words they rely on. Ultimately, this exploration of Bourgeois’s words participates in a wider debate on the status of artists’ writings, first articulated in Linda Goddard’s 2012 special issue of this journal, where they are defined through their ‘heightened awareness of the inescapable tensions and crossovers between practice and discourse’ and the way they ‘bear the trace of this consciousness’.
Bajo la premisa de que, la tradición alegórica se ha trasladado durante siglos al imaginario popular colectivo gracias a la incesante transmisión de ciertas cosmogonías, mitos y leyendas por medio de ...todo tipo de medios como los orales, los impresos o los audiovisuales, el presente texto tiene como objetivo otear cómo el arte contemporáneo sigue generando procesos de semiosis fundamentados en este tipo de evocaciones, centrándonos únicamente en el enclave interpretativo del hilo y sus adyacentes –como la acción de tejer–. Nos ayudaremos para ello de los estudios sobre mitología antigua y cultura indígena de autores como Danesi (2004), Pintado (2012) Aguilera (2014) y Fernández (2012), para relacionarlos con la práctica artística, especialmente en torno a la obra de dos autoras contemporáneas que han hecho del hilo su material plástico: en este caso, artistas de la talla de la chino-estadounidense Beili Liu y la franco-americana Louise Joséphine Bourgeois.
Critics have become increasingly cognisant of the limitations of interpreting Louise Bourgeois's artworks through the lens of autobiographical and psychoanalytic narratives, preferring a focus on ...their form. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss the function of these narratives in her œuvre altogether, for a study of the archival material reveals a different use of narrativity that is explicitly parodic. Demonstrating how Bourgeois's diverse writings reframe confession as an aesthetic genre, this essay draws attention to the literary and cultural influences that shape her construction of girlhood trauma. The mechanism of parody is illustrated by Bourgeois's photo essay 'Child Abuse: A Project by Louise Bourgeois' (1982), in which the artist identifies with the confusing world of childhood in the face of adult sexuality, whilst also deftly staging this identification and thus politicizing the narratives in play. Applying this focus on parody to a study of the archive writings brings their striking intertextuality to the fore. Notable references include Honoré de Balzac's Eugénie Grandet (1833) and Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse (1954), novels that each centre on the subject position of a daughter with whom Bourgeois self-reflexively identifies. By parodying these canonical stories of French literature, Bourgeois both inhabits the identity of victim and stands outside of it: 'Little orphan Annie', she mockingly describes herself. Bourgeois's writings thereby indicate how the parodic mode may help to establish distance from a traumatic past by giving form to undetermined affect. Equally, the emerging archive attests to the centrality of writing in Bourgeois's creative process, as a means of developing ideas that would become prime material for her art.
This essay focuses on a current project: to publish a selection of letters between the artist Louise Bourgeois and her husband, art historian Robert Goldwater. A detailed account is provided of an ...archival object of study, describing a corpus of letters in quantitative and material terms, as well as reporting on the various personal circumstances and historical events to which they refer. The essay also examines specific passages from letters by Bourgeois addressed to her husband, and from letters by Goldwater to Bourgeois. These letters, for the most part hitherto unpublished, offer an unprecedented glimpse into the inner workings of a marriage, which Louise Bourgeois, despite the self-constructed autobiographical nature of her work, kept mostly aside and private. Arguing that a publication of the Bourgeois-Goldwater correspondence enriches the scholarship on Louise Bourgeois and provides new research leads, this essay also instigates a subjective approach to the edition of Bourgeois's and Goldwater's letters as a work in progress, reflecting on the technical and ethical challenges it creates. The essay poses a wider interrogation of the possibilities and difficulties of archival research and the recasting of archival documents into published pieces of writing
Cet essai offre une vue d'ensemble des archives de Louise Bourgeois et développe une typologie des différents documents qui s'y trouvent. Des journaux intimes, que l'artiste Louise Bourgeois commence ...à utiliser à l'âge de onze ans et qu'elle continue à écrire durant toute sa vie, aux écrits psychanalytiques des années 1952-1966 découverts au début des années 2000, aux papiers administratifs, photographies, documents sonores et (audio)visuels: la majeure partie des archives est ici listée, classée, décrite et commentée. Ce regard exhaustif est porté sur une ressource désormais incontournable pour les chercheurs et curateurs qui se penchent sur l'œuvre de Louise Bourgeois, mais aussi sur les mouvements artistiques et périodes historiques dont ses travaux et ses écrits sont à la fois témoins et acteurs. Cet essai propose également une réflexion personnelle sur la portée des écrits intimes sur l'œuvre de l'artiste, les enjeux à la fois biographiques et symboliques de l'attachement de Louise Bourgeois à l'écriture, et à la manie conservatrice qui l'accompagne. Deux axes se croisent ainsi dans cet essai: une première approche méthodique, qui propose pour la première fois d'indexer les archives de Louise Bourgeois et fait de cet essai une ressource documentaire et didactique. Un second axe amorce une réflexion nouvelle sur l'œuvre de Louise Bourgeois, définissant les archives comme à la fois un lieu de documentation, de création et de conservation: les archives comme mémoire, atelier et musée.
The Louise Bourgeois Archive (LBA) was established by The Easton Foundation, a charitable and non-profit organization put in place more than thirty years ago by the artist Louise Bourgeois. Since her ...death in 2010, the Foundation exists as two spaces that are simultaneously distinct and interlinked: one is the former artist's home and studio and the other, housed in the building next door to Louise Bourgeois's townhouse, is the LBA. A research centre aimed at academic and art-world scholars, it is directed by Maggie Wright, who is also leading ongoing efforts to catalogue Louise Bourgeois's vast collection of personal documents, a monumental enterprise in both scale and ambition. Academic and curatorial research into a late artist's work requires dialogue and collaboration with the artist's estate. The way scholars and curators interact with an institution set up to protect and promote the work of an artist is central to guaranteeing independent research work. Yet, the nature of these relationships is rarely commented upon, and the role played by artists' estates often remains out of sight. Wright has agreed to be interviewed as part of this issue devoted to Louise Bourgeois's archival writings and documents. The interview was carried out by email exchanges between January and April 2019. Wright's description of the LBA details this emerging archival corpus ripe for scholarly exploration. The interview also provides a clear and extensive overview of the predetermined functions and roles of the LBA, giving an insider's view into the workings of an artist's archives and some of the ambitions and challenges that have determined the focus of this particular archive.
This special issue on French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) brings together essays by curators and scholars who have spent time in her Archive, located next to the artist's home in New ...York. This article presents the special issue and how it regroups contributions by authors who share the same object of study but who are rarely brought into dialogue with each other. They range from museum and gallery professionals to academics in art history and literary studies, who have written their contributions in French or in English. An interdisciplinary and bilingual space for established and new critical voices on Louise Bourgeois, this special issue is a scholarly état présent of the research undertaken at the Louise Bourgeois Archive. It brings to light interactions between word and image, literature and visual art in her work, and the importance of writing and words for Louise Bourgeois. This article also reflects on some of the risks faced by researchers in the Archive. It defines some of the tactics that such archival research requires, notably how distance, in order to assert an objective reading, can complement rather than cancel the seductive and feverish intimacy of archives and the interpretative gains they contain.