Louise Bourgeois: Sculptural Confrontations Author(s): Alex Potts Reviewed work(s): Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol.

22, No. 2, Louise Bourgeois (1999), pp. 39-53 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360634 . Accessed: 19/04/2012 08:15
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Louise Bourgeois - SculpturalConfrontations

Alex Potts

1. M.-L. Bernadacand H.-U. Olbrist (eds.),

Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father, Writings and Interviews

1923-1997 (Violette Editions: London, 1998) p. 86. (References to the book are cited throughout in abbreviatedform as: 'Bourgeois, Writings'.)The comment comes from an intriguing interchange with William Rubin published in 1969. That there is much of the canny modernist in Bourgeois' artistry is argued particularlypersuasively by Adrian Rifcin in 'Reading the Sexual for Something Else', in I. Cole (ed.), LouiseBourgeois (Museum of Modern Art: Oxford, 1996), pp. 31-6. Rosalind Krauss' 1989 article 'Louise Bourgeois: Portrait of the
Artist as Fillette', in Bachelors (The MIT Press:

Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999), pp. 5174, also makes a strong case against easy autobiographicalreadings of Bourgeois' work and for ones that recognize the extent to which her project is embedded in a sharp awareness of avant-gardestrategies. That the foregrounding of the psychic in Bourgeois' work itself emerges from a complex structuralunderstandingof the nature of affects and drives is brought out very convincingly in Mignon Nixon's writing on the artist (see for example 'Bad Enough Mother', October Winter 1995, pp. 71-92). 71, 2. This is particularlyapparent in the careful structuring of her statement on TheSail (1988) - see Bourgeois, Writings, pp. 168-9. 3. See also her comment about how 'the value of [a] sculpture does not stem from what it means to me'. Bourgeois, Writings, pp. 128-8, 302, 364. 4. Bourgeois, Writings, 229. p.

One of the more characteristic and intriguing features of Louise Bourgeois' work is the way it stages such a vivid psychodynamics of viewing. There seems to be an unusual attentiveness on her part to the structure of a viewer's encounter with three-dimensional art works in a modern gallery setting as well as to the forms of psychic phantasy activated in such interactions between viewer and work. She often made the point that a focus on form operated at a different level from a concern with psychodrama; but she also insisted in a way that few other modernist artists of her generation in the New York art would that 'There is no conflict whatsoever between these two levels.'l Her heightened awareness of the interplay between the formal and the psychic is evident in her own canny and carefully considered commentary on her work in interviews and published statements. When she offers a reading of one of her sculptures in terms of some archetypal childhood trauma, the story she tells is not so much an explanation of the meaning of the work, as an allegory of the viewer's engagement with it.2 The structure of the story really matters, rather than its manifest content. It is important to remember too that her readiness to tell stories about the supposed psychic basis of her art is qualified by some resolutely modernist negations of the idea that art expresses the artist's intentions or inner world. She would insist that 'A work of art has nothing to do with the artist, a work of art has to stand by itself, so I repeat that it is totally unnecessary to ask me what I want you to see in a piece, because you are supposed to see it by yourself; or again, 'you ask me what I think of it, but what counts is the effect it has on others'.3 That is the nub of the matter, the effect, the impact a work has on anyone who engages closely with it. Her Cell I dating from 1991 (Fig. 1) features an intriguing slogan that is pertinent in this context, and that shares with the rhetoric of her work an apparently simple provocative immediacy that in the end is quite difficult to unpack- PAIN IS THE RANSOM OF FORMALISM. Bourgeois is particularly fond of the word ransom - we have her saying, for example, that death is the ransom of fear.4 'Ransom' refers to the price payed to redeem a condition to which one is condemnedin Christian theology, for example, Christ's sacrifice was the price exacted to redeem mankind from the condition of sin. Pain then is the price that has to be paid if the artist's work is to escape its endemic condition of formalism. This is not quite a counsel of despair; nor is it an easy Romantic antiformalism. Clearly what is not on offer is some libertarian release from the confines of formalism, of the kind that has been peddled so often since the antimodernist turn got under way in the 1960s. 'Pain is the ransom of formalism' is part of a hard-headed dialectic, or double bind, whose other term is the slogan ART IS THE GUARANTEE OF SANITY, repeated as 'Art is A Guarantee of Sanity' in the inscription over the entry to the 1992 installation Precious Liquids.Art then is an obsession that functions to distance psychic pain, but can only be redeemed by pain from the self-enclosing obsession with form that produces this distance.

? OXFORD UNIVERSITYPRESS

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999 37-53

Alex Potts

With her focus on the physical arena of encounter between viewer and work, Bourgeois is much closer to artists of the Minimalist generation than to the modernist or late Surrealist sculptors who like her came to maturity in the immediate post-war period. She shared with the Minimalists an understanding of sculpture as constituted not just by its internal structural attributes, but also by its situation in the space shared with the viewer. But whereas in Minimalist sculpture, the psychic resonances of the interaction between viewer and work, however powerful, are implicit, and the formal structuring very explicit, she reverses the terms. There is in her case no lingering unease that allowing a powerful psychic or affective charge to take over a viewer's response might compromise a work.5 Her use of blatantly sexual imagery, and her repeated claims that her artistic project was driven by deep-seated personal obsessions and traumas, function as provocations to ensure that from the outset a viewer is aware that the encounter with a work is imbued with psychodrama. At the same time she is as subtly and closely engaged with the formal aspects of the relation between viewer and work as any Minimalist sculptor. Two particular forms of interaction are brought into focus by Bourgeois, firstly interaction as a one to one confrontation - Confrontation being the title

5. Think for example of how Serra tried to deny any preoccupation on his part 'in confrontation per se' and insisted that with large-scale urban sculpture like TiltedArche was primarily 'interested in the particular relationshipsthat I conceive to be sculptural in a Interviews (The given context' (R. Serra, Writings University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1994), p. 188); or how Hesse expressed strong reservations about the idea that the shapes in her work might be interpreted as images of erotic body parts (C. Nemser (ed.), Artists Art Talk:Conversations 15 Women with (Harper & Collins: New York, 1995), pp. 1812). On the other hand, the Minimalistswere hardly indifferent to the psychic resonances of their own or their contemporaries' work, and did at times make this quite explicit - for example there is Andre's comment that 'art is sexy in its basic root. It is about an erotic

Peter NewYork. Cell (Photograph: Fig. 1. LouiseBourgeois: I (detail),1991, mixedmedia,210.8 2 x 43.8 x 274.3 cm. CoutesyCheim& ReadGallery,
Bellamy.)

40 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999

SculpturalConfrontations

relationship with the world', quoted in P. (St. Cummings (ed.), Artistsin TheirOwn Words Martin's Press: New York, 1979), p. 195. 6. D. Judd, 'Specific Objects' (1965), Complete 1959-1975 (Press of the Nova Scotia Writings College of Art: Halifax, Nova Scotia and New York, 1975), p. 183.

of a performance piece Bourgeois staged in the Hamilton Gallery in New York in 1978 - and secondly interaction conceived as the relation between an isolated self and its immediate environment, often envisaged psychoanalytically as a family scenario - in the sense of One and Others,as Bourgeois herself put it in the title she gave to a early wood sculpture dating from 1955 (Fig. 2) that acquired for her a kind of iconic status. In his 'Specific Objects' essay of 1965, Judd characterized the new threedimensional work as taking two main forms - it could be 'something of an object, one single thing', or it could be 'open and extended, more or less environmental'.6 A significant body of Bourgeois' work, particularly the earlier work, is clearly constituted as 'one single thing', an isolated object pointedly confronting the viewer. Whether the more environmental multi-

Museumof Art,NewYork. Oneand Others,1965, paintedwood,20 x 46.1 x 16.8 cm. Whitney Jeffrey (Photograph: Fg. 2. LouiseBourgeois: Clements.)
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999 41

Alex Potts

object work, such as the cells, is to be seen as 'open and extended' is another matter to which we shall return later on. Works such as the grey marble and steel Nature Study (VelvetEyes) of 1984 (Fig. 3) and the latex covered plaster Fillette (Fig. 4) of 1968, might seem to have strong affinities with Surrealist objects. But their scale, the simple wholeness of their overall shape, and their situation directly in the viewer's space, make them very different. Surrealist objects, which seem so striking in the decontextualising photographs published of them, often look contrived and out of place in a gallery space when they have to be set out as precious little things in a cabinet, or raised up on pedestals that obviously do not belong to them and are sculpturally so much more solidly present than the objects themselves. As Louise Bourgeois put it, 'The Surrealist object . . . was in the direction of preciousness, rarity - rarity in time, in that there are very few of left, rarity in space, in that you don't find it so much.'7 Nature Study (Velvet Eyes) (Fig. 3) is set almost directly on the floor on a minimal steel base. The low-lying block has an immediate physical presence that commands attention as one approaches: it is implacably there, blocking and obstructing one's passage, as well as projecting a strong fixed gaze out into the surrounding space. Fillette (Fig. 4) hangs at eye level, blocking one in another way- its up-frontness as a large thing suspended in space directly at

7. Bourgeois, Writings, 161. The comment p. was made with particularreference to Joseph Cornell.

Nature of Flg. 3. LouiseBourgeois: Study(Velvet Eyes),1984, greymarbleand steel, 64 x 84 x 68.5 cm, steel base, height11.4 cm. Collection Michael JoanSalke, Boston, MA.(Photograph: and AllanFinkelman.)
42 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999

SculpturalConfrontations

fs

Fillette,1968, latexover plaster,59.5 x 26.5 x 19.5 cm. Museumof Fig. 4. LouiseBourgeois: Modern NewYork. PeterMoore.) Art, (Photograph:
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999 43

Alex Potts

eye level echoing its up-frontness in photographic representations. The photograph through which it is best known, that unlike earlier photos of Surrealist objects makes a feature of the work's immediate environs, was published as part of Louise Bourgeois' Child Abusepiece in 1982 beside the comment: 'I am sorry to get so excited but I still react to it'.8 The idea of a drama of confrontation is amplified in Bourgeois's retelling of the traditional story of the sculptor's confrontation with hard recalcitrant materials. Thus on stone carving:
Howare you goingto ... makethe stone say whatyou wantwhenit is thereto say "no"to It everything. forbidsyou. Youwanta hole, it refuses to makea hole. It is a constantsource of refusal.Youhaveto winthe shape. It is a fightto the finishat everymoment... the thingthat had to be said was so difficult so painful and that you haveto hackit out of yourselfand so you hackit out of the material, very,veryhardmaterial.9 a

8. Bourgeois, 9. Bourgeois, 10. Bourgeois,

Writings, p. 134. Writings, p. 142. Writings, p. 184.

11. Bourgeois, Writings, pp. 142-3, 156, 195, 74. There is an intriguing parallel to this alternationin BarbaraHepworth's statements about carving stone - see A. Potts, 'Carving and the Engenderingof Sculpture: Adrian Stokes on BarbaraHepworth' in D. Thistlewood (ed.),
Barbara Hepworth Reconsidered (Liverpool

University Press and Tate Gallery Liverpool: Liverpool, 1996), p. 50. 12. Bourgeois, Writings, pp. 183, 129. A similar ambiguity is projected in her account of Janus see p. 224.

Bourgeois might seem to be talking in quite conventional terms about a confrontation that aims at subjugation - as in Sartre's Existentialist dramas of confrontation between self and other, a favourite author of hers who supplied the title of one of her earliest installation pieces, No Exit. But the central thrust of the drama she evokes does not have to do with subjugation as such, but rather with the resulting resistance. As she put it, 'the resistance that must be overcome in stone is a stimulation'.10 A drive to subjugation is not in the end the overriding dynamic of interaction set up by even the most confrontational of her pieces - the coming up against something is not resolved either by the viewer being subjected to the work, or by the work being subjugated by and taken over by the viewer. Rather, it is as if the viewing subject is drawn into a situation where it can only anchor and define itself by way of the resistance it encounters impinging on and being impinged upon by an object looming before it - that is by feeling the pressure exerted on it by some outside thing. Moreover, Bourgeois' talk of the struggle to dominate hard resistant materials is almost always given a dialectical twist- the aggressive hacking alternating with or giving way to processes that by contrast seem almost reparative, such as polishing, assemblage, or a more flexible engagement with soft and pliable materials. How viewers might relate to a work like Fillette (Fig. 4) in very different ways is teasingly suggested by Bourgeois in the classic photo of her by Mapplethorpe dating from 1982. This may be stretching it, but there is nothing in principle to stop one from imagining this 'very very strong thing' as also, in her own words, 'an extremely delicate thing that needs to be protected'. It was not, she at one point claimed both honestly and disingenuously, her aim to set up this ludicrous effect. 'It was no desire of mine', she claimed, 'it just turned out that way - because life is . . . so ridiculous. 12 Such a give and take between the thing as stiff and hard, crudely speaking phallic, and as somewhat soft and vulnerable, evocative of a tenderness of touch rather than a rigid thrusting confrontation, is already set in train by the title, 'little girl', and also by the physical constitution of the work: a softish flexible layer of latex covers the hard rigid crumbly plaster. The slippage between a phallic and a feminised erotic image might recall Brancusi's Princess X. But there is a difference. With Fillette, the penis shape can just about mutate into the stylised neck and breasts of a female figure. But I would not quite call the work sexually ambivalent in the way that Brancusi's is it is first and foremost, and to some extent insistently remains a penis strung up on a hook like a piece of meat in an old-fashioned butcher's shop, the result
44 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999

SculpturalConfrontations

13. Bourgeois, Writings, 266. p.

14. Bourgeois, Writings, p. 210.

15. Bourgeois, Writings, 209. p.

of an act of castrating violence that can never quite be repaired. By contrast too with the Brancusi, it does not have a reassuringly smooth surface - the latex in certain areas coagulates in awkward lumps, in places even peels away from its solid core, as if its skin might stick to one rather than glide under one's touch. At the same time, even as a fairly solidly saturated phallic shape, Fillette does not produce a stable, fixed response. For instability is in the very nature of the psychic charge momentarily activating a viewer when an inanimate thing catches her or his attention. The placing of the work, its free dangling, functions to intensify such instability. The object/thing is not propped up or grounded, it is neither lying flat nor thrusting upwards - 'hanging' as Bourgeois put it, 'is important because it allows things to turn around. It is very helpless, it changes the hierarchy of the work; the base disappears'.3 In her later work composed of assemblages of objects in relatively closed environments, not only does the implicit structure of the viewer's response become different, but the proliferation of interactions takes place within a more articulated framework. However, something still remains of a sculptural one to one interaction, of its dynamic immediacy and its instabilities, and the sense of obdurate otherness it induces. There is one rather complex statement elicited from Bourgeois in an interview published in 1991 which deals intriguingly with the kinds of interaction into which her multi-part work might draw a viewer. Bourgeois is specifically referring to Twosome, a work composed of two connected cylindrical steel cells, a larger one about two meters in diameter and illuminated inside and a slightly smaller one that slides inside it and out of it along a track (Fig. 5). This is a very dense passage, with a particularly complex intermingling of evocative psychodrama and more formal sculptural considerations:
A twosome is a closed world. Twopeopleconstitutean environment, personalone is an one unless you make it relate, it has a solitary,poorand object.Anobjectdoesn't relateto anything As withthe otherpersonit becomes an patheticquality. soon as you get concerned whichinvolvesnot onlyyou, who are contained,but also the container.It is very environment, to the important me that people be able to go around piece. Thenthey become partof the environment althoughin some ways it is not an environment the relation two cells. but of is Installation reallya formbetweensculpture theatre,and this bothersme.14 and

There is the interesting observation here that the single sculptural object remains sadly lacking unless it is activated by some kind of interaction; then the further suggestion that such interaction might be set in train if one object is made to impinge on another, creating a dynamic that then echoes out to include the viewer. Referring specifically to Twosome,she suggests that the work is at one level the environment or arena containing the two cells as well as the viewer who has been drawn into their ambit. Yet it can also be defined simply as the two cells interacting with one another. This ambiguity bothers Bourgeois. What bothers her though is not just a nostalgic tug back to the traditional notion of the sculptural object, but an unavoidable tension which the work is the better for not seeking to resolve. For it presents itself both as a single thing staged in an empty space to be looked at by a viewer, and as something that encompasses the viewer within the space it activates. Viewer and work are isolated and separate, but they also exist together in the same arena. This autonomy and connectedness is echoed in the relation between the component cells of Twosome, which, as Bourgeois suggested, are both 'completely isolated from each other' and 'next to each other'.'5
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999 45

Alex Potts

1150 cm, diameter203.2 cm. Courtesy Cheim& ReadGallery, Twosome, 1991, steel, paintand electriclight,length(variable) Flg. 5. LouiseBourgeois: NewYork. PeterBellamy.) (Photograph:

A similar duality is set up by Bourgeois' much earlier installations of wood sculpture shown in the Peridot Gallery in New York in 1949 and 1950 (Fig. 6). In comments she made at the time, she claimed that the relation between the individual figures was integral to their formal definition. The work was both an assemblage of disparate free-standing entities and a scene of interaction, a duality summed up succinctly in her comment: 'My work grows from the duel between the isolated individual and the shared awareness of the group.'16 It is important to hold onto the word duel here - we are not talking about a harmonious interchange binding individuals together in a nicely configured group, any more than we are about a formal structure integrating the individual elements of a work in a stably composed whole. Looking back on these early shows from the perspective of the late 1970s, Bourgeois claimed that they were informed by a new awareness of the environment of display. She represented it as a pioneering instance of a major change that had been taking place whereby the artist was becoming an active participant in the display of her or his work who no longer simply accepted the given conditions of an 'academic space of display' - in the same way that the new installation-consciousness brought the viewer in too as an active element. Though obviously coloured by hindsight, what she said offers an astute commentary on the change in three dimensional art from a focus on the autonomous sculptural object to work partly defined by its theatrical staging. I quote Bourgeois:
46 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999

16. Bourgeois, Writings, 66. The comment p. was published in 1954.

of viewof exhibition work Fig. 6. Installation at by LouiseBourgeois the Peridot Gallery, in NewYork, 1949. (Photograph: Aaron Siskind.)

SculpturalConfrontations

-r.

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: 41

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if

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999 47

Alex Potts

Thefiguresare presences whichneeded the room,the six sides of the cube. Theprivileged It space has certaincharacteristics. is closed and exactlydefinedand belongsto the artistin the waythe stage belongsto the performer a certainnumber minutes.Thespectatoris no for of to longermerelya viewerif he is able to movefromthe stage of viewing the stage of
collaborating.17

17. The Art Journal, vol. 35, Summer 1976,

For all Bourgeois' self-awareness about staging, however, the exhibitions easily separated out into their individual components - autonomous sculptures conceived as separate entities that were and are still marketed as such.18 It was only in the late 1980s that Bourgeois began to exhibit sculpture that categorically departed from being a single object and became manifestly about objects situated in spaces: the series of cells she began working on then were among the more high profile works in the new wave of object-based installations. Unlike the installation work of her contemporaries such as Beuys and of the younger generation of artists coming to prominence then like Robert Gober, however, and unlike her own earlier displays in the Peridot Gallery, these cells did not take over an entire gallery space. Instead they were closed shapes defining self-contained spatial arenas within a more open gallery 19 area.9 From a distance, the cells present themselves as big, fairly massive, slightly awkward sculptures resting on the floor. But they are not quite sculptural objects in the traditional sense because their outer shells either have largish openings, or form open screens, allowing one, indeed inviting one, to look inside to their visually more dense and resonant interiors (Figs. 7 and 1). Still, even if by contrast with most sculpture, the visual interest is mostly located on their inner rather than outer surfaces, the outer aspect immediately confronting one still has a certain ambiguous sculptural substance. It forms
a container rather than a mere frame, and intervenes in one's space, in some places blocking one and in others opening intriguingly inwards. It also defines the basic structure of the work as both closed off from one and made partially

p. 373; cited in slightly abbreviatedfrom in pp. 104-5. The Bourgeois, Writings, commentary very slightly predates Rosalind Krauss'now classic formulation of this historical
shift in Passages in Modern Sculpture (The MIT

Press: Boston, MA and London, 1977), pp. 243 ff. Bourgeois also drew attention to the absence of traditionalbases in her installation (there were only minimal fixtures connecting the sculptures to the floor), explaining how this made the sculptures impinge directly on the viewer's space and prevented them from looking monumental they seemed to hold themselves up in a 'fragile balance', as she put it. The emphasis on installation in her later commentary clearly partly has to do with her trying to claim a certain priority for herself. Thus in 1996, echoing claims made by Minimalistartists for their innovative awareness of situation, she insisted that the display of work in her early sculpture shows was quite unusual for being 'an installation, not just a group of things. The idea of making sculpture as a space, as a large entity, with no pedestals, was not really done at that time.' Bourgeois, Writings, pp. 352-3. 18. Like Giacometti's figures, they now tend to be installed in groups when shown at exhibitions of Bourgeois' work, but usually staged
inappropriately in an array facing the viewer

accessible. The inside cannot physically be entered by one's body, yet is open to one's view looking in through the openings and gaps, even if often in a fragmentary way. Hence the logic behind the use of the doors and windows that define the exterior aspect of some of the cells. The way the cells no longer present themselves as traditional solid sculptural things, and offer to the viewer both an exterior face and an enclosed interior, sets up a distinction between insideness and outsideness that is both more insistent and disjunctive than that in open structure modernist work such as Caro's or in the partly enclosed and partly open volumes of Minimalist work such as Judd's. There is perhaps a certain parallel with Hesse's famous Accession II of 1968, where the affective resonance of what at first seems to be a hard plain metal box is largely located in the interior into which thousands of segments of soft vinyl tubing protrude. But Hesse's piece does not share the architectonic feel of Bourgeois's work. It is generically more like a body with an inside and outside, whereas Bourgeois' cells are more interiorised arenas that a body inhabits - arenas that have acquired a domestic and social patina. At the same time, the complex duality between insideness and outsideness, and the fact that this is integral to the viewer's immediate physical experience of the work, means that Bourgeois' cells are different in kind from the diorama-like or shop window-like displays that a viewer simply looks at rather than into and around. The distinctive interplay between interior and exterior produced by these works effects a particularly intriguing variation on the standard patterning of viewing invited by a free-standing sculptural object. A sculpture usually comes
48 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999

rather than as elements within the space occupied by the viewer. What is still remarkableabout the attitude manifest in these early installationsis Bourgeois' realization that the works were being redefined by being shown together, and that they created a new kind of sculptural arena. 19. Taken as a whole, each installationwas in effect an isolated entity set, a little like a lot of Minimalist objects and even traditional sculptures, in a spatially largely indeterminate arena. At the same time, the work was not an object, but rather a setting for objects that was simultaneouslyan array of objects. On Bourgeois' shift to a more installation-orientated kind of work in the late 1980s, see T. Sultan, 'Redefining the Terms of Engagement:the Art of Louise Bourgeois', in C. Kotik, T. Sultan and
C. Leigh, Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993 (Harry N. Abrams: New

York, 1994), pp. 41-7.

SculpturalConfrontations

Fig. 7. Louise Bourgeois: Cell (Three White Marble Spheres), 1993, steel, glass, marble and mirror,213.4 x 213.4

x 213.4 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum.

PeterBellamy.) (Photograph:
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Alex Potts

alive, not when it is seen as static shape, but once a viewer starts moving between distant views, in which the overall shape is apparent, and rather different close-up views, whose vividness is often such as momentarily to block out awareness of the overall shape or structure. With Bourgeois' cells, the distant overview can no longer even pretend to offer a summation of the work - from a distance, what already seems most intriguing about it is blocked or slightly hidden from view, veritably impelling one to shift viewpoint and move in to take a closer look. And once one is positioned where the interiors are fully revealed, the external shape is often literally invisible. Close viewing turns the work inside-out.

Cell Fig. 8. LouiseBourgeois: (GlassSpheresand Hands),1990-3, glass, marble,wood, metaland Peter of Melbourne. fabric,218.4 x 218.4 x 210.8 cm, National Gallery Victoria, (Photograph: Bellamy.)
50 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999

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20. For Bourgeois' own comments on these associations, see Bourgeois, Writings, pp. 231, 263-4. 21. Bourgeois, Writings, 237. Compare also p. her comment, 'In this . . . cell the glasses are the family. One, two, three, four, five, we were five and we all live in a different world, and the bubbles are the form of an autonomous creation' (p. 264). 22. It was a matter of placing things together in a very simple matter of fact way that did not impose a definite order or hierarchy, of ensuring, as Judd put it, that 'everything is fairly independent and specific' (Complete
Writings 1959-1975, p. 195); or, as Andre said,

of combining units or particles 'according to laws which are particularto each particle, rather than a law which is applied to the whole set', of creating 'non structural combinations of particles' (quoted in P. Tuchman, 'An Interview with Carl Andre', Arforum,June 1970, p. 55).

The interiors defined by the cells have obvious psychic resonances, which go beyond a vague sense of spatial interiority. They often define specific social spaces the bedrooms and dining rooms for example within which domestic life is confined, and where the more memorable and psychically invested childhood family scenarios are played out. The idea of a cell also evokes a prison, and in some works this resonance becomes quite explicit. Cell in its usage as biological cell also suggests an autonomous unit, one that is selfenclosed, but yet also situated in a larger environment with innumerable other equivalent units.20 The way that the more prominent objects within Bourgeois' cells are placed together yet apart gives visual or sculptural definition to a distinctive social scenario. This emerges most explicitly in cells where several equivalent, yet clearly distinct, objects stand out from the furnishings and interior surroundings, such as Cell (Glass Spheresand Hands) (Fig. 8). The objects are situated in such a way as to project simultaneously a sense of the 'isolated individual' and the 'shared awareness of the group', as Bourgeois put it. The glass bubbles are each cells in their own right: 'They're enclosed; you do not get at them. They are sealed off without the possibility of communication and yet they are together.'21 This scenario may remind one most immediately of the dramatising of the isolated, alienated modern self found in the post-war Existentialist thinking of writers such as Sartre, but it has wider resonances that operate with continuing, if not more acutely intense force today. The sense of self being interpolated is resonant both of the solipsistic ego entrapped within the phantasmic structures of a family drama, analysed by Freud, and of the asocial sociality of the bourgeois individual, alienated yet enmeshed within the fabric of social being, envisaged by Marx. The scenario also has its formal dimension, having to do with how the relations between elements in the work are defined, an issue that had come to a head with the critique of a conventionally structured composition mediating between part and whole mounted by artists of the Minimalist generation such as Judd. Judd had argued that the more significant elements of a work needed to stand out as relatively autonomous and complete in themselves.22 The arrangement of elements within Bourgeois' cells does not directly echo the pared down no-nonsense grid-like placement of equivalent units in Minimalist works. But it is quite simple and matter of fact; more akin to the vague sense one has of the basic disposition of things in one's memory of an interior space punctuated by objects and other presences, than to the structured positioning of figures and objects laid out before one in genre and still life paintings. Those elements that stand out as suggested presences or as particularly intriguing objects seem self-contained, disconnected from what is around them, even while their isolation is suggested by their situation. They exist as quite separate entities within a collective scenario. Autonomy was a key point of reference for Bourgeois- when pressed, not only did she envisage the cells as units 'absolutely distinct from each other ... autonomous, absolutely'. But she also saw this autonomy echoed by the selfenclosed objects placed within the cells. Several arenas of autonomy emerge, the autonomous cells loosely assembled together in a gallery display, the autonomous units or implied presences situated in the interior spaces of the cells, and the autonomy and isolated positioning of the viewer, drawn into while also being excluded from the scenes - both psychic and physical - staged by the work. Sometimes there is a position within a cell with which the viewer is invited particularly to identify, marked out by a suggested presence that is more immediately body-like than the others, such as the pair of clenched hands
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999 51

Alex Potts in Cell (Glass Spheresand Hands). In these cases, the viewer is encouraged momentarily to imagine her or himself situated there within a space surrounded by the other self-enclosed presences. At the same time, there is no fixed, stable hierarchy - while the hands might momentarily seem vulnerable, dominated or crowded out by the complacently blank glass spheres, they could also be imagined as possessed of an authority that was commanding the others' attention. Things exist side by side, each defining a situation that is both enclosed within but also isolated from the larger environment, with no stable order correlating their inter-relationship. There is an instability to one's viewing that is given a strong inflection by the interplay between the empty spaces in the cells, and the insistent materiality and density of the intriguingly patinated fixtures and furnishingswhether hard glinting glass, solid heavy marble, rusting steel, worn and roughly textured wood, or fabric from cast off clothes. Often readily recognisable everyday 'found' items or containers, and on a very much smaller scale than a whole figure, these function as condensations of weight and substance that begin to evoke an absent human presence, whether one that would occupy some empty area close by them, or one that would be anchored in the spot where one of them is placed, such as on a chair or a stool, or a bed for example. These objects, however, are usually too compact to offer an expansive painterly or sculptural surface on which one's gaze can linger, and invite instead a more glancing and momentary engagement with their visual and tactile qualities. The effect is further heightened by the combination of relatively low level ambient light and directed spot-lighting favoured by Bourgeois that makes the shape and substance of the objects stand out, accentuating the disjunction between their vivid materiality and the emptinesses that open up around them. In a statement published in 1992, Bourgeois made the now much quoted comment,
Oneand Others Severalyears ago I called a sculpture (Fig.2). Thismightbe the title of many It is since then:the relationof one personto his surroundings a continuing preoccupation. can or subtle or blunt.Itcan be painful pleasant.Mostof all be casual or close, simpleor involved, it can be realor imaginary.23

23. Bourgeois,

Writings, p. 223.

24. Bourgeois, Writings, 205. p.

25. C. Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois. Designing

for FreeFall (Ammann Verlag: Zurich, 1992), p. 136. Only selections from the interviews and statements published by Meyer-Thoss are The work included in Bourgeois, Writings. Articulated Lair,completed in 1986, is illustrated in C. Kotik, T. Sultan and C. Leigh, Louise
Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993,

pp. 94-5.

The cells evoke two distinct yet overlapping psychodramas, one played out on the interior stage of the sculpture, and one on the more open stage of the gallery space encompassing viewer and work. Bourgeois herself was acutely conscious of the significance of the latter. 'Each Cell', she commented, 'deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at. The Cells either attract or repulse each other. There is this urge to integrate, merge, or disintegrate.'24 In another context, talking about the partially enclosed arena created by the work ArticulatedLair, which included a seat where the viewer was invited to sit, she stressed the ambiguity inherent in the idea of such a lair - it functioned as 'a protected place you can enter to take refuge', but it had to be partially open so if needs be one could also escape from 'the invading, frightening visitor'.25 The psychodrama activated by her work is structured, like the close viewing of any work of art, as something private taking place within a public space. The viewer is drawn into a particularly vivid individual encounter with some object or spatial arena, experiencing this from the inside as immediately felt sensation. But because the apparently unmediated interchange with the work taking place at an individual level is staged in a public arena, there also opens up for the viewer the possibility of a more externalised view of the drama of encounter and of
52 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 22.2 1999

SculpturalConfrontations

26. Bourgeois, Writings, 151. p.

the isolated self being interpolated by it. The work will remain alive for the viewer, however, only so long as he or she is suspended between an immediately engrossing affectively charged individual experience of the work and one that is more distanced and less intimate - that is, so long as there is a continuing tension between the potentially claustrophobic sense of being engulfed in the spatial and psychic field the work activates and the potentially alienating sense of being situated apart from or outside it. Such externalised staging of what is felt to be inward echoes in its uncontrollable instabilities and excesses the largely unmediated interplay between the interiority of the autonomous individual and the exteriority of the field of social interaction that permeates so many aspects of contemporary should I say - capitalist society. With Bourgeois' accounts of herself and her work, then, we should not simply linger on the revelation of private experience and private psychodrama, but also be attuned to the self-consciously public staging. Once, when an interviewer voiced concern that she might be exposing herself in what was turning into a 'private conversation', she interjected 'I don't mind. Whether something is private or public makes no difference to me. I wish I could make my private morepublic and by doing so lose it.'26 Through the medium of the work, not only the artist, but the viewer too is staged so as to make public and externalize what is usually envisaged as an indefinitely defined interiorised experience. What makes this possible is not any particular understanding Bourgeois might have of the existential parameters of such experience, but the way she is able to play it out and give it public currency in an unusually astute staging of sculptural objects and spaces, a staging that provokes in a viewer who engages closely with her work a state of mind suspended somewhere between anxiety and fascination. By involving the viewer in a vividly physical sculptural drama, incessantly moving between interiority and exteriority, intimacy and exposure, closeness and distance, Bourgeois's work momentarily empties the mind of the unwanted rubbish and pleasurable residues of everyday psychic and social existence, and then incites these to re-emerge with quite unpredictable intensity. This is a three dimensional art that thoroughly negates the traditional sculpted funerary monument and its customary message 'May he or she rest in peace'.

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