Louise Bourgeois at The Guggenheim Museum, New York City

The Guggenheim was designed so that the works on view would be seen beginning from the top. One takes the elevator up and then walks down. Frank Lloyd Wright is a master of directing the foot traffic and this long ramp is especially assertive. For this exhibit, however, the chronology begins at the bottom: one is expected to climb to the top. In a sense I suspect this is symbolic: these are works that require one to slog his way through the career. As a creature of habit I rode up and walked down. I then walked back up and back down. In the end it really did not matter which way was chosen: there is little sense of development over the many long years of this career, there is a sameness of achievement overall.

While I recognize the artist’s name as one among the Twentieth Century American artists with name recognition there is no image in my mind that connotes her work. And while I have seen her work in other museums, especially over the last several years, I cannot remember exactly which of her works I have seen: she has created neither a signature image nor have the works she has created created a lingering iconic image in my memory.

While giving these works my attention two things became apparent to me: finish and celebrity.

Near the top there is a series of works, “Cells”, from the 1990’s, which have been made from discarded doors of various descriptions found, I assume, on the streets of New York. In the 1960’s it was common to see doors like these fronting construction sites in the city. Tableaux have been created inside these cells and there are windows or small openings through which we can look inside. There we see various items that look, to be perfectly honest, as if they were things that had also been found on the street or purchased at flea markets. Although the interpretation rhapsodized about the intensity of the emotional experience within these cells, as a viewer I felt that they never rose above the reality of being a collection of found objects. Perhaps I am too successfully a Buddhist and accept life as too obviously maya and know that a thing is only what it is and that any color we give it is only the color that we give it. While this collection of objects might have profound meaning for the artist, that concern was not presented in such a way as to communicate a shared experience. Trained as a set designer I did not sense that the design of these Cells expressed the essence of the artist’s intention.

The doors, or in one case the panels to circuit boxes, had an apparent “as found” finish, but on some of them I wondered if a seemingly casual over painting might not have been the artist’s rather than as found. I wondered if there might not have been a little more scenic manipulation here than we were supposed to notice. I had an uncomfortable feeling that not all of this revelatory autobiography was as honest as it was stated to be. So let me be honest: I am suggesting that these cells read as being rather contrived: they were not really intended as an expression of the artist’s angst but as contemporary art works made for gallery consumption.

At the bottom of the ramp, at the beginning of the career, there are several paintings from the 1940’s. The drawing is poor, the limited colors are poor, and they are placed in the center of prevailing twentieth century “style”. The craftsmanship is emphatically nonexistent. On the whole they have the look: these are of interest because I made them. They are very bad paintings and the artist was well advised to turn her interest to sculpture. That they had been publicly exhibited at the time they were made brought to my mind an awareness of what I believe is commonly understood as “art world darlings”: those insiders whose social networking has secured a recognition for their work in the commercial venues of contemporary art. This was augmented by references in the museum literature to her marriage to the American art critic Robert Goldwater. I wondered: if she had not been married to that person, would her works have been taken on by an art gallery?

There are two areas where a number of her drawings were displayed as a group. Near the top of the ramp there were many drawings of what looked like loosely woven cheesecloth and others of free form spirals. It was apparent to me that she was also not a draftsman. Initially I was curious if she was referencing Chinese calligraphy. Chinese calligraphy is a very proscribed discipline with very rigid rules. In my reading I have been made familiar with the work of a Chinese artist, whose name I have forgotten, probably in the 800’s C.E., who took the stance of an anti-artist and whose works are valued for their fluency and spontaneity. Were the Louise Bourgeois drawings referencing that anti-art esthetic? Because there was no other reference to Chinese art, I decided that there wasn’t. They are simply not very good drawings. They are made on not very good paper. They were probably nothing more than working drawings for sculptures she intended to make

The only interesting drawings were nine engravings. These were made to illustrate some of the artist’s personal anecdotes. They are very good drawings. If there are more of these somewhere I would much rather have seen them than the working drawings we were shown. But these drawings showed high finish, a compliance with the standards of excellence in the arts, and I wondered if they might not have been included to show us that, yes, she can, when she wants to.

Her real talent is in sculpture and there are some very good pieces in the show. After the first paintings we find the first group of sculpture, Personages, carved wood, again wood as found in the street. But this discarded American wood has been made into African sculpture. I have no quarrel with an artist expanding his or her horizons by working within a foreign cultural tradition. But these are so obvious that I do have a problem with something like this that is only a studio exploration presented in a museum setting. Personages was followed by a series, Lair, again primitive, derivative, and again studio exploration. And the same can be said for a series of vertical assemblages of small pieces of wood, Mortise, Memling Dawn, et al. A large assemblage of half round shapes of wood, “Partial Recall”, painted white, looked like an exercise: how can I make something of this without referencing Nevelson? The answer was to make it horizontal and to paint it white. But that did not disguise the reference.

It was not until she began to work in bronze and marble, creating small intimate pieces that evoked a strong visceral response that the work began to be interesting. Again, if there is more of this somewhere I would much rather have seen it than those made from found wood…there is more than enough of that kind of thing around.

Among the best of these is Spiral Woman, the body of a woman hanging out of a spiral of “something” cast in bronze and finished in a polished gold. It is very tactile, it is very visceral and it has an extremely pleasant sense of form. Two larger spirals, in shiny silver, hanging above the lobby from the high ceiling, have the look of mere decoration. They are instantly forgettable.

“One and Others” a group of painted wood shapes, was somewhat interesting but it felt overworked because of the really fine and careful finish.

I was very favorably impressed with “Rabbit”, what looked to be the carcass of a partially gutted creature hanging by a foot from a nail, the skin of the back splayed out creating a diamond shape behind the spine. I suspect a mold was made of the real object and that it was then cast in bronze. It created an immediate remembrance of the 16th Century French ceramicist, Palissy. As both an object and as an art world and cultural reference I thought this was one of the most successful works in the exhibition.

I was very impressed by the works in marble. Moderately sized, each had a very monumental quality. These for the most part refer to body parts…breast, penises, and vaginas. Most of them were placed on large single blocks of wood serving as pedestals. It was a lovely contrast of materials and a lovely sensual subject matter. All of these marble works had the highest finish and in most the polished surface was contrasted to areas that were left rough cut. But this series was also marred by a number of works of forearms and hands, clasped or opened, that looked to have been life casts and cast in plaster and painted to resemble the marble. There was something really “off” about them in what seemed but more contrivance.

Late works are made in fabric and the most successful of these were those made from remnants of tapestries. These had wonderful colors and texture. This material was intended to reference the artist’s early years and her family. Whereas the interpretation makes much of a childhood trauma inspired by her father, because there is so constant a reference to the mother I think there is a stronger case for an unresolved mother/daughter separation anxiety. This is not to say that an artist cannot take that reference and turn it into a major art work: O’Neill gave us some major masterpieces using his family history. But as art works the remnants of tapestry were more interesting than what was made of them.

On the floor of the lobby stands a large sculptural work of two spiders about eight feet high. Bourgeois has said that she wants to rehabilitate the reputation of the spider. And she has. These are silly but fun.

“Don’t Swallow Me” a flat and framed work incorporating a petticoat laid out in a flat circle, two long red arms painted on the paper ground and some other markings was also interesting because of the composition and the contrast of textures.

Interesting. Interesting is the most that I get from this exhibition. Except for Arch of Hysteria, a polished gold headless male torso, sans genitals (?), bent backward and hanging at eye level from the naval, none of the images elicited a shock of recognition or the sense of a confrontation with something deeply buried in the collective unconscious. However, while there are no masterpieces neither was there an overload of signature images that look to have been manufactured for the many hundreds of museums in America. Instead, there is a constant sense of an ongoing exploration for… “something”. That’s fine.

One image that does stand out in many of these works is the spiral. Initially when I saw it in the series of the drawings I responded to it as if it were a contrived effort to create a universal image: the spiral is the most universal of all symbols and has been found in every early culture. At first I assumed that we were being directed to the works of Jung and Joseph Campbell. But next to those drawings was a work which included a skein of linen and so I came to understand the fascination of the spiral as referencing that: the spiral is the skein from which the creativity flows.

A second image which was almost as commonly used was the dress maker’s or tailor’s sausage or gourd. But because the interpretation never identified it, for most viewers it was probably simply an odd object. But knowing what it was did not invest it with any deeper meaning for me. As I have said, I’m a Buddhist and a gourd is a gourd is a gourd.

Despite the well known fact that Louise Bourgeois is a celebrity, an insider of the New York art world, her work, as presented here, seems not worthy of museum attention. Does that have to do with her work or with this selection of her works? From the early to the late works there is a vacillation between a too fine finish and an indifference to finish; I sense that a decision had never been made one way or the other. Thus overall the approach to the work seems unfocused and…casual. I’m not sure that I would even consider all of this minor or of secondary importance. At the end of the day it is really just the stuff of art world galleries. The most powerful experience here was reading the artist’s comments about her works that merge human form with buildings. (Which are also …interesting.) She is reputed to have written: “Skyscrapers reflect the human condition. They do not touch.” Nothing else I saw here had so strong an impact, nothing else so succinctly spoke to me from the depths of the artist’s being or told me so much about her. Ironically it was not a visual experience, it was a verbal communication. Painting, sculpture, and photography are visual experiences. There is no reason for an artist to spend his, or her, time making an image of something that can be more powerfully said.

Postscript: Museums would do the arts a great service if they would curtail the hyperbole in their guides and interpretations. The interpretation for this exhibit is printed as a brochure and available at the entrance, as well as on the web site. It is an okay accompaniment to the exhibit but with a few too many histrionic utterances. For example: “the fraught dynamic between…”, “unprecedented emotional intensity…” “these troubling connotations…”, “sinister traps”, and “fraught (yes, fraught again) with the suggestion of life concealed…” It presents, overall, the image of a woman who has lived her life as the victim of her childhood traumas and her adult gender anomie. As described in this document, in the whole wide universe it is all about her. Because I do not know her personally my experience of the universe has been otherwise. As so many of us have grown weary of the professional victim, I’m sure many observers other than myself wondered why she simply didn’t chuck it all and go to a therapist.

I am suggesting that with a less breathy guide we might have more readily felt what the artist was attempting to express. I certainly did not buy into this rhetoric: for the most part what it described was not evident in the work. Eventually the emotional high pitch of that document had the effect of creating in me a feeling of resistance. I know that’s what it was because I have been to the therapist.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/26/arts/0627-BOUR_index.html