“It’s a good place for a retrospective”: Louise Bourgeois @ the Guggenheim
It’s a drizzly night and starting to feel like early fall. Alison and I just came back from the Louise Bourgeois exhibit at the Guggenheim. The exhibit is a retrospective. It showed work from the 1940s to today. It’s hard to imagine one person’s active working life spanning so much history, but there it all was. “I want to think,” said Alison, “that she got a chance to walk through the museum by herself.”
The Guggenheim was crowded because it was pay-what-you-wish night. The crowd was good-looking and slightly damp. We went to the top of the spiral, because that’s what you do, and worked our way down. Here are some of the things we saw.
Sculptures made of old glasswares on a shelf. Sculptures in marble, rubber, and bronze, of biomorphic forms that mostly looked sexual. Spider shapes. Spirals. A woman’s tiny legs, dangling, her upper body stuck in a spiral. Garments hanging from heavy bones. Rooms made of doors fastened together, forcing viewers to peer in to see sculpted marble hands, cots, medical instruments, red objects, Shalimar perfume bottles, hands holding or manipulating each other. An androgynous body, in flaming gold, arched backwards and suspended from the ceiling by a cord from its navel. The hind legs of a large predatory cat, in marble, with a penis, three sets of breasts, and no head (claimed to be a self-portrait, said the wall text). Enormous balls of wood. Bathtub-sized slabs of stone. Many repetitions on the theme of collections; groups of stone rods, pieces of wood gathered together on a steel skewer, like a spine made of pebbles; childlike drawings, some with words. Soft sculptures of grotesque bodies or heads. “LB” or “Louise Bourgeois” spelled or carved out neatly and simply on almost everything.
Yes, I liked her art. I felt a very strong sense of personality at her show, even though so much of the work is abstract. Looking at her art, with its motifs repeated so many times, I realized how much of art is obsessiveness, and I enjoyed that. It made me feel comfortable and safe to be inside someone else’s system of meaning, even though that meaning could not necessarily be grasped by me. It was inspiring enough to know that someone has dedicated herself to making something that is of significance to herself. I was reminded of a remark that someone who knew him made in an obituary of Joe Strummer: ‘he wrote the lyrics he wanted to and was never afraid of not making sense,’ was the sentiment. He gave himself to us untranslated, and didn’t worry or care that we might fail to understand. There’s faith and courage in that gesture. At the museum tonight, I felt those things too, and individualism: she seems to speak of herself only, her own quirks, and to stand up for them, not in an in-your-face way, but without shame. Amid her work I felt a sense of great strength, and I thought that Louise Bourgeois would potentially be an excellent role model for young girls—at least as good as anyone else living that I could think of just then.
Afterwards we went downtown for frites, and I thought more about this thing of art and the (obsessive?) making or displaying of personal meaning: that’s a goal that I feel drives some artists, or maybe some artists most of the time and many artists some of the time. Anyway, I got to thinking about self-expression, not a popular idea in these postmodern times, but one I can’t quite get past, and the way that I felt about art when I was little, and about creation in general, but by then we’d come out from under the sky’s eerie wet-night glow and into the 6 train; the ideas got scattered, the frites were good, and back at home now, my eyelids are drooping.
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