Episode 44: Louise Bourgeois' Pillar (1949-50)
VOICE 1: I am looking at a figure. I think it’s made of wood. It’s very tall and narrow and abstract.
VOICE 2: It looks like a plaster, sort of. Sort of a giant, elongated, ah, handmade candelabra.
VOICE 3: It’s a white pillar with parts cut out that make it more rounded. It’s about five inches wide and five feet tall. And it’s white with blue accents in the middle and then some stripes down the bottom. It kinda looks like a dress to me, ‘cause of the top and then this skirt with stripes going downwards.
VOICE 4: Um, and kind of curves in, like, a traditionally female’s body and waist. Hourglass, yeah.
VOICE 5: Soft. Seems feminine to me. The top part, anyway.
VOICE 6: I have walked by it a lot. But I’ve never really stopped to think about what it means.
VOICE 8: Hmmm, feels kind of haunting to me, a little bit. But [laughs] … Oh, you can’t quite tell what the figure is. Hmmm. Seems kind of eerie in a way.
VOICE 9: If it is a person, if I’m correct that it’s a figure, it’s kind of shut down and shut in. Um, there’s not expression on the – the top part, which could be a face. It’s sort of a triangular thing with a line cut through it.
VOICE 10: In all honesty, it reminds me kind of like an alien or robot… [laughs]… Because, like, the – the head is triangle shape, but then it has a body-like form. But it’s not really humanoid.
VOICE 11: It’s look like a – a Chrysler build- – the Chrysler Building with a fruit bowl on top. [laughs]
VOICE 12: It looks like it’s maybe a mop, I guess, without the thing you clean with.
VOICE 13: It’s kind of evocative. I feel like it – it evokes sort of a deeper feeling, gives it an opportunity. One of these pieces where you can’t quite tell what it is, so you can read into it, whatever you’re feeling or whatever you want to try to get out of it.
VOICE 14: Maybe emptiness and sterility, almost. And yet, with vaguely happy colors. [laughs] Mm-hmmm. Like, maybe, still, sort of a still feeling, right? Like, sit in stillness and contemplate, think, and cope.
VOICE 16: In its abstraction, the fact that I… That it still looks like a figure and possibly a female figure. And just even the – the elongated figurativeness of it, um, draws me, too, because it’s unusual. And I enjoy things that don’t give you all the answers.
[00:02:59]
Here’s a fun fact about me. I am deathly afraid of snakes. They are the worst. The worst. I don’t even want to be thinking about them right now as I say this, because it means I am thinking about snakes, and that’s horrifying. But I’m going to push through to tell you a story. It’s about the time I was a camp counselor and wrangling all my seven-year-olds in their level three swimming class, in the part of the lake where you could touch the squishy ground, which was bad enough, when a wee little water snake, minding its own business, slithered out from under the dock and moved across smooth surface of the water as though it was on the ground. I, of course, did everything my amygdala made me do when confronted with a primal fear. My mouth got numb, my teeth tickled, my stomach sank like a stone, and I hightailed it the hell out of there, probably screaming, and definitely, George Costanza-style, splashing multiple children in my wake. Fortunately, I had a co-teacher to handle my campers, some equally freaked and some freakishly nonplussed, and the moment passed without further incident. But I took it with me for a while. It was one of the few times I can remember being so aware of how out of control I was, how my lizard brain blindly perceived something as a threat and made my body act accordingly.
You know exactly the feeling I’m talking about, whether for you it’s snakes, or heights, or rodents, or blown-up balloons if you’re my friend Phoebe, or, of course, spiders. This feeling is instantaneous and overwhelming and as primal as it gets. And maybe you could say that it’s the price we pay for having a body, the tax our body charges us for putting it in danger, real or imaginary: this physical, innate response, this visceral sense that something in our own bodies is off-kilter and out of our conscious control. This purely instinctual desire for self-protection. The realization that just by having a body means you’re at the mercy of what’s around you, and inside you. And for most of human evolution, it was our brains alone manufacturing this feeling. But then along came a spider.
That is, along came the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, who spent a lifetime of almost a century tapping into this uncomfortable, and universal, part of human experience, making tangible this intangible feeling of disquiet. Her work is primal, psychologically-charged, corporeal, repulsive, and moreover, stubbornly uncategorizable; she’s been half-adopted by multiple movements, a Primitivist-Surrealist-Expressionist with Feminist rising, a sculptor who immigrated from France to the U.S. during the 1930s and died in 2010 at the age of 98, working practically up until the week of her death – and you can imagine how different one object ends up looking from another when you’ve been an artist that long. This is particularly true with Bourgeois, whose drawings, prints, and sculptures have always spoken more intimately to each other than to a particular movement. “A piece,” she says, “is always a consequence of the one that preceded it. It’s a complete evolution.” Though she maintains that there is indeed a through line in her work, it’s emotional, not stylistic. But put a pin in this for now.
This is all to say that you’ve probably seen a Bourgeois but not realized it, at least not by name. Of course, if you do know her name, it’s probably because of her series of spider sculptures. If you know, then you definitely know, because they’re not easy to forget. Some are oversized, looming gracefully, almost protectively, on large outdoor plazas. Others are small, daintily squatting on gallery walls. One in particular, at Dia: Beacon, occupies almost an entire small brick room, giving the jolting, horrifying effect that you’ve just walked into its lair. And while it’s a gross oversimplification of her work to only associate her with these spider sculptures – and a clear example of the art world’s need to turn a tremendously prolific artist into something recognizable and therefore sellable – if you’re going to reduce Bourgeois down to a single image, it does actually make sense that this is it. Spiders don’t happen to be a primal fear of mine – I actually think they’re kind of cute, although I know of many others, my husband included, who would disagree – but they get to something very authentic, even emblematic, in her work. Because a Bourgeois, across the board, taps into that lizard brain. She makes your teeth tickle. Believe me when I say that walking into a gallery of her work is not a pleasant experience, and that we’re getting off easy with this relatively tame wooden pillar. You experience her art, consciously and subconsciously, with your whole body. And this is because she understands that the very fact that we all live inside bodies means that we’re going to respond to this viscerally uncomfortable art a certain way, all sharing a kind of primal repulsion and primal familiarity. And this feeling of being simultaneously repelled and compelled is a tension she then exacerbates with an almost grotesquely incongruous use of materials. We encounter biomorphic forms from her imagination that are both tactile and taboo: hanging, organlike, sinewy, indefinable objects that you half expect to stink of rotting meat, but made out of industrial materials like wood, bronze, skin-like latex, fossil-like concrete. And that tension between soft and hard, organic and inorganic, inviting and kind of gross, becomes tremendously disconcerting, a perverse subversion of expectations. Imagine, for example, coming upon an organized, appealing rows of smooth, hard, egg-like polished marble sculptures, only to realize that they are, upon closer inspection, the slack heads of penises. Imagine a sculpture where the breasts of a pregnant female body end in a blunt headless penis-like shaft, indistinguishable from testes, as we see in “Fragile Goddess” from 1970. Imagine a figure, also headless, cast in smooth bronze, that hangs from a thread, spiderlike, in a graceful, disturbing back bend in “Arch of Hysteria” from 1993. The artist Patty Chang perhaps put it best when she compared Bourgeois’ work to a sea cucumber: a grotesque, inexplicable mix of animal and vegetable that breaths out of its anus, has its sex organs near its mouth, and, more to the point, physically vomits its body inside out to scare away predators in “a defiant and spectacular act of self-immolation.” They offer themselves by emptying themselves, and yet they’re continually regenerating. The performance of death makes them stronger.
Okay, wow. I know this is a lot. But stay with me, because as gloriously visceral as these descriptions are, there’s honestly no better metaphor for Bourgeois’s work. She herself described her artmaking as an exorcism, specifically an exorcism of her own personal experiences, and while her work is far more elegant than a sea cucumber vomiting itself inside out, this idea of continually laying oneself bare with the goal of growing ever stronger and more resilient is Louise Bourgeois to a tee. And so I want to return to this emotional through line that underpins her work, this past she’s continually trying to reconcile through her art. She was vocal throughout her career about how her underlying motivations as an artist originated in unresolved childhood traumas, writing that “every day, you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.” She describes her work as exploring the primordial sexual and emotional anxieties of childhood, and specifically her relationship with her parents, which was exacerbated by her father’s infidelity. She’s fascinated by the memory, both psychological and a kind of innate muscle memory, that is churned up by her biomorphic forms. Our deeply human impulses – fear, jealousy, vulnerability, loss of control – are made manifest in her sculptures of bodies, and, as soon as we walk into a gallery of them, in ours too.
Which brings us back to this deceptively simple wooden pillar from 1949. It might be hard to see how it has its place in the graphic narrative we’ve just unfolded, but remember two things: the first is that that it’s from relatively early in a career that, as we’ve said, was defined by the evolution of objects, one to the next, and therefore just a step in the road of what her work would evolve into. And second, we’re looking at it as a single object in a museum collection. This sculpture was never meant to stand by itself. It was actually part of a group, a series of 80 or so wooden figures Bourgeois completed between 1945 and 1955 titled “Personages.” And if we look at this one specifically, we see a tall, narrow, pillar anchored in thin metal, carved into balsa wood, painted white, and comprised of three distinct parts: a head, trunk, and long, flouted skirt, with three grooved sky-blue lines down the center. And despite its name, Pillar, which evokes strength, sturdiness, support, it’s hard not to see the gentle organic curves, too. You could argue that you’re looking at a softer, maybe more feminine version of such a sturdy, uncompromising, and may we add phallic form of a pillar, or maybe it’s just the opposite: that something as simple as a pillar, so architectural, so blunt and inanimate, is granted a graceful figure, a body, and with it all the complexities of being human. I myself have a history of anthropomorphizing inanimate objects – I mean, I’ve named every car I’ve ever had – and so it’s a comfort to know that this was very much Bourgeois’s intent, to infuse humanness into even the most inert forms. She talks about the personalities of geometric forms, first in how they communicate with her – for example, the anxiety she gets from spirals versus the tranquil safety of grids – and secondly, in how they communicate with each other. She describes her personages as a community, always mid-conversation. “Even though the shapes are abstract,” she wrote about her personages, “they represent people. They are delicate as relationships are delicate. They look at each other and they lean on each other.” And so they occupy the room like a skeletal cocktail party, inhabitants of a private world.
But – and this is critical – it’s a world we’re invited into. To this end, Bourgeois describes the experience of her work not as the contemplation of an object, but as an encounter. We’re encouraged to move amongst these bodies with our own. And in doing so, we begin to realize what the art historian Lucy Lippard means when she describes Bourgeois’s work as “exacting the physicality of the body as experienced from within.” Here we are, welcomed into the physical space of these personages, into their corporeal conversations, and continually reminded that we, too, occupy spaces and bodies of our own, and that these bodies house guts and glory, feelings, emotions, associations, memories. And though Bourgeois’s work is about her memories, her ongoing reconciliation, her vomiting sea cucumber, she is inviting us to both probe our own, and also, crucially, to be aware that those bodies of ours are controlled by something that lives so deep beneath the surface that it defies awareness.
There is, of course, another, more explicitly feminist, interpretation of Bourgeois’s work. One of the largest spider sculptures is titled “Maman,” the informal French word for mother, and she’s described it alluding to her own mother’s strength, her protection, her nurture, and specifically her affinity for spinning and weaving – both of her parents repaired tapestries by trade. And Pillar, too, has its multiple interpretations, from its resemblance to a weaving shuttle to its particularly feminine curves. Its most explicit feminist metaphor is the architectural structure that becomes a woman, a literal house wife – you could make the argument that Pillar was carved as a response to a painting series from the mid-1940s, titled “Femme Maison,” or house wife, where female bodies are given the heads of houses. Bourgeois described this series, which was the last of her paintings before she turned exclusively to sculpture, as identifying home as a female space, a place to probe identity, a place to hide, a place to be exposed.
But looking at gender, or feminism, in her work, only hammers home how overly simplistic it would be to use any single lens. There is no one way to define her work except as an evolution, an attempt at growth and acceptance, tied together with the invisible threads of her emotional experience. So maybe the best way to really understand Bourgeois is to hold her own work up against itself, to see this evolution in action. And we have a great example of this. I briefly mentioned Fragile Goddess earlier, that penis-breast-testes hybrid, an aggressive, psychosexual mishmash of genitals. It is a body that is simultaneously sexualized and repulsive, simultaneously creating new life and protecting its own – in other words, experiencing all of the most anxious moments of pregnancy. In the 1970s, when it was initially carved, Bourgeois wrote, “With Fragile Goddess, I try to give representation of a woman who is pregnant and tries to be frightening, because she is frightened. She’s frightened for the child she carries. She’s afraid somebody is going to invade her privacy and she won’t be able to defend what she’s responsible for.”
But then, in 2002, she revisited the sculpture. And this version of Fragile Goddess is a different piece of art entirely. The hard, fossilized stone of the original is replaced with plush, pink sown felt. There’s a softness, a richness to the curves: the breasts and belly are more clearly defined, less phallic, and with a greater sense of stillness and calm. It’s like a woman realizing how much more joy she could have experienced late in her pregnancy had she been unencumbered by the anxiety of the unknown. And while both versions of Fragile Goddess are said to be based on the Venus of Willendorf, that wonderfully zaftig stone fertility goddess from 25,000 BCE, it’s only the 2002 version that really speaks to its heavy, placid femininity. And it feels appropriate that Bourgeois reissued this softer, calmer version that’s so much truer to its source at the age of 90. It feels like acceptance, like a reconciliation of sorts. It feels hard-won. It’s a body that has matured as its artist’s body has matured, a soul made so much stronger from its lifetime of emptying out and regenerating that it can now replace disquiet with actual quiet, here at the end of an evolution that Pillar, and our lizard brains before that, began.