DISTURBANCE

Why do I find Louise Bourgeois' art so disturbing?

"My work disturbs people and nobody wants to be disturbed. They are not fully aware of the effect my work has on them, but they know it is disturbing."  Louise Bourgeois, 1979 (Crone and Schaesberg, 2008,p.11)

In an earlier blog I describe visiting my Auntie who was dying and the resulting disturbance I felt.  I came to the conclusion that unknowingly my hands had expressed my conflicting emotions and painful realisation that no-one escapes death. My own art making had helped me to unravel my feelings of unease.  In the process of creating art I transferred my inner emotions into a symbolic form. 

In order to unravel the power of a Louise Bourgeois' sculpture to disturb me I have been reading "The return of the repressed" edited by Philip Larratt-Smith with a series of commissioned essays. There are two books.  The first holds Louise Bourgeois' own private notes that she wrote while undergoing psychoanalysis with Henry Lowenfeld which occurred on and off for thirty years.  The second is a companion guide that reflects on her psychoanalysis and her art from different contributors. 

At one point,  an essay (who) within the book describes how Louise was at times difficult and prickly.  The author believes this was because she would project her own anxiety into others creating a corresponding anxiety in them.  Her difficult emotions were also projected into her artwork. Louise Bourgeois herself stressed that it is not only the artist who creates from the unconscious, but the viewer must also work from the unconscious.  It is perhaps not surprising that I experienced some of the obvious emotional conflicts that Louise Bourgeois projected into her own artworks.

An invitation to experience rather than observe

When I think about the times I have seen her sculptures, I sense that she has invited me tantalisingly into her own emotional world.  I do not observe her work, I experience it.  I can walk around it and in the case of one of her large spiders - stand under it.  The sheer size of the spider gave me a sense of being trapped and overwhelmed. When I stood beneath it I felt I may be devoured or annihilated.

The exhibition at Heide Gallery, Melbourne Australia of her later works also invited the viewer in.  I was able to walk amongst her hanging headless bodies and walk into her jail like cell and under her spider.  Her installations invite you  quite literally to enter.  They force you to interact and through this to connect with her emotional experiences.

Other sculptures had movement created by the suspension. Suspended heads that slowly turned and moved. Hung almost domestically like washing on a clothes line. Domestic chores and dismemberment.  A disturbing image. A juxtaposition.

Conflicting material and conflicting emotions

Much like conflicting emotions Louise Bourgeois utilised conflicting materials. Her own clothes stuffed and hung from meathooks.  Soft warm fabric nestled in metal, glass or wood.  Latex and metal - like skin and bone.  Bodies attached to kitchen implements in place of heads or limbs.  Soft and hard.  Fluidity and rigidity.  Human and machine. 

Larratt-Smith (2012) states that her power as an artist lies in the 'unresolved and irresolvable contradictions between binary opposites.' (p.11) Kuspit (2012) believes her art has an 'uncanny, disorientating effect because it is innately paradoxical.' (p.22)

Containers for human pain and suffering

She created artworks that held her own emotional pain. Her themes seem to centre on the things that caused her great personal anguish.  Reflections of her childhood trauma, challenges with her mental health, passion, death, torture, dismemberment, sexuality, secrets, powerlessness, gender, murder are alluded to. They can be frightening to the viewer.

According to an essay titled 'Louise Bourgeois in Psychoanalysis with Henry Lowenfeld' written by Donald Kuspit, Louise (can I call her that?) was 'in desperate need of holding.' (Kuspit, 2012).  He details some of the periods in her life when she was profoundly depressed, agoraphobic and contemplating suicide.  Her art was her salvation.

Kuspit (2012) states that her artworks in whatever material she used are 'symptoms of her suffering.' (p.19)  He alludes to her art transcending  this pain by her embodiment of the suffering. 

Unapologetic honesty

Louise Bourgeois' art speaks of the unspeakable.  Sexuality, death, trauma,  It is unapologetic.  It does not care if we are offended, horrified, shocked, surprised or thrilled. Her art overts her innermost private thoughts - many of them violent or bizarre.  She brings the unbearable to her conscious through her hands. According to Larratt Smith (2012) she believes that the artist has a special ability to reach into the unconscious and express psychic truths in symbolic form.

Mitchell (2012) believed that keeping her memories raw and alive helped her to delve into her unconscious and take it one step further.  She makes concrete, through her art, what is unbearable and unknowable.  The transference of her feelings onto materials.  The brutality of her honesty is disturbing.   Mitchell (2012)describes this honesty in her art as true and real.


The following quotes from British artists

“	I walked in and just gasped and went, 'This is for me.' I love the juxtaposition of sinister, controlling elements and full-on macho materials with a warm, nurturing and cocoon-like feminine side. I gather she's had to deal with a lot of anger, jealousy and rage in her past but she still treats the female and the male with love and compassion - there's no silly anti-male thing in her work. You're allowed to feel in its presence. If I had to choose one thing she's done it would be one of the enormous penises, which I've always wanted to pick up and touch when the security guards weren't looking. They're tender and full of passion and love, and there's a little bit of comedy in there.	”
—Stella Vine, The Guardian[31]

“	I like the ways she speaks about her family and its tensions. When the work is very illustrative it interests me less, but I like that the fuel for the work is very emotional. She works in lots of different ways, and one of the most refreshing things is that you can't necessarily spot a Louise Bourgeois. That's the sign of a really good artist	”
—Richard Wentworth, The Guardian[31]

“	We're interested in Louise Bourgeois because of the way she archives memory in architecture. Her installations have a strong psychological tension within them, and I think we definitely cross over on that basis. The first time we came in contact with her was in the early Nineties when we went to an event at her studio in Brooklyn. We got to see the spider pieces she was working on before they showed in the Turbine Hall, and there were all these delicious cheeses and nibbles laid out within the work - you had to go underneath to get them. She struck us as being a pretty out-there kind of person.	”
—Jane and Louise Wilson, The Guardian[31] “  Louise goes further by including the viewer in the drama. The first show of hers that I saw, in New York at the end of the Seventies, involved parts of houses, … the paraphernalia of real life, and you could walk into them. I remember a staircase in the middle of a dim, dark room, with a little door in the side. You opened the door and there was a little blue rubber heart hanging on a hook under the stairs. That piece really stuck in my mind: there was something extremely secretive and fabulous about it.