Louise Bourgeois and the leap of faith

I love the way Louise Bourgeois talks about this sculpture, and about the people who can’t see it. And the leap of faith. Without the leap of faith you’re nothing; with it, you can do anything. (Of course she was also a great artist.)

Louise Bourgeois is a huge inspiration. She is the lesson in carrying on because carrying on is what you do: not in the sense of plodding forlornly, but as yourself, simply alive, doing your thing. She never made her name really properly until her sixties, but kept making her work as she made it, not “for the market.” The market caught up. Her work is still like no one else’s: it has a tremendous dignity and beauty, and variousness – and everyone can picture it, because her spiders literally became part of the landscape. In major cities round the world, her haunting Maman (and others) became part of people’s days as it stood in some open urban space – part natural longing and part street architecture – hard and uncompromising and monolithically, toweringly massive.

The extent to which her work is like no one else’s is  illustrated rather depressingly in my Google search this morning. Look at this! What’s it about?

Louise Bourgeois, Sculptor of Freaky Giant Spiders, Dies at 98

Louise Bourgeois, an American artist whose bizarre spiders and sexually graphic sculptures propelled her to worldwide…

Artist Louise Bourgeois, whose sculptures exploring women’s deepest feelings on birth, sexuality and death were highly influential on younger…

The French-born artist died in Manhattan Monday at the age of 98. In 2008, Peter Plagens wrote a really nice assessment of her retrospective at the…

Her studio’s managing director says artist Louise Bourgeois (burzh-WAH’) has died in New York City, after a lengthy career of exploring women’s…

Louise Bourgeois, whose sculptures explored a number of women’s issues, passed away today at the age of 98…

Bourgeois dies at 98, leaves behind famed sculptures… (What, like she forgot to take them with her?)

Now, this is ridiculous. Try this alternative: “Pablo Picasso (pick ASS oh), a freaky and crazy artist whose paintings explored men’s issues… whose work arose out of a masculist sensibility… Pablo Picasso, whose work explored men’s deepest feelings about sexuality, having children and death… wrote a really nice piece about his…” Can’t see it, can you? Though I’ve heard enough anti-Picasso jokes in my time.

Bourgeois’ work is tremendously mysterious and inner, even the huge things like Maman.  That spider, by the way, changed my life. Shifted it over a little bit. And LOOK:

Her work is both personal and utterly authoritative. She said, “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” As Adrian Searle says, “there are few artists who have claimed so outspokenly that their work has been founded in childhood and adolescence,” and it is in this ancient source that her real interiority is found, I think. Childhood is like the river bed.

In this Bourgeois was like many other really driven artists. I’m reminded of the poet Anthony Hecht, who had an ill brother and a depressed, careworn father (and indeed a sharp downturn in the family’s financial affairs). Bourgeois’ father had a mistress who was also the family’s live-in tutor, and when her mother succumbed to the influenza epidemic after the War, and Louise tended her, “this familial triangle of sexual infidelity and illness cast the young artist in the most inappropriate of roles—as voyeur, accomplice, and nurturer.” Her ideas about the abuse of the body and the closeness of mothers and children grew from that time. They were both, thinking about it, formalists of a kind; but Bourgeois explicitly stated that the qualities of the materials were not the business of the artist. Emotion is. And thinking about it, you could say she often chose materials for their communicative properties, not their plastic ones.

She works with bodies, not as a “feminist” but as a human being who inhabits one.  She makes figures out of fabric, some deformed-looking, that resemble voodoo dolls. (Dolls, by the way, have no status at all, but they are a very ancient and fascinating form. They’re integral to human expression.) She makes drawings, and sculptures that use line like drawings.

“What is a drawing?” asks Bourgeois. “It is a secretion, like a thread in a spider’s web . . . . It is a knitting, a spiral, a spider web, a significant organization of space.” She makes “drawings” out of fabric, using her clothes, linens, bedclothes. (Her parents restored tapestries, and when she was a child she restored tapestries too, embroidering fig leaves on for the prim clients. I’m willing to bet this was not “women’s work,” it was just work.

This interiority, I believe, transcends (even while it addresses) the boring limitations of gender, which is something those people in those newspaper articles can’t see. Looking beyond the famous biographical aspect, you can see humanity there, both danger and a need for protection, both of which come from inside us.

Adrian Searle has written a beautiful piece in the Guardian, and he more or less says what I wanted to say, so here he is:

Bourgeois made sculptures in all kinds of media; she made wonderful prints and drawings, created claustrophobic installations and fabricated little sewn dolls and giant metal spiders with equal care. She even recorded herself singing childhood songs, broadcast in an empty Venetian tower.

There were many-breasted creatures, beautifully carved marble hands, things that were sexual and strange and filled with secrets and barely suppressed violence. Refusing to describe herself as a feminist, she was one anyway. She has lessons for all artists alive now – inpersistence, commitment and individuality, and in the difference between art made as an adjunct to a career, and art borne out of inner necessity.

Bourgeois made great work and bad work, and didn’t care to choose. She even published her insomniac bedside drawings.

“My memories are moth-eaten”, she wrote recently, in a crabby hand, next to a beautiful, abstract drawing.

Here Jonathan Jones gives his ten essential works: please look.

Louise Bourgeois was born on Christmas Day 1911; she died aged 98 after a heart attack, in the same hospital in New York City that I was born in: my own childhood seedbed. She was working till last week.