Material Matters

Louise Bourgeois and the Question of Materiality

Dissertation submitted for the Special Degree of

B.A. Honours in History of Art

2010

Rachel May Walker

Table of contents

Introduction

1. Material Bodies

a. Louise Bourgeois and the Aesthetics of Touch

b. Second Skins: Flesh in Fabric and Latex

13

c. A Visceral Viscosity: from Eccentric Abstraction to Existentialism

19

2. Sex and the Medium

27

a. The Erotics of Carving

28

b. Sculptures in Fabric: Rewriting the Hierarchy of the Arts

31

Conclusion

37

Bibliography

39

List of Illustrations

43

Illustrations

45

"

INTRODUCTION
An artists words are always to be taken cautiously. . . . The artist who
discusses the so-called meaning of his work is usually describing a
literary side-issue. The core of his original impulse is to be found, if at
all, in the work itself.1
Louise Bourgeois

In the summer of 1982, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major

retrospective exhibition of the work of Louise Bourgeois the first retrospective given
to any living female artist at the institution. Perhaps even more surprisingly, this was
the first time that Bourgeois, who by then was aged seventy and had been exhibiting
her work for over forty years, had been awarded international recognition. One of the
effects of having all of her lifes work presented simultaneously was to draw attention
to what would become one of the defining features of Bourgeoiss art: that is, her
seemingly endless variety of sculptural materials and techniques, ranging from ancient
and traditional to the most up-to-date and unconventional. Deborah Wye, who
curated the exhibition, captured this aspect of Bourgeoiss sculpture when she wrote in
the shows accompanying catalogue:
Encompassing abrupt changes in medium and form, [Louise Bourgeoiss sculpture]
moves unexpectedly from rigid wood poles to amorphous plaster nests; from pliable
masses to stiff protrusions in rubber and plastic; from bulbous bronze configurations
hanging on hooks or chords to their reappearance in solid marble on sturdy bases,
from a tiny four-inch fetish pincushion to a room-size environment.2

For Wye, the main impulse behind the artists eclectic choice of media lay in her
affinities with Surrealism3. Though she moved to New York in 1938 after marrying
the American art historian Robert Goldwater, Bourgeois had grown up in Paris,
where she was born in 1911. As a student she lived above the Galerie Gradiva opened
by Andre Breton as a showcase for the Surrealists work, and it is indeed likely that
Bourgeois was influenced by the Surrealists formal vocabulary. Moreover Bourgeois,
despite having stated her dislike of being classed as a Surrealist4, has often explained
her art in terms of unconscious drives rooted in an early childhood trauma, namely
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Louise Bourgeois, Deconstruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews
1923-1997, edited by Marie Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (London: Violette
Editions, 1998), p. 15.
2 Deborah Wye, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), p. 11.
3 The Bourgeois exhibition at the MoMA was held shortly after the museumss Giorgio De
Chirico retrospective, and was succeeded, in the following year, by a retrospective of Joan
Miro, two important figures in French and Spanish Surrealism. It is likely that this timing
contributed to promulgating the idea that her art was inscribed within the Surrealist tradition.
4 Frances Morris (ed), Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing: 2007), p. 285.
Bourgeoiss main contention was based on the Surrealistss somewhat sexist assumption that
women are more in tune with the unconscious and are thus to be held up as an exotic riddle,
or muse.

her fathers ten-year-long affair with Bourgeoiss live-in English teacher, Sadie5.
According to Wye, Bourgeoiss art can only be understood by tracing the artists
personal themes, needs, and instincts, and her growing popularity as an artist should
be read as signaling an art public that had grown weary of the formalistic attitudes
championed by the Minimalists:
The overriding emphasis on stylistic analysis, prevalent for so long, no longer satisfied
the intellectual and emotional needs of the art public. Instead, personal content and
deeply felt themes were sought and explored. Bourgeoiss work spoke directly of these
new needs ().6

Though perhaps such a stance seemed appropriate at the time, Wyes

psychobiographical approach, which has since been adopted in much of the
subsequent writing on Bourgeois, seems somewhat limiting in retrospect. As a critic
noted even at the time, The revelation [of the artists childhood trauma] may or may
not explain the art but it sure snaps the dossier on Miss Bourgeois closed before it
could be fully opened7. A quarter of a century later, during a recent retrospective at
the Tate Modern in London, the same criticism was being made: The problem I have
with Bourgeoiss work, wrote a critic, is its literalness, the indexical symbolism that
has given her interpreters material for their academic frenzy8.
Recent scholarship, however, demonstrates a renewed interest in the formal
aspects of Louise Bourgeoiss work9. Consequently, her status has shifted from that of
an outsider operating on the fringes of modern and contemporary artistic
developments to one which acknowledges the important position of her art within the
major artistic debates of the twentieth century as well as its influence on a younger
generations of contemporary artists. The present study attempts to contribute to this
reevaluation, to this reopening of the Bourgeois dossier, by focusing on an aspect of
her sculpture which, whilst constituting one of the defining features of her art, has so
far eluded serious investigation: materiality. If material has often been a neglected
category in the discipline of art history10, the present paper will argue that looking
more closely at the different materials in Bourgeoiss work can greatly enrich our
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In 1982 Bourgeois published an article in Artforum titled Child Abuse (Artforum vol. 20 no. 4,
December 1982) where she revealed her fathers affair. The timing coincided with the
opening of her MoMA retrospective and was clearly aimed providing a psychobiographical
interpretation of her work.
6 Wye 1982, p. 11.
7 Vivien Raynor, Art: Louise Bourgeois closes her own dossier, The New York Times,
December 3, 1982 (retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com).
8 Richard Dorment, Louise Bourgeois: The shape of a childs torment, The Telegraph,
October 9, 2007 (retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk).
9 See, for instance the articles which appear in Frances Morriss 2006 exhibition catalogue
(Morris 2006). The contributions of Robert Storr (Lesprit Geometrique) and Alex Potts
(Hybrid Sculpture) in particular indicate a conscious effort to move away from the
biographical.
10 If addressed, the physical constituents of art works tend to be approached from the
perspective of technical history, and these technical accounts usually content themselves with
economically valuable materials. See Jack C. Rich, The Materials and Methods of Sculpture (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1947) and Nicholas Penny, The Materials of Sculpture (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993).
5

understanding of her oeuvre. It will also highlight some of the common

preconceptions about materials which affect this understanding, in an effort to
revealing the mutual relationship which exists between materiality and artistic
reception.
The paper is divided into two chapters. Chapter 1 will examine the
relationship between materiality and the body, both in the way the viewers body is
engaged by materials and how materials themselves can be used as bodily metaphors.
Chapter 2 will investigate the ways in which materials affect the gendering of
sculpture and it processes, and the implication of this gendering with respect to the
hierarchy of sculptural materials and of the arts.

CHAPTER 1

MATERIAL BODIES
For me, Louise Bourgeois states, sculpture is the body. My body is my
sculpture.11 The frequency with which this statement reappears in journals and
literature on Bourgeois is testimony to an acknowledgement of the crucial place which
the body occupies in Bourgeoiss art. And yet paradoxically, representations of human
bodies as we usually understand them figurative and whole rarely appear in
Bourgeoiss extensive sculptural oeuvre. The body for Bourgeois is always either
fragmented, deformed or completely metaphorical. Whilst a lot has been written
about how formal aspects of Bourgeoiss work have suggested notions of embodiment
(for example, through the recurrence of sexually suggestive contours), the importance
of materials in conveying notions of corporeality has been largely overlooked.
Drawing on the texts of Johann Gottfried Herder, Donald Kuspit and Jean-Paul
Sartre amongst others, the following chapter will explore some of the ways in which
materiality can both engage the body of the beholder and act as bodily metaphors
within the sculptures themselves.

a. Louise Bourgeois and the Aesthetics of Touch

Sculpture has long been considered a visual art. Louise Bourgeoiss sculpture,
however, is deeply tactile. One wants to do more than approach the work, reflects
one art critic; Again and again, one wants to touch12. Bourgeoiss early transition
from painting to sculpture emphasises the need for her art to express a tangible reality.
Painting, she asserted, doesnt exist for me. What was important for her was the
physical aspect of sculpture13, both its medium its sensual and tactile character
and its three-dimensionality and the stronger sense of reality that this made possible.
For the viewer, there is also a fundamental difference between apprehending a threedimensional sculpture and a two-dimensional painting. As Alex Potts writes, a freestanding sculpture tends to activate a more directly physical and bodily engaged
response from the viewer than a painting14. Of course, this idea is not new. In
Sculpture: Some Observations on Form and Shape from Pygmalions Creative
Dream, Herder was the first to articulate the differences between encountering a work
of painting and a sculpture. For Herder, the distinction could be grounded in the
senses required in perceiving these media. The sculptural, unlike the painterly, elicits
touch as well as sight, thus requiring a more physical engagement on the part of the
beholder. As Robert Norton explains in his study of Herder,
Although we learn to regard sculpture in purely visual terms, it exists in the sphere of
tangible physicality; our first, original acquaintance with the basic elements of
sculpture comes to us not through the eye, but through tactile experience. . . . The

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bourgeois 1998, p. 357. From an interview first published in 1998.
John Haber, Do Not Touch, 28 September 2008, www.haberarts.com
13 Bourgeois 1998, p. 184. From an interview published in the journal Arts in 1989.
14 Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. ix.
11

12

&

very material of sculpture does not merely represent forms and figures, it actually is
these objects themselves, partaking in the space occupied by the person experiencing
it.15

Furthermore, Herder challenges the traditional view that beauty is restricted to

objects of vision, instead maintaining that there is a specific concept of beauty
accessible to the sense of touch, one that is quite different from the beauty of things
seen. Using the example of blind peoples perception of objects, he argues that they
take genuine immediate pleasure in beautiful touch16.
Louise Bourgeoiss Blind Mans Buff (1984) (fig. 1) echoes Herders effort at
redressing the optical bias17 in our experience of sculpture by drawing attention to
the tactile properties of the material. The works title refers to a childrens game in
which a person wearing a blindfold chases the other players, guided only by sound or
touch, and recalls Constantin Brancusis Sculpture for the Blind (c. 1916) (fig. 2), a work
originally displayed in an enclosed bag with two sleeves through which hands could
enter, and so intended to be literally touched18. Though museum restrictions prevent
us from touching Blind Mans Bluff, the contrast between the rough surface of the
unworked marble and the apparent softness of the phallic or breast-like forms
burgeoning from the surface of the stone seems to visually recreate the dynamic of a
tactile exploration. While touching Brancusis sculpture would have drawn attention
mainly to the objects form, Bourgeoiss objects place a greater emphasis on
materiality. Furthermore, the contradiction between the sensual contours of the
protrusions and the cold hardness of the white marble appear to convey a sense of
movement, which the sculptures helicoid dynamic further emphasises. This
concentration on the tactile and motor seems to almost literally bring the dead stone
to life. It is, in David Sylvesters words, a haptic image, which though abstract makes
bodies look the way they feel. The works physicality, its sensual quality, is further
emphasised by its placement slightly under eye-level, which requires the viewer to
bend down and thus invites a close, intimate viewing.
Bourgeoiss concern with the tactile dimension of sculpture is further displayed
in a work of the same period, the bronze Untitled (Fingers) (fig. 3) of 1986. Again,
Brancusi is called to mind in the reflective polish of the bronze. Geist argues that
Brancusis polish recalls the movement of the hand but his highly, nearly obsessively
polished bronzes seem rather to express the artists desire to transcend their
materiality whilst denying tactile response on the viewers part - the slightest touch
would tarnish the polished surface. In Bourgeoiss work, however, the contrast
between the dark, unpolished bronze and the shiny bulbs or fingers, as Bourgeois
describes them, clearly attests to the process of touching, caressing and rubbing which
the material has undergone. Like the monument to Everard 't Serclaes located in
Brussels (fig. 4), of which certain parts have retained their shiny polish through
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
15 Robert E. Norton, Herders Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1991), p. 221.
16 Johann Gottfried Herder, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalions Creative
Dream, ed. and transl. by Jason Gaiger (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2002)
(originally published in 1778), p. 14.
17 To quote Jason Gaigers expression, in Herder 2002, p. 14.
18 Brancusi apparently described this sculpture as a revelation for the hands; see Sidney
Geist, Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture (London: Studio Vista Limited, 1968), p. 56.

'

tourists constant rubbing (which according to tradition brings good luck), Untitled
(Fingers) visually elicits a tactile response - again emphasised by the title, as in Blind
Mans Buff - and thus engages the viewer at a bodily level19. As such, this work
demonstrates Bourgeoiss ability to exploit literal matter in this case, bronze in
order to invoke the physical, material presence of sculpture and to create an interplay
between the object and the person apprehending it.
So far I have only looked at works in marble and bronze, classical media par
excellence which have long been associated with ancient sculpture and carry the same
connotations of ideal beauty in art. Though Herder characterised touch as a gateway
to the beautiful20, in Bourgeoiss work it is often not so much beauty as sheer curiosity
which seems to invite touch. The 1960s was a period of intense exploration into
materials for Bourgeois: she experimented with plaster, resin, latex, plastic and wax.
In her numerous Soft Landscapes of the period, she often made these soft materials
appear hard whilst retaining aspects of their former liquid state, as with Soft Landscape I
(1967) (fig. 5). This use of material as trompe loeil extends to Bourgeoiss most recent
work, with her 2007 Echo series consisting of bronze casts of discarded clothing and
fabric, stretched and draped into various forms (fig. 6). The bronze perfectly mimics
the texture of the textiles from which these objects are cast which Bourgeois has
further painted white, thereby disguising their actual material and confounding our
expectations of what they should feel like to touch. But perhaps one of the most
intriguing instances where Bourgeois plays on viewers tactile associations can be
found in her sewn and stuffed fabric pieces. Seven in Bed (2001) (fig. 7) consists of a line
of pink fabric dolls, made from roughly torn-up patches of cloth sewn together and
huddling on a simple white bed, which Lorna Collins likens to a toy made by a child
but also describes as double-headed hermaphrodites writhing in orgy21. The soft
fabric of the dolls brings forth associations of childhood comfort, and yet the
copulating figures are utterly unchildlike and quite disturbing. We see the traces of the
artists touch in the rough stitches and the figures are also touching each other. As
Collins writes,
This work comes forth from Bourgeoiss instinctive desire to express by palpating and
molding matter, which seems to gush out of the work as one looks. There is such
sensual poetry to the tactile in looking one desires to touch, and seeing becomes a
different kind of perception, rather like squashing and fondling, just as those figures
act out in front of me.22

The reactions which switch and interplay uncomfortably in ones perception when
faced with this work stem from the conflict between what we associate with soft,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It could further be argued that the relationship between the viewer and the object is
rendered somewhat ambiguous by the suggestive nature of the forms, which have often been
described as phallic or breast-like. Geist noted about Brancusis work that in most cases the
palping of sculpture is only a voyeurism of the hands (Geist 1968, p. 162). Whilst perhaps an
exaggeration when we consider Brancusis sculpture, this certainly seems to apply to much of
Bourgeoiss art.
20 Johann Gottfried Herder, Critical Forests: Fourth Grove, On Riedels Theory of the Beaux
Arts, in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, ed. and transl. by Gregory Moore (Princeton and
Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2006) (originally published in 1769), p. 210.
21 Lorna Collins, The Wild Being of Louise Bourgeois: Merleau-Ponty in the Flesh, Romance
Studies, Vol. 28 No. 1 (January 2010), p. 50.
22 Ibid., p. 51.
19

stuffed fabric and the sexually transgressive nature of the scene. Furthermore, the
work itself is encased within a steel and glass vitrine like a museum specimen23 which
is situated at eye level, and therefore the potential for tactility seems to be negated by
the presence of a physical barrier between the viewer and the work. But as Hilary
Robinson notes, even the glass vitrines do not prevent viewers from feeling a disquiet,
almost an embarrassment in this encounter as the fabric piece does not benefit from
the distancing mechanism24 which operates with other materials. To illustrate this
idea, it is instructive to note the contrast between fabric works that revisit older themes
and their antecedents. The highly polished bronze in Arch of Hysteria (1993) (fig. 8)
connotes a long tradition of figurative sculpture, and its reflective polish does not seem
to invite touch. But looking at the later Arched Woman (1999) (fig. 9), where the theme
of Arch of Hysteria has been translated into fabric, the tactile sculptures that we
associate with dolls - the original purpose of which is to be handled and touched means that despite being presented within a curatorial context they cannot be
distanced as objects and instead they only gain legibility as vital and present
meditations of an insistent subjectivity25. Robinson also points out that whereas the
bronze sculptures situate us safely in the realm of art, the gesture and methods of
production of the fabric figures are at the furthest remove from those high art
practices26. I will examine how Bourgeoiss use of fabric explores the dichotomies
between art and craft at a later stage, but what remains clear for now is that the tactile
qualities of materials can prove essential in determining the way we approach
sculptural objects, and that Louise Bourgeoiss works, as well as operating visually, are
also crucially concerned with an aesthetics of touch.

b. Second Skins: Flesh in Fabric and Latex

In the previous section I suggested some of the ways in which our sense of
touch can help inform our understanding of Bourgeoiss art, and how materials
constitute an essential component in the process of tactile perception. Building on this
idea, the next section will investigate how materials relate to what we must consider
the corollary to touch, the principal organ of tactile perception: that is, of course, skin.
In the hands of scholars, words like skin and flesh have often come to describe or
even act as substitutes for the materials from which the artworks are made. Thus
Allan Schwartzmann describes how the flesh tone of one of Bourgeoiss marble
pieces exudes a gentle warmth27 whilst Robert Storr argues that the skins of her
fabric figures suggest a race of Frankensteins28. Lorna Collins explains that some of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Frances Morris, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2007), p. 266).
Suprisingly, most photographs of Bourgeoiss fabric objects are cropped so as to cut out the
glass vitrines in which they are encased, thus removing what is surely an essential component
of these works.
24 Hilary Robinson, Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (New York: I.B.
Tauris & Co Ltd, 2006), p. 143.
25 Ibid., p. 144.
26 Ibid., p. 144.
27 Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff and Allan Schwartzman, Louise Bourgeois (New York and
London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2003) p.110.
28 Ibid., p. 88.
23

her bronze pieces express a most brute sense of flesh29; Briony Fer describes the latex
of Bourgeoiss 1960s works as skin-like, mostly like a shed skin with raw unfinished
edges30. These analogies and countless others suggest some sort of metamorphosis
within the works themselves, where the material, whether marble, fabric, bronze or
latex, somehow magically transforms itself into skin.
Donald Kuspits psychoanalytical investigation of the medium in his
Psychostrategies of the Avant-Garde proposes an intriguing view of the processes behind this
transformation. In his chapter Identification with the Medium: The Consolidation of
Matter, Kuspit discusses the importance of skin in avant-garde imagery by drawing
on the writings of French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu in his book The Skin Ego. For
Anzieu the skin fulfils three functions:
The primary function of the skin is as the sac which contains and retains inside it the
goodness and fullness accumulating there through feeding, care, the bathing in words.
Its second function is as the interface which marks the boundary with the outside and
keeps that outside out Finally, the third function . . . is as a site and a primary
means of communication with others, of establishing signifying relations; it is,
moreover, an inscribing surface for the marks left by those others.31

For Kuspit, the problem of avant-garde art is whether the skin can fulfill its function
as a barrier between the self and the outside world, whether the skin can stick to the
body or whether it is ripped open by the world, so that the contents of the body the
psychical as well as physical body spill out, in a general catastrophe of
disintegration.32 But the body in avant-garde art has become broken, fragmented and
conspicuously unhappy. The skin has failed to fulfill its function: it has become hard
and cold or mutilated and generally inhuman, representing the artists lack of
empathy for the body. The artist is now faced with repairing the damage:
The body and skin separately or together are clearly the ultimate avant-garde
medium, and avant-garde art increasingly becomes an attempt to resurrect a body
that is experienced as damaged if not dead, and give it a new skin that will function as
a boundary keeping the outside world out, once and for all.33

Bourgeoiss Three Horizontals (1998) (Fig. 10), like some of the previously discussed
fabric figures, are made using roughly stitched, stuffed fabric. Three pink figures are
laid out horizontally on a steel trolley, decreasing in size from top to bottom. The
figures are stuffed to the brink, and the white patches showing on the larger womans
surface make it look as if the figures insides are bursting through the seams. If the
rough stitching and vivid fabric recall muscles or flayed flesh34, then this image
provides a very concrete illustration of the catastrophe of disintegration Kuspit had
warned us about. Juxtaposing this work with Dorothea Tannings Nue Couche of 196970 (fig. 11), further emphasises the effects of Bourgeoiss treatment of fabric as
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Collins 2010, p. 52.
Briony Fer, Objects Beyond Objecthood, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2, Louise
Bourgeois (1999), p. 32.
31 Didier Anzieu, the Skin Ego (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 40.
32 Donald Kuspit, Psychostrategies of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University press,
2000), p. 141.
33 Ibid, p. 142.
34 Ann Coxon, in Morris, 2006, p. 286.
29
30

*+

mutilated flesh. While both artists use pink textile to represent skin, Tannings stuffed
and neatly stitched pastel-pink fabric evoke a nude of surprising vitality and sensuality.
Even though it is headless and only has two limbs, its skin seems impermeable and it
retains a sense of wholeness and integrity which is completely absent from Bourgeoiss
work. Furthermore, the stiffness of figures in Bourgeoiss piece makes them seem as
though they were in a state of rigor mortis: this is dead skin on a dissection table.
These stuffed figures and their flayed skin, as Linda Nochlin writes, make us
uncomfortable in our own skin, our human skin, which, these works remind us, are
only a temporary covering, after all, and a highly vulnerable one35.
Of all the materials in Bourgeoiss large repertoire, latex is probably the one
which is normally most closely associated to human skin. Adrian Rifkin clearly
demonstrates this idea when he asks, in relation to one of Bourgeoiss latex works,
is the piercing, the tiny, ugly stretching of the latex round a needle, a different gesture
from the carving of wood and stone . . . ? For after all, if the needle is withdrawn from
the latex, it will close and heal, like human flesh, but without the pain, and unlike the
marking of a stone or a piece of wood.36

Of course, latex does not actually heal when pierced, but this comment goes to show
just how deeply entrenched is the common association of latex to human flesh.
Perhaps it is the literalness of this association which makes us think of latex works as
ugly or repulsive whilst marble, which has traditionally been used in sculpture for
its ability to mimic skin, is considered beautiful. To illustrate this, I would like to
return to Herders previously cited text, to a passage where he discusses polychromy.
Herder explains his opposition to the colouring of statues, which he thinks renders
them ugly rather than beautiful, by asking a rather intriguing question: Would
Myrons cow please us more if it were covered in hair? The answer is no, since this
cow would look too real for the artist and yet not real enough for the herdsman: it is
too like a cow and not like a cow, that is to say, a phantom.37 The link between
Herders argument and Bourgeoiss use of latex is made clearer when we observe
Robert Mapplethorpes famous photograph of Bourgeois holding her 1968 sculpture
Fillette (fig. 12), taken on the occasion of her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of
Modern Art, for a portrait intended as the catalogues frontispiece. Focusing on the
bottom right corner of the image Mignon Nixon makes a very interesting remark:
The coarse, stubbled skin of the tip pushes through the V-shaped opening of a sleeve
fitted over the shaft, the ridges formed by its raised seam mimicking, in the pristine
limpidity of Mapplethorpes print, a crescent of skin traced out by the veins running
across Bourgeoiss fixed hand and elbow.38

Indeed, there is an uncanny resemblance between the raised seam of the sculptures
shaft and the hands tracery of veins. This rhyme of flesh, as Nixon describes it, blurs
the distinction between material and human skin, or rather, makes the latex appear as
though it were actually human flesh. Furthermore, Bourgeoiss gripping and touching
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Linda Nochlin, Old-Age Style: Late Louise Bourgeois, in Morris 2006, p. 188.
Adrian Rifkin, Louise Bourgeois: Reading the Sexual for Something Else, in Ian Cole
(ed.), Museum of Modern Art Papers Volume I: Louise Bourgeois (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art
Oxford, 1996), p. 35.
37 Herder 2002, p. 54.
38 Mignon Nixon, Posing the Phallus, October, Vol. 92 (Spring, 2000), p. 123.
35

36

**

of the objects emphasises its tactile quality: not only does the latex look like human
skin, it also feels (or appears to feel) the same. Confronting the actual work (fig. 13)
with this photograph in mind, as visitors in 1982 exhibition were (and as many people
viewing Fillette in the MoMA today probably still are, judging by the celebrity of the
photograph), we can almost imagine ourselves touching it. Alex Potts demonstrates
how seeing the work can convey a sense of its tactile quality when comparing Fillette to
Brancusis smoothly polished bronze Princess X (fig. 14) he writes that By contrast . . .
with the Brancusi, it does not have a reassuringly smooth surface the latex in certain
areas coagulates in awkward lumps, in places even peels away from its core, as if its
skin might stick to one rather than glide under ones touch.39 Again we are reminded
of Herder who states that
Statues must be kept free of much finer things than varnish and cow skin, for these
repel our sense of touch . . . The veins in the hands, the cartilage of the fingers, the
knee-pan must be softened and veiled in the fullness of the whole. If not, the silent
sense of touch that feels things in the dark will register the veins as wriggling worms
and the cartilage as protruding growths. . . . The blue veins beneath the skin that
pulse with life and surge with blood are visible to the eye; as something felt they are
nothing but cartilage and bone, devoid of blood or animate life. A living death
pervades them.40

Hence the lumps and veins which appear in the latex of Fillette are analogous to the
notional covering of Myrons cow with hair: they are too much like skin, but they are
not skin, and this ambiguity (and the fact that the object itself represents a castrated
penis strung up on a hook like a piece of meat in an old-fashioned butchers shop41) is
in part what makes this object so disturbing.

c. A Visceral Viscosity: from Eccentric Abstraction to Existentialism

When Bourgeois began making and exhibiting her latex pieces in the 1960s,
the corporeal quality of her forms and materials were sometimes interpreted as a
response to the rigid industrial aesthetic of minimalism. In 1966, she participated in
the exhibition Eccentric Abstraction at the Fischbach gallery in New York. Curated by
Lucy Lippard, by then a respected and widely published art critic, it also showed
sculptures by Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman and Don Potts, amongst others. Bourgeois
was much older than any of the other artists included in her exhibition, and it has
been argued that the literalness of the work she exhibited, which was not so much
allusive as representational42, set her works apart from those of other exhibiting
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Alex Potts, Louise Bourgeois: Sculptural Confrontations, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2,
Louise Bourgeois (1999), p. 45
40 Herder 2002, p. 54.
41 Potts 1999, p. 44.
42 Richard J. Williams, After Modern Sculpture: Art in the United States and Europe 1965-70
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 45. Williams argues that
Bourgeois was included as a keynote in the exhibition and that the explicitness of bodily
representation in her work was supposed to make such things more legible in the works by
other artists, a somewhat dubious claim which I do not think applies to the works exhibited in
Eccentric Abstraction.
39

*"

artists, many of whose art would later come to be termed broadly as Anti-Form or
Postminimalist. However, looking at one of the works Bourgeois contributed to
Eccentric Abstraction, Portrait of 1963 (fig. 15), we clearly have an abstract work which
certainly does not seem to fit into our conventional understanding of portraiture and
is certainly not literal. Like the later Fillette this piece is made of latex, and is actually
the cast-off mould of one of her plaster torsos, a highly abstract work itself.
Still, Bourgeois seems to have occupied something of a special position in the
exhibition, which I think is more accurately accounted for in Briony Fers thoroughly
thought-provoking article Objects Beyond Objecthood. Instead of dwelling on the
question of whether the objects themselves in Eccentric Abstraction contained elements of
corporeality, Fer proposes to study the different ways these objects have of situating
the subject or spectator within the field of vision. Comparing Bourgeoiss works to
some of the latex pieces Hesse contributed, Fer argues that whilst Hesses work
produces an effect of detachment or self-effacement where the subject is both
caught up and effaced in the work43, it is the way Bourgeoiss work stages or
performs its disintegrating effects that mark her out. The treatment of materials and
the different ways in which Bourgeois and Hesse utilise latex are central to Fers
argument. Hesse applied latex on like paint, and liked the translucence of the
material. For Bourgeois, on the other hand,
it was how the material seemed to perform the viscosity of the pouring, the event of
its malleable action of which she spoke: The poured form is stretched from the
inside and obeys the laws of gravity or the way hot wax poured into freezing water
will assume a unique shape. In Bourgeois, latex does not so much bear the mark of
touch it is not modelled as act out its previous liquidity, of wetness, of bodily
secretions which make the skin [or] surface bulge and almost leak or seep out.44

The treatment of latex in Portrait exemplifies this disintegrating effect in that it

displays the quality of an inside of something45. Michael Kelly echoes this
observation when he writes that Portrait, in its glistening viscosity and shapelessness,
evoke[s] not the architecture of a body but the fluidity of its internal matrix46. If the
latex in Fillette is evocative of skin, in Portrait it takes on a much more visceral
character. As Lucy Lippard had already commented at the time,
The internal-external, earthly-visceral aspects of Louise Bourgeoiss flexible latex
moulds imply the location of metamorphosis rather than the act. Her work is less
aggressively detached and more poetically mature than that of the younger artists, but
like them, she does not ignore the uneasy, near-repellent side of art.47

However, I would argue that it is less the disintegrating effect of Bourgeoiss latex
objects which make them revolting or repulsive than the very nature of their
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fer 1999, p. 36.
Ibid, p. 32.
45 Ibid, p. 32. Fer notes how phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty once described how we
can imagine parts of the body that we have never seen and how certain people could
hallucinate their own face seen from inside (Maurice de Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of
Perception (Routledge: London and New York, 1962), p. 149.)
46 Michael Kelly, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Volume 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),
p. 306.
47 Lucy R. Lippard, exhibition announcement, Eccentric Abstraction, Fischbach Gallery
(New York, 1966), quoted in Deborah Wye, p. 24
43
44

*#

materiality. Fer touches upon this when she describes the behaviour of latex, its
appearance as somewhere in between liquid and solid, and most importantly, its
viscosity48. It was the existential phenomenologist Jean-Paul Sartre who, in his
seminal philosophical treatise LEtre et le Nant (Being and Nothingness, 1943), first
offered a theorisation of what he termed in French le visqueux, translated as viscosity,
stickiness, or as is more often the case, slime.
But before embarking on a discussion of how Sartres concept of the visqueux
manifests itself in Bourgeoiss work, it is worth making a few preliminary remarks.
Although Bourgeois is often considered an American artist49, she was born in France
and lived in and around Paris until the age of 26. We tend to forget that she was part
of the same generation as some of the great existentialist thinkers, including Sartre,
Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. She read many of their works and often cites
passages of their texts in interviews when she talks about her own life and her art50. In
a 1995 interview for the catalogue of an exhibition being held in Paris, when asked to
comment on the iconography of one of her works Bourgeois replied:
Its funny, you ask me what I think of it, but what counts for me is the effect it has on
others. . . . Id like to tell you something Im sorry but its very important. Rosalind
Krauss, who is a great Francophile, has got it into her head that Im a Surrealist.
[This frustrates me], because Im bending over backwards to explain to you that Im
an Existentialist.51

There are many ways in which existentialist theory manifests itself in Bourgeoiss art,
and though not all can be discussed here, it seems that Sartre, in particular, exerted an
important influence. Of course she did not always agree with what he wrote52 but she
engaged with his ideas, even naming one of her pieces, No Exit (1989), after one of his
plays.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The terms viscous and viscosity are very often used to describe Bourgeoiss latex works.
See, in addition to the previously cited examples of Briony Fer and Mark Kelly, Frances
Morris, Louise Bourgeois (p. 272). Mieke Bal has even described one of Bourgeoiss marble
works, Cumul I (1969) as visually representing viscosity (Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeoiss Spider: The
Architecture of Art-Writing (Chicago and London: University of Chicage Press, 2001), p. 69.)
49 Bourgeois moved to the United States in 1938 after marrying the American art historian
Robert Goldwater. She became a US citizen in 1951, and her work is now included in most
surveys of twentieth century American sculpture.
50 During the war (and with the help of Marcel Duchamp) Bourgeois curated the exhibition
Document France 1940-1944: Art-Literature-Press of the French Underground at the Norlyst Gallery
which included works by Sartre. Sartre first appears in Bourgeoiss diaries in 1945 and Camus
the year after. Bourgeois called Sartres Les Mots (Words) the most beautiful work I know and
often refers to passages in Camuss LEtranger (The Stranger). Of Simone de Beauvoir,
Bourgeois states: I read Simone de Beauvoir and I approve. I feel like a sister. What she says
is true. See Morris 2006, pp. 117- 118.
51 Bourgeois 1998, p. 302. The section in brackets is my translation; it appears in the text as
Im a bit embarrassed by that. However judging by the tone of the comment it seems fairly
certain to have been mistranslated from the French embarasser which does not mean to
embarrass but to frustrate.
52 For example, she opposed Sartres idea, expressed in Huis Clos (No Exit) that Hell is other
people. According to Bourgeois, Hell is the absence of others thats hell. (Bourgeois 1998,
p. 143.)
48

*$

The next piece I would like to examine, Le Regard (The Look or The Gaze)
of 1966 (fig. 16), bears the same title of one of the subsections of Being and
Nothingness. This could of course be a coincidence, but the work seems to exemplify
Sartres notion of the viscous which he discusses in one of the most famous passages
of his treatise. For Sartre, the viscous (or slime) is a condition of matter that he
analyses as neither liquid nor solid, but somewhere midway between the two. A slow
drag against the fluidity of the liquid, this flaccid ooze may have some of the qualities
of a solid but does not have its resistance; instead, it clings stickily to the fingers,
sucking them in and compromising them:
I open my hands, I want to let go of the slimy and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks
at me. Its mode of being is neither the reassuring inertia of the solid nor a dynamism
like that in water which is exhausted in fleeing from me. . . . There is something like a
tactile fascination in the slimy. . . . But it is a trap. . . . To touch the slimy is to risk
being dissolved in its sliminess.53

Like Sartres slime, the latex in Le Regard is simultaneously soft and resistant, it is solid
but appears to act out its former liquidity. The latex has actually been poured onto
cloth, and the fleshy texture of its brown bulbous shape protrudes folds and wrinkles
as the latex sticks and slickens into the cloths threads, giving the impression of a
mucus membrane evoking the wet/dry interplay that constantly shifts as globules of
thickness catch the light54. A slit in the upper surface suggests a labial interior55
which like Sartres slime seems to want to suck the subject in like a leech. We notice
there is something trapped inside it, as though in the process of dissolving in the
objects solidifying viscosity (I may dissolve in the slime precisely because the slimy is
in process of solidification56). But as its title makes clear, the object is primarily an eye
which, by looking out at the subject and returning their gaze, heightens and
dramatises their experience of viewing. Sartre and the existentialists were interested
in experience, Louise Bourgeois notes. With words, you can say anything. . . . But
you cannot lie in the re-creation of an experience57.
As well as demonstrating the ambiguity between soft and hard or the inside
and outside of bodies, materiality, in Bourgeoiss work, can also be used to represent
bodily processes, which according to Bourgeois are analogous to the kinds of processes
that materials undergo. As she writes,
Content is a concern with the human body, its aspect, its changes, transformations,
what it needs, wants and feels its functions.
What it perceives and undergoes passively, what it performs.
What it feels and what protects it its habitat.
All these states of being, perceiving, and doing are expressed by processes that are
familiar to us and that have to do with the treatment of materials, pouring, flowing,
dripping, oozing out, setting, hardening, coagulating, thawing, expanding,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, transl. and ed. by
Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1957), pp. 609-611.
54 Collins 2010, p. 52.
55 Lucy Lippard, Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside Out, Artforum, March 1927, p. 27, cited
in Morris, p. 242.
56 Sartre 1957, p. 610.
57 Bourgeois1998, p. 230.
53

*%

contracting, and the voluntary aspects such as slipping away, advancing, collecting,
letting go 58

Her latex works of the 1960s and her numerous Soft Landscapes in latex, plastic,
plaster, resin and wax clearly demonstrate Bourgeoiss intense interest in the
behaviour of materials, but it was not until the 1990s that these material processes
were explicitly linked with the working of the human body. The 1992 installation
Precious Liquids (fig. 17), presented at Documenta IX in Kassel consists of a cedar-wood
water tower, in the centre of which is a cast-iron bedstead surrounded by metal stands
bearing hollow glass vessels. Bourgeois has described the glass as metaphors for the
muscles of the body: when we are in a tense state, our muscles tighten; when they
relax and the tension goes down, a liquid is released. Intense emotions become
physically liquid a precious liquid59. But despite Bourgeoiss characterisation of
these liquids as precious, the sweat, blood, vomit, semen, urine, tears, milk that the
piece conjures up are, as Charlotta Kotik notes, jarringly unprecious60. Instead, they
seem to announce the emergence of abject art, which gained prominence after the
1993 exhibition at the Whitney Museum Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art.
Developed by Julia Kristeva in her 1980 book Powers of Horror, the concept of
abjection focuses on bodily processes and disgust and emphasises female procreative
functions and the ambiguity between what is situated inside a body and outside61.
Marie-Laure Bernadac has noted how the puddle of stagnant water on the bed in
Precious Liquids evokes the amniotic fluid of birth62, which brings to mind Kristevas
notion of maternal abjection and the primary rejection of birth when one body is
expelled from another63. The contrast between the glass muscles and the liquid
bodily fluid confuses the border which separates the inside and the outside of the
body, and thus they correspond closely to the preoccupations of contemporary avantgarde art which explores an aesthetic of bodily transgression, often symbolically
enacted on the female body64.
If Le Regard appears to look back to the existentialist theories of her natal
France, Precious Liquids demonstrates that Bourgeoiss art is still firmly rooted in the
present and actively engages with contemporary concerns surrounding abjection and
the female body. The next chapter will further investigate the ways in which
Bourgeois uses materiality and material processes to address ideas of gender and
sexuality.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bourgeois1998, p. 76. From notes for a lecture, late 1960s.
Bourgeois 1998, p. 235. From an interview published in1993 in Artforum, vol. 32 no. 1, pp.
86-7, 127.
60 Charlotta Kotik, Terrie Sulten and Christian Leigh, Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory.
Works 1982-1993, exh. cat. (New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1994), pp. 65-68.
61 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, transl. by Leon S. Roudiez (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 12-18.
62 Marie-Laure Bernadac, Louise Bourgeois, transl. by Deke Dusinberre (Paris: Flammarion
Contemporary, 2006), p. 142.
63 Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-Bind (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 12.
64 Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (New York and
Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), p. 135.
58

59

*&

CHAPTER 2

SEX AND THE MEDIUM

It has often been argued that one of the central issues in Louise Bourgeoiss
work concerns the mutability of gender. The bulbous forms in works like Blind Mans
Buff have been read as simultaneously phallic and breast-like65, whilst Fillette, with its
vaginal opening at the foot of the shaft and its title signifying little girl, has also been
interpreted as representing a collapse of the opposition between male and female66.
But how, if at all, does materiality affect our ideas about the gendering of sculpture?
According to Nicholas Chare in his recent article Sexing the Medium: Calling on the
Canvas,
Medium is never gender neutral. Both the artists and the art historians relationship
to the substances out of which art objects are crafted is, and probably always has
been, mediated by values and assumptions about the sexes. These beliefs are often
disavowed and unacknowledged in the writing of art history, yet have held
prominence for artists and critics in the past and continue to influence attitudes
towards artistic media today.67

By examining works in marble and fabric, the following chapter will explore the ways
in which Bourgeoiss use of materials often subverts these assumptions about the
sexes whilst at the same time destabilising the hierarchical distinction between art
and craft.

a. The Erotics of Carving

Sleep II (1967) (fig. 18) is one of Bourgeoiss earliest works in marble. Presented on
a base consisting of two blocks of timber, its stacked, sloping cylindrical form
resembles a phallus which has collapsed onto itself and has been described by Robert
Storr as a fairly straightforward representation of a limp penis . . . and as such, a
rather tender portrayal by a woman of a mans impotence or post-coital
detumescence. Material does not enter into Storrs interpretation, yet further analysis
demonstrates that the marble should not be read as a simple vehicle of meaning but
rather possesses meaning in its own right. Firstly, it is noteworthy that marble used in
Sleep II, as in most of Bourgeoiss marble sculptures, originates from the quarries of
Carrara in Italy which are famous for having attracted the likes of Michelangelo,
Bernini and Canova, who prized Carrara marble for its special translucence. Marble
is generally associated with tradition and masculinity it was, after all, the medium
used by Myron and Praxiteles, whose works have come to embody the ideals of
beauty and art. To represent a limp penis out of such a noble material which we
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bernadac 2006, p. 125.
Morris 2006, p. 146.
67 Nicholas Chare, Sexing the Medium: Calling on the Canvas, Art History Vol. 32 No. 4
(September 2009), p. 667.
65
66

*'

have come to associate with some of the great (male) masters of sculpture can be
understood as a provocation in itself. Secondly, relationship between form and matter
has often been characterised as one of gendered opposition, where form is related to
the male and exists prior to its feminised complement, matter. Aristotle was the first to
articulate this conception when he wrote that
Form is better and more divine in its nature than the Matter, it is better also that the
superior one should be separate from the inferior one. That is why wherever possible and
so far as possible the male is separate from the female, since it is something better and
more divine in that it is the principle of movement for generated things, while the female
serves as their Matter.68

In the context of sculpture, this viewing of form and matter in gendered terms is
epitomised in the myth of Pygmalion, where the sculptor is represented as the
masculine giver of form who animates the female matter through the power of his
creative genius. Placed within this context, Bourgeoiss Sleep II emerges, not as a
tender portrayal of a retreating phallus, but as a radical reversal of the Pygmalion
fantasy: in Bourgeoiss hands, the woman/artist becomes the creator of the
phallus/man. The title, as well as referring to the flaccid state of the penis, can be
interpreted as referring specifically to the material, thus implying the artists role in
bringing the material back to life, as suggested by Bourgeois herself when she states
that [t]o talk about the sleep of the material is a wonderful image you have to
wake it, to wake the material up69. In a photograph taken during her 1982
retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, we see Bourgeois in a gallery posing with
her work, one foot placed on the sculptures wooden base, the other resting on top of
the statue, with a terrific grin on her face (fig. 19). The photograph clearly conveys
Bourgeoiss sense of triumph, as though she had defied gendered categorisations by
asserting her female dominance over the marble and over the phallus.
Returning to Pygmalions myth, not only does it portray the distinction
between matter and form as feminine and masculine, it also demonstrates that the
sculptural process itself has long been characterised as a masculine activity. As
Nicholas Chave has brilliantly argued, historically when an artistic activity has
required substantial physical exertion it has often been characterized as masculine.
Michelangelo associated fresco painting with masculinity because it was a substantially
physical undertaking. By contrast, as Chare explains in his life of Sebastiano
Viniziano . . . Giorgio Vasari famously quotes Michelangelo as having denounced oil
painting as a womans art only fit for lazy well-to-do people. So fresco painting in the
Renaissance is a mans work because it requires endurance, strength, the ability to
tolerate and transcend discomfort70. As Chare notes, the meanings impressed upon,
or within, these materials shift with time71, but if painting has mostly lost the
gendered associations which it carried in the Renaissance, carving has retained its
status as a masculine activity well into the modernist period. For instance, British
modernist sculptors characterisation of direct carving as an exclusively masculine
endeavour can be read as a continuation of this tradition. As David Getsy has argued,
[a]s modernist conceptions of direct carving were formulated around the works of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Cited in Patricia L. Reilly, The Taming of the Blue: Writing Out Colour in Italian
Renaissance Theory, in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard Expanding Discourse: Feminism
and Art History (New York: Icon Editions), p. 88.
69 Cited in Morris 2006, p. 174.
68

*(

Epstein, Gaudier Brezska, and Gill, the sculptors physical negotiation of the
materiality of sculpture was depicted in gendered terms72. Indeed, Eric Gill once
described the physical exertion of carving as a substitute for the sex he was unable to
have with his pregnant wife73. Bourgeois has often described the process of carving as
an aggressive attack on the material. In an interview in 1989, she stated that her
decision to work in marble
stems form the fact that the aggressive side of my nature liked the resistance of the
stone. . . . [T]he resistance that must be overcome in stone is a stimulation; like the
fact that puritans attract me sexually because theyre a formidable challenge. Its
almost playing with the impossible.74

Bourgeois, like Gill, thus explains the activity of carving in sexual terms, in a radical
reversal of roles where the female sculpture becomes the sexual predator whilst the
stone takes on the role of the male object of aggression. Alex Potts rightly remarks that
in practice, Bourgeois would often not have carved most of her finished works herself,
particularly those in marble, so processes of aggression she had in mind were often
more imagined than real75. But the fact that she chooses to describe the carving
process in these terms plays a fundamental part in highlighting and destabilizing the
erotics of carving as they have been constructed historically.

b. Sculptures in Fabric: Rewriting the Hierarchy of the Arts

Throughout Bourgeoiss oeuvre, it is common to see early subjects reappear at a
later stage in a number of different media, the interval between the versions
sometimes extending over decades. When asked by William Rubin to state her
feelings about traditional materials like marble and bronze used for final versions and
their relationship to the materials used in building up the works, Bourgeois replied
that she prized bronze and marble for their permanence, but insisted that ultimately
the only thing that counts is whether the result has plastic validity76. If Rubins
question illustrates the common conception that traditional materials denote finality
whilst soft materials plaster, latex, clay are only used in preliminary versions, in
Bourgeoiss oeuvre all of these objects constitute works of art in their own right.
Moreover, in the 1990s Bourgeois started producing new versions of her earlier works
using a range of colourful fabrics and recycled fragments of seventeenth-century
tapestries - materials which are obviously less permanent than marble and bronze thus reversing the usual soft-to-hard progression.
Despite the fact that these fabric works have emerged as the final outcome of a
long series of material translations, whenever they are mentioned in scholarly texts
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chare 2009, p. 675.
Ibid., p. 673.
72 David Getsy, Body Doubles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 185.
73 Ibid., p. 185.
74 Bourgeois 1998, p. 184. From an interview published in 1989 in Arts, vol. 63 no. 7, pp. 6875.
75 Alex Potts, Hybrid Sculpture, in Morris 2006, p. 261.
76 Bourgeois 1998, pp. 81-2. From an interview for an article published in April 1969 in Art
International, vol. 8, pp. 17-20.
70
71

*)

they are inevitably associated with a sense of weakness or frailty, not, as one would
expect, because of their fragile nature, but because of the perceived fragility of their
creator in her old age. Thus for Linda Nochlin, writing for the exhibition catalogue of
Bourgeoiss 2007 retrospective at the Tate Modern, Seven in Bed becomes as
spectacular evidence of the sexually powered inventiveness of Bourgeoiss old-age
style, comparable to Renoirs series of late Bathers, the only other artist to infuse such
amounts of frustrated, displaced desire into pink, naked bodies77. Others have seen
Bourgeoiss practice of using textiles as a means of reconstructing memories of her
early life: for Marie-Laure Bernadac, they signify a return to childhood78. The
medium of fabric is thus seen as either geriatric or regressive, and never as a sign of
the vitality of Bourgeoiss ongoing artistic production. What this demonstrates is that
textiles and fabric carry deep-rooted associations which clearly have an impact on the
way these works have been understood and interpreted.
It is often accepted that painting and sculpture constitute art whilst weaving,
even when the object produced is non-functional, is decoration or craft. According
to Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker in their 1981 Old Mistresses: Women, Art and
Ideology, the art and craft division can appear on different levels: it can be read on
class lines, but crucially for the present study, there is an important connection
between the new hierarchy of the arts and sexual categorisation, male-female79. The
spectre of domestic art is menacing for women because high art and the fine artist
have come to mean the direct antithesis for all that is defined by the feminine
stereotype80. Art which is made of materials like thread and textiles and which uses
processes like weaving and stitching which have long been associated with the
domestic sphere face the danger of being relegated to the domain of craft. Isabelle
Bernier similarly observes how in the modern Western ideology, an association with
women . . . is almost invariably accompanied by a fall in the status of the art form.
Moreover, according to Bernier whenever an art form is practiced by both men and
women its supposedly superior mode is usually reserved for men while its banal
mode falls to women. Berniers argument is convincing: she cites the culinary arts,
sewing and tapestry as some of the many cases where this phenomenon occurs, and
shows how it is also exemplified in language constructs81. It is no wonder then that as
Nochlin remarks Claes Oldenburg immediately springs to mind82 when we think of
the modern tradition of sewn, soft sculpture, even though the women working with
soft materials in the 1960s substantially outnumbered men83. Robert Morris also used
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nochlin, in Morris 2006, pp. 189-94.
Bernadac 2006, p. 158.
79 Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts, Old
Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 51. !
80 Pollock and Parker 1981, p. 80.
81 For example, the word tapisserie in French is defined in the Petit Robert as two distinct kinds of
work: a work of art and a work done by women, thus implying that the two cannot coincide.
Isabelle Bernier, In the Shadow of contemporary art (1986), in Hilary Robinson, FeminismArt-Theory: An Anthology, 1968-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001), pp. 41-3.
82 Nochlin, in Morris 2006, p. 190.
83 See Dona Z. Meilach, Soft Sculptures and Other Soft Art Forms (New York: Crown Publishers,
1974). The book is mainly technical but it is interesting in that it identifies a large number of
disparate artists working in fabric and other soft materials in Europe and America in the
1960s, most of whom are women. Claes Oldenburg is often cited as an influence: it could be
the case that the example of a man working in soft media in a way legitimized the practice
77
78

"+

felt sculptures, yet as is the case for Oldenbergs the use of these materials is
accounted for on theoretical grounds84, and these objects have thus acquiring an
intellectual validation which is absent from the Old Age Style accounts of
Bourgeoiss use of textiles.
According to Pollock and Parker, the ideology which holds this gendered
system in place is not a conscious process but its effects are reproduced not only in
the way art is discussed, the discipline of art history, but in the works themselves.
However, I want to suggest that Bourgeoiss works in fabric do not reproduce this
ideology, but instead disrupt its very premises. As early as 1969, Bourgeois stated her
attitudes towards the medium of fabric and its relation to sculpture in a review of the
exhibition Wall Hangings at the Museum of Modern in New York85. Asked whether
she though the objects on show reach[ed] towards the space of sculpture, Bourgeois
replied that they fell somewhere between fine and applied art:

I feel that though [the exhibition] showed very fine weaving, it could have been a little
wilder. . . . I could think, for instance, of all kinds of turned shapes cubes or any
three-dimensional forms that could have been used. The pieces in the show rarely
liberate themselves from decoration and only begin to explore the possibilities of
textiles.86

In the same interview, Bourgeois explains her own childhood association with
tapestries growing up in Aubusson, where the women wove and the men cut stone in
the quarries87. Taken together, these comments reveal that Bourgeois shared the
same underlying assumptions delineated by Pollock and Parker and which equate
sculpting to masculinity and art, and weaving to femininity and craft. But if at the
time Bourgeois saw the medium of weaving incompatible with the art of sculpture,
thirty years later her attitude appears to have taken a drastic turn. In 2001, Bourgeois
produced a series of monolith made up of cushion-like segments that were sewn,
stuffed and deployed around hidden armature (fig. 20), thus giving concrete shape to
the ideas she had put forward thirty years earlier and effectively turning craft (woven
materials) into art (sculpture). Bourgeois had employed the monolith form in her
earliest sculpture for her Personages series, many of which bear significant formal
similarities with the later ones (figs. 21 and 22). These early works enabled her to have
her first solo exhibition at the Peridot Gallery in New York in 1949, and one of them,
Sleeping Figure (1950), was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art shortly after, the
first of her works to enter a museum collection. These early monoliths were therefore
key to Bourgeoiss emergence onto the male-dominated New York art scene, and the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
for women artists, although most of those mentioned in the book are relatively unknown
today.
84 Morris and Oldenburgs soft sculpture are often seen as a theoretical attack on formalist
ideas of sculpture championed by Minimalism, and are thus interpreted as essentially
conceptual works. See Williams 2000, pp. 18-38.
85 Bourgeois 1998, pp. 87-91. From an article first published in March-April 1969 in Craft
Horizons, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 30-5.
86 Bourgeois 1998, p. 89.
87 Bourgeois 1998, p. 87.

"*

acquisition of Sleeping Figure effectively signaled her entry into the canon of art
history. The effects of translating these early sculptures into fabric half a century later,
when her reputation as an artist has been seriously established, are thus rather
ambiguous. On the one hand, this can be read as a validation of the use of fabric as a
sculptural material. But on the other, it can also be seen as calling into question the
hierarchy of materials and the hierarchy of art forms: these works are woven but they
are also assembled, they are tapestry as well as sculpture, craft as well as art. This is
especially true of the pieces made using fragments of recycled tapestry. In Untitled
(2001) (fig. 23), the battered state of the tapestry pieces, roughly sewn together using
purple thread and clearly hand crafted gives it an air of domesticity which is
discordant with the characters of tradition and monumentality we usually associate to
the monolithic form. The object is also feminine and masculine: it combines the
feminine activity of weaving and the phallic structure of the column.
The textile version of Fragile Goddess (fig. 24) similarly makes us question the
distinctions between art and craft and between masculine and feminine artistic
production. The work, made out of pink fabric, is a reinterpretation of a bronze
version of 1969 (fig. 25). The earlier Fragile Goddess is in itself a highly ambiguous
work. The title is an obvious acknowledgement of the objects source in the Paleolithic
past, namely the Venus of Willendorf, a statuette which is held as evidence of a time
when women held leading positions in society and were worshipped as primary
exemplars of the divine88. But Fragile Goddess is headless: it would appear as though the
head of the Venus of Willendorf had been removed and replaced instead with a
pointed-like, somewhat phallic top. According to Anne Wagner, the issue here for
Bourgeois evidently . . . is whether the notion of a female creativity as plenitude
somehow forces the return of phallic form as the vehicle for a new confidence89. If
this is the case, what happens when the object is transferred to pink fabric? The
question remains unresolved, but the fact that it can be asked demonstrates that
moving beyond a limited concern with a works obvious subject matter to engage with
the import of its medium and technique can potentially offer great insights into the
significance of gendered materiality in our understanding of sculptural works.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Godesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History
(London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), p. 3.
89 Anne Wagner, Bourgeois Prehistory, or the Ransom of Fantasies, Oxford Art Journal, Vol.
22 No. 2, Louise Bourgeois (1999), p. 13.
88

""

CONCLUSION
Now in her 99th year, Louise Bourgeois has an almost biblical lifespan of
stories told, repeated, refined and recast. Their constant flux and ever-increasing
proliferation have fostered a critical literature on Bourgeois that consists
preponderantly, and to a detrimental effect, of recapitulations of and psychoanalytic
commentaries on these stories. Their mesmerizing textuality has distracted people
from, and in some cases blinded them to, the manifest physical and perceptual
realities of Bourgeoiss art. If, as Bourgeois tells us, an artists words are always to be
taken cautiously, I hope that by sidestepping narratives and returning to her
sculptures basic grammar its materiality I have demonstrated that meaning, or at
least a meaning, can still be found within the work itself.
As we have seen, there are several reasons why Bourgeoiss oeuvre lends itself
well to a study of materiality. With respect to materials and the body, the huge range
of materials which Bourgeois has made use of throughout her artistic career enables us
to compare how different media and the ways in which they are used can operate on
distinct, if interrelated, levels of corporeality. From touch to skin and from flesh to
viscera, materials in Bourgeoiss art prove essential in engaging the viewer on a bodily
level. Though temporally and geographically disparate, the texts which I have drawn
on throughout the first chapter have in common the fact that they emphasise the
subjective experience of materiality. By relating them to Bourgeoiss work, I hope to
have shown that these writings can yield new insight into how and why materials as
varied as marble, fabric and latex affect us the way they do.
As the second chapter has shown, the significance of materials does not only
have to do with their inherent qualities: it is also shaped by the social and historical
connotations which are attached to them, particularly in relation to gender. If the
study of gender within art history has been predominantly structured around analyses
of the sex of the artist, the sex of the audience, and sexed subject matter, materials
themselves are never gender neutral. By translating the same subject into different
materials, Bourgeoiss sculpture draws attention to their gendered nature, often
subverting it in the process. Thus in Bourgeoiss hands, carving marble becomes a
mode of female aggression which is no longer associated with virility, whilst the
traditionally feminine activity of weaving is freely incorporated into sculpture, forcing
us to question the hierarchies of art forms and materials in their most fundamental
sense.
As contemporary artistic practice demonstrates, the range of sculptural
materials has become almost as broad as art itself. New material technologies have
enabled sculptors to pursue a relentless exploration into the possibilities of their
medium. The study of sculptural materiality provides a fertile ground for
investigation; I hope the present paper has provided an insight of some of the ways it
can be addressed. If material clearly matters, the question of materiality still remains
an open one.

"#

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books
Anzieu, Didier, the Skin Ego (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989)
Bal, Mieke, Louise Bourgeoiss Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing (Chicago and
London: University of Chicage Press, 2001)
Barnes, Hazel E., Sartre (London: Quartet Books Limited, 1974)
Bernadac, Marie-Laure, Louise Bourgeois, transl. by Deke Dusinberre (Paris:
Flammarion Contemporary, 2006)
Betterton, Rosemary, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (New York and
Abingdon: Routledge, 1996)
Bourgeois, Louise, Deconstruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and
Interviews 1923-1997, edited by Marie Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist
(London: Violette Editions, 1998)
Cole, Ian (ed.), Museum of Modern Art Papers Volume I: Louise Bourgeois (Oxford: Museum
of Modern Art Oxford, 1996)
Crone, Rainer and Petrus Graf Schaesburg, Louise Bourgeois: The Secret of the Cells
(Munich, London and New York: Prestel Verlag, 2008)
Geist, Sidney, Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture (London: Studio Vista Limited, 1968)
Getsy, David, Body Doubles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)
Herder, Johann Gottfried, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalions
Creative Dream, ed. and transl. by Jason Gaiger (Chicago and London: Chicago
University Press, 2002)
Kelly, Michael, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Volume 1 (New York: Oxfor University Press,
1998)
Kotik, Charlotta, Terrie Sultan and Christian Leigh, Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of
Memory. Works 1982-1993, exh. cat (New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1994)
Kuspit, Donald, Psychostrategies of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University
press, 2000)
Meilach, Dona Z., Soft Sculptures and Other Soft Art Forms (New York: Crown Publishers,
1974)
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge: London and New
York, 1962)

"$

Morris, Frances (ed), Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing: 2007)
Morris, Frances, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55, exh. cat. (London: Tate
Gallery, 1993)
Norton, Robert E., Herders Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1991)
Oliver, Kelly, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-Bind (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993)
Paterson, Mark, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Effects and Technologies (New York: Berg,
2007)
Penny, Nicholas, The Materials of Sculpture (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1993)
Pollock, Griselda and Rozsika Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)
Potts, Alex, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2000)
Radford Ruether, Rosemary, Godesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History
(London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press)
Rich, Jack C., The Materials and Methods of Sculpture (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1947)
Robinson, Hilary, Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (New York:
I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2006)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, transl. and
ed. by Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1957)
Storr, Robert, Paulo Herkenhoff and Allan Schwartzmann, Louise Bourgeois (London:
Phaidon Press Limited, 2003)
Williams, Richard J., After Modern Sculpture: Art in the United States and Europe 1965-70
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000)
Wye, Deborah, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982)

Chapters and Essays in Edited Books

Bernier, Isabelle, , In the Shadow of contemporary art (1986), in Hilary Robinson,
Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology, 1968-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001)
Didi-Huberman, Georges, The Order of Material: Plasticities, malaises, survivals, in
Brandon Taylor (ed.), Sculpture and Psychoanalysis (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishinf
LImited, 2006)
!

"%

Herder, Johann Gottfried, Critical Forests: Fourth Grove, On Riedels Theory of the
Beaux Arts, Selected Writings on Aesthetics, ed. and transl. by Gregory Moore (Princeton
and Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2006)
Reilly, Patricia L., The Taming of the Blue: Writing Out Colour in Italian
Renaissance Theory, in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, The Expanding
Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York: Icon Editions, 1982)
Rifkin, Adrian Louise Bourgeois: Reading the Sexual for Something Else, in Ian
Cole (ed.), Museum of Modern Art Papers Volume I: Louise Bourgeois (Oxford: Museum of
Modern Art Oxford, 1996)
Sylvester, David, Hard and Soft (1968), in John Wood, David Hulks and Alex Pott
(eds.), Modern Sculpture Reader (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007)

Journal Articles
Chare, Nicholas, Sexing the Medium: Calling on the Canvas, Art History Vol. 32 No.
4 (September 2009), pp. 89-105
Collins, Lorna, The Wild Being of Louise Bourgeois: Merleau-Ponty in the Flesh,
Romance Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (January, 2010), pp. 47-56
Fer, Briony, Objects Beyond Objecthood, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2, Louise
Bourgeois (1999), pp. 25-36
Krauss, Rosalind, Informe without Conclusion, October, Vol. 78 (Autumn 1996), pp.
89-105
Mieke, Bal, Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bourgeois' Spider as Theoretical Object,
Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2, Louise Bourgeois (1999), pp. 101-126
Nixon, Mignon, Eating Words, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2, Louise Bourgeois
(1999), pp. 55-70
Nixon, Mignon, Posing the Phallus, October, Vol. 92 (Spring, 2000), pp. 99-127
Potts, Alex, Louise Bourgeois: Sculptural Confrontations, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22
No. 2, Louise Bourgeois (1999), pp. 39-53
Wagner, Anne M., Bourgeois Prehistory, or the Ransom of Fantasies, Oxford Art
Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2, Louise Bourgeois (1999), pp. 3-23

"&

Internet Sources
Dorment, Richard, Louise Bourgeois: The shape of a childs torment, The Telegraph,
October 9, 2007 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3668414/LouiseBourgeois-The-shape-of-a-childs-torment.html)
Haber John, Do Not Touch, 28 September 2008
(http://www.haberarts.com/louiseb.htm)
Raynor, Vivien, Art: Louise Bourgeois closes her own dossier, The New York Times,
December 3, 1982 (http://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/03/arts/art-louise-bourgeoiscloses-her-own-dossier.html)

"'

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Blind Mans Buff, 1984

Marble
92.7 x 88.9 x 63.5 cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland

2 Constantin Brancusi, Sculpture for the Blind, c. 1916

Marble
28.9 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
!

"(

3 Untitled (Fingers), 1986

Bronze
10.2 x 21.6 x 47 cm
Cheim & Read Collection, New York

4 Julien Dillens, Monument to Everard 't Serclaes, 1902

Brass
Brussels, Belgium

")

5 Soft Landscape I, 1967

Plastic
10.1 x 30.4 x 27.9 cm
Cheim & Read Collection, New York

6 Echo I, 2007
Bronze painted white and steel
193 x 43.2 x 35.6 cm
Cheim & Read Collection, New York

#+

7 Seven in Bed, 2001

Fabric, stainless steel, glass and wood
172.7 x 85 x 87.6 cm
Hauser & Wirth Collection, Switzerland

8 Arch of Hysteria, 1993

Bronze, polished patina
83.5 x 101.6 x 58.4

#*

9 Arched Figure, 1999

Fabric, mirror, wood and glass
190.5 x 152.4 x 99 cm
Private Collection

10 Three Horizontals, 1998

Fabric and Steel
134.6 x 182.9 x 91.4 cm
Daros collection, Switzerland

#"

11 Dorothea Tanning, Nue Couche, 1969-70

Fabric, wool, table tennis balls
38.5 x 108.9 x 53.5 cmm
Tate Modern, London

12 Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois in 1982 with Fillette, 1982

Gelatin silver print
50.8 x 40.6 cm
Photo 1982 the Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe

##

13 Fillette, 1968
Latex and plaster
59.6 x 26.6 x 19.6 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

14 Constantin Brancusi, Princess X, 1916

Polished bronze
58.4 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

#$

15 Portrait, 1963
Latex
26.6 x 17.7 x 7.6 cm

16 Le Regard, 1966
Latex and Cloth

#%

12.7 x 39.3 x 36.8 cm

17 Precious Liquids, 1992

Wood, metal, glass, alabaster, cloth and water
425.5 x 445.1 x 445.1 cm
Muse National dArt Moderne, Paris

18 Sleep II, 1967

Marble

#&

59.4 x 76.8 x 60.3

19 Louise Bourgeois with Sleep II at her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern
Art

20 Installation view, Louise Bourgeois: New Work, 2001-2

Cheim & Read Gallery, New York

#'

21 Untitled, 2001
Rust and tan fabric and stainless steel
269.2 x 58.4 x 40.6 cm

22 Untitled, 1950
Painted wood and stainless steel
146 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm
Collection Jerry Gorovoy
!

#(

23 Untitled, 2001
Tapestry and stainless steel
189.2 x 31.7 x 22.8
Private Collection

24 Fragile Goddess, 2002

Fabric
31.8 x 12.7 x 15.2 cm

#)

25 Fragile Goddess, 1970

Bronze, gold patina
26 x 14.3 x 13.7 cm
!

$+