CASTELLO DI AMA
2009: LOUISE BOURGEOIS
Topiary
"Everyday you have to abandon your past or accept it,” asserts Louise Bourgeois. She adds, “and then if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor."
It is not at all surprising that Tuscany’s medieval landscape, with its fertile fields studded with villages and thrusting towers that can hardly fail to conjure up (at times quite aggressive) erotic themes, has always served as a pregnant fount of images for artists and sculptors.
That Louise Bourgeois would respond to such a fecund spot was a foregone conclusion for an artist who many years ago created an important art piece entitled Destruction of the Father and who characterises her first sculpture as a way to dismantle the father figure. One day, as a child, while she was eating with the family, she took some white bread, moistened it with saliva, and fashioned it into a figure of her father. “As soon as I had finished making it, I took a knife and started cutting off the limbs. I consider that my first sculpture project.” That of course was some years ago, and since that time Bourgeois’s creative attitude to phallic power has gone through various stages, even though the energy inherent in that first project remains fundamental throughout her entire corpus. “There are always sexual allusions in my work,” states the artist, explaining that recurrent dynamic. “Sometimes I am interested in just female forms--such as clusters of breasts that are clouds --, but quite often the forms merge together: phallic breasts, male and female, active and passive.”
Both in her sculptures and in her drawings, Bourgeois returns often to images of towers, to towers rising straight up, erect male elements, rigid poles that emanate virility. On the other hand, she creates organic cavities as well, internal hollows and cells. At times very intimate, at times claustrophobic. Illustrative of this is her Cell (Arch of Hysteria) done in 1992-3, in which the body of a women, over a fabric-laid bed, creates a hysteric arch that is, Bourgeois explains, sexual: “It is a substitute for orgasm, without access to the sexual act.” Next to the woman is a large appliance, which is not sexual, but an ironing board, which resolves wrinkles and alleviates tension, encouraging sleep. The woman on the bed is isolated, and has no desire to make use of the male mechanism; she creates, rather, her own world and is completely happy with it. “She functions within a cell that she herself has created, where the rules of happiness and of stress are unknown,” adds Bourgeois.
Isolation is a way to go beyond the tension inherent in the dualism of the sexes. Plato wonderfully imagined an alternate possibility. “In the beginning, the sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two…. The primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and the same number of feet, one head with two faces looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two genital members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast. Then, the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three; and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth...”
If the hysteric arch in the other work of Bougeois delineates a world of tension beyond the dualism of the sexes in the sense of isolation, her new piece for Castello di Ama represents instead a moment of total synthesis. Pieces of pink marble suggest a continual process of self-fecundation, with a vertical figure tapering up into a phallus in full bloom. Bourgeois chose a dark, hidden spot, and within the confines of this damp cavity created a vertical figure. It is without doubt a female figure, but it is at the same time a blossoming sexual organ in a moisture-laden stage of self-fulfillment that emanates infinite fluidity. It is something independent, autonomous, what the Gnostics would characterise as a pleroma, a fullness. Plato dreamed of something similar, and now that is here, complete.
Daniel Birnbaum