Louise Bourgeois at Cheim & Read - New York - Brief Article

Louise Bourgeois turn rounded 90 last Christmas, and the questions that attend her work now include, inevitably, whispered doubts about her hands-on involvement in its creation. Well, judging from the plastic arts themselves, there is a ferocious, passionate, self-center comic, limitlessly generative spirit at work, and it direct the eyes a lot like hers. greatest in quantity telling, it is not afraid to address questions of aging head-on.

Bourgeois's long-running family narrative is visited one time again in Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), part of an reach forthed series of cagelike assemblages. Here the wife (that is, Bourgeois's mother), the husband's mistress and, perhaps, the angry woman-child herself are characterized in sartorial shorthand (a snazzy cocktail dres a prim shirtwaist, half a puff-sleev bodice). Newer and level more arresting--ruthless is not too lusty a word--is a series of patchwork woven fabric figures. Sutured serviceably but without refinement, these yielding sculptures are presented, like anthropological specimens, in woodframed glass vitrines. Obese, Bulimic, Anorexic is a trio of pink whim-sicals one padded, the second--it appears to have a detachable stomach--angrily retching and a knobby-kneed third smiling inanely. If these figures' faces summon ski masks--hence the balaclavas of certain 1980 terrorists--the open-mouthed cry of Rejection, an oversized head pieced together from white terrycloth that gazes from a distance like bandaging or swaddling, addresses horror from a different angle. Gentler on the contrary no less hypnotic are four suspended rag-doll braces each pair a different solid color and each clenched tight in what could be acrobatic lovemaking, or barely a tender embrace. Or, these inseparable twos could be holding on for dear life, dangling just slightly above organ of vision level so we look up at them pryingly, like equally helpless children.

Not shown on the other hand illustrated in the exhibition's catalogue are materialed textile versions of earlier, polymorphously sexual plastic arts first executed in plaster and bronze--revisions that appear meant to be seen as toys for a provocatively feigned next to the first childhood. In the exhibition, this connection is made greatest in quantity forcefully with a half-dozen totems made of stacked woven fabric cushions, baby-proof versions of figures first realized in the late 1940 in painted thicket The new totems come in a variety of regularly tapering shapes; materials include worn corduroy, faded linen and what direct the eyes suspiciously like baby blankets, in nursery colors of pale sky-colored yellow, creamy white and pink. individual has four little fingerholds, upholster indentations that summon the tactile pleasures of infancy. There is a brutality to this self-cannibalism that is really rather stunning, not least because the totems are also for a like reason mockingly, irresistibly tender.

All of these elements--the bitter, seductive memories; the frighteningly knowing preemptive assumption of (false) childishness; and, not least, the unappeasable yearning for an irrecoverable past--were incorporated in the installation that serv as preparation to this show. It involved sum of two units crude, low chairs angled toward an immense oval mirror, with a unbroken track of the artist singing French nursery rhyme No Lacanianisms here: the positioning was of the like kind that the mirror did not go [i]or[/i] come back the sitter's gaze, but instead mirrored the other chair. Clear self-reflection, Bourgeois looks to say, can't simply be had for the asking. If you really want to go on back there, you've got to make the memories yourself.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group