Cell (Choisy), 1990-3. Courtesy Tate © Jon Pratty / 24 Hour Museum
24 Hour Museum Editor Jon Pratty enjoys an intimate, puzzling and Freudian experience at Tate Modern. Louise Bourgeoise runs at the gallery until January 20 2008.
Louise Bourgeois is the real thing. While all around in London during the week of the Freize Art Fair we've been treated to the latest, loudest, louchest art world experiences, the new Bourgeois retrospective is a must-see show.
Here is work of the utmost imagination, intimacy and bravery. Bourgeois is 95, and she's still creating great work. Will Damien Hirst still be pickling sharks at the same age?
The Winged Figure, 1948. © Jon Pratty / 24 Hour Museum
Bourgeois' lengthy career spans seven decades: she was born in Paris in 1911, moving to New York in 1938 where she still lives and works. Over these momentous years, she's been associated with many of the big art movements, such as surrealism and abstract expressionism, but still, her work crosses boundaries, defies categorisation and makes it's own definitions.
This work is really personal. The early years in France were spent making paintings, prints and small wooden/mixed media about a life that was even then spelt out to others in very politicised terms. It's so much about the interior, about a dream world, about feminism before anyone else really put that vision into the plastic world of three dimensional art.
Room one in the Tate show is all about these early years, with some sensitive and surprising works in two dimensions that also reveal a sense of humour too. The Femme Maison series play with imagery that flirts with the female form and particularly allusions to cages, enclosure and the notion of being trapped.
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Above - from room 2 - the Personage series. First shown in New York's Peridot Gallery from 1949 - 53. © Jon Pratty / 24 Hour Museum
Walking around rooms 1 and 2 you'll perhaps see that Bourgeois is an artist concerned about illusion, about personal memories and psychological instances like anxiety and trauma. Here we begin to walk around three dimensional pieces such as Cell (Choisy) of 1990-93.
Cages are a recurring motif. Bourgeois suffers from agoraphobia, a fear of being in environments that are unfamiliar or where there's little perceived control: classically there's an anxiety about leaving the house. Cell (Choisy) recalls the house in Choisy-le-Roi, south of Paris, where the artist spent her very early years, from 1912 to 1917. It's a delicate pink marble carving of a dwelling, encased brutally in a rusty steel cage, trapping memories and recollections within.
Detail, Arch of Hysteria, 1993. Bronze, polished patina, hanging piece. © Jon Pratty / 24 Hour Museum
Rooms 3 and 4 reveal the resourceful Bourgeois: on moving to New York in 1938 she was making small scale works that often take vertical forms, hewn from wood or metal. Often playful and referring to organic shapes and anthropomorphic forms, these pieces (the Personage sculptures) cemented her reputation, as peace turned to war in what was then a male-dominated north American art culture.
They're particularly satisfying sculptural statements. Though often made from found materials, little has been left unshaped or unpainted. There's a native American feel to these works too.
Arch of Hysteria, 1993. Bronze, polished patina, hanging piece. Courtesy Cheim and Read, Galerie Karsten Greve and Galerie Hauser & Wirth. © Jon Pratty / 24 Hour Museum
In rooms 5, 6 and 7 you'll walk around forms in marble and bronze that are increasingly phallic or sexually revealing. Some shapes are explicitly obvious, others mixing shapes and species in ways that make the exploration of these rooms a compelling three dimensional experience.
Arch of Hysteria, 1993, neatly sums up this later period of Bourgeois' canon that is both erotic and technically accomplished, like all her work. Here is a suspended, polished bronze form that arches in either pain, or ecstasy, or both. Walk around it and the shape is always surprising and pretty spectacular.
In room 8, catch glimpses of yourself in the cages, mirrors and dirty glass. © Jon Pratty / 24 Hour Museum
Leaving behind the shapes and forms of her apparently conventional sculptural moments, room 8 begins an exploration of the exterior/interior world that Bourgeois increasingly essayed in the 1980's after she aquired a bigger studio.
I found this place chilling. These are installations, cages, found objects, suspensions, dream interiors, glimpses of a neo-Freudian world that can be entered via small passageways let into the outside edges of the constructions.
Above - Passage Dangereux, 1997. Collection Ursula Hauser, Switzerland. © Jon Pratty / 24 Hour Museum
Perhaps the most powerful work in this Tate show was, for me, Passage Dangereux, a recent work from 1997. Here is the world of the trapped, the impossible dream, a place where rows of chairs have floated off the floor and now orchestrate themselves in a dance around the architrave of the steel mesh room.
It's redolent of the asylum, a scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, or the place where you might be screened for psychotherapy. Not comfortable viewing, and Bourgeois doesn't make it easy for consumers of her work here.
To view this work you have to approach with caution and enter some passageways let into the sides at carefully placed points. Once there, you look around and see conjunctions of mirrors, objects and materials that sing a song of interior pain.
Room 8, inside the wooden construction. © Jon Pratty / 24 Hour Museum
Moving across the gallery space into the adjacent part of room 8, three large works catch the eye and envelope the watcher/reader/consumer of this extraordinary exhibition. There's a very large wooden construction, which appears to be a brewing vat or some such thing.
Doorways have been cut into the side planking and within the cylindrical volume Bourgeois has suspended glass forms which, elsewhere, she's also used, calling them Ventouse. This is a curious place. It's reminiscent, as all these larger structures are, of Rachel Whiteread's explorations of the 'presence' left in certain locations by the previous, historical occupants. In this case, there's a lingering smell of the wood planking, which seems to be cedar or something similar.
Looking into the artist's past? Room 9, and in her later work, Bourgeois increasingly starts to use textiles. © Jon Pratty / 24 Hour Museum
One of the other installations is a closed circle of white-painted doors, each with glass panes. Mostly they are obscured, but in a few places you can glimpse inside.
This (picture above) is a world of hanging textile forms, sometimes grossly misshapen, occasionally inserted into the space unmodified. At the centre is a wierd form, partly human, partly animal, wearing a white cotton/linen shroud. It's not clear what we're seeing here, but the vision to me evoked the smudged forms found in the paintings of Francis Bacon.
Around the corner, there's a vision of something unexplained, unexplainable. © Jon Pratty / 24 Hour Museum
Moving across Room 9, back into 8, there's another circle of doors. These lovely mahogany enclosures are paradoxical. There's a circular, snail-shell shape, but you are only allowed by the artist to stretch around the corner into a mirror that reveals a puzzling filmic scene. There's a red bedspread, something possibly medical in a case. All of it suggested, not wholly revealed, but atmospheric.
It needs to be said that where Bourgeois uses found materials such as the doors, mirrors and chairs in these installations, there's an element of choice here. She's conjured up objects that chime in with the interior of an earlier era.
There's little here that's new. The chairs are vintage, the panelling pre-war, the mirrors and signage apparently re-used haphazardly must have been chosen with great precision for the atmosphere they evoke.
Above, Maman - a 35 foot high steel and marble spider towering over the approaches to Tate Modern. © Jon Pratty / 24 Hour Museum
Press outwards the black exit doors at the end of room 10, the last part of the show, a room of maquettes, small expositions and surprises. Escape from the interior world of Louise Bourgeois.
Go outside, and the sight that greeted you on the outer reaches of Tate Modern now might seem more meaningful. Maman, 1999, is a massive example of a recurring theme in the artist's work. It's a spider, yes, but not for Bourgeois the frightening weaver of nightmares.
For her, the arachnid represents her mother's sewing, spinning and weaving, a tribute to her umbrella of care and love. It's a spectacular sculpture: in a way the opposite of this subtle, involving and intricately referential exhibition.
