The Eternal Return

"Arch of Hysteria" (1993)

Louise Bourgeois
Guggenheim Museum
June 27-Sept. 28

For many years Louise Bourgeois hosted a Sunday salon for artists at her West 20th Street apartment. A few years back, two of our friends decided to go, carrying with them examples of their work — no slides allowed. As it happened, on the day they were there, the 90-something Bourgeois decided to speak exclusively in French. They didn’t understand a word.

Now we’re invited into the exotic world of Louise Bourgeois by way of an enthralling and essential retrospective at the Guggenheim. It’s arranged chronologically, populated by objects spanning most of her seven-decade career, spooling out and winding its way up, with turns towards surrealism, primitivism, cannibalism, mutant sex parts, stuffed dummies and psycho-trauma.

As others have observed, the Gugg’s a perfect venue. Frank Lloyd Wright’s off-white spiral so perfectly matches her organic sensibility, it’s as if the museum itself has been revealed to be one big Bourgeois sculpture. This point is nicely underscored by twin silver swirl cocoon shapes that hang in the rotunda. The museum's spiral ramp also shows how her career circles back on itself as she reworks earlier ideas, adding new twists.

Born in Paris into a comfortable (yes, bourgeois) family of tapestry restorers, she experienced the lasting trauma of having her live-in English teacher become her father's mistress (this could explain why she sometimes prefers her mother tongue). After getting a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne, she took up art, studying under artists, including Fernand Léger. In 1938, she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York.

While she made art in Paris and even had a couple gallery shows, the show opens with works made in New York, the first of which are her surrealist-inspired “Femme Maison” paintings, which depict naked armless women joined with buildings, the architecture subsuming their heads. These images and ideas -- the body, buildings, sexuality and mutilation -- would be remain major themes throughout her career.

Next is a group of 17 wooden anthropomorphic “Personage” sculptures, each resembling a totem pole crossed with a Constantine Brancusi. Each represents someone from her life. In the same room is the extraordinary “The Blind Leading the Blind,” an abstract wooden centipede that reminded me of Theo Jansen’s beach-walking robots.

In the 50s, her sculpture becomes more abstract and varied. Her skinny totem towers are now made of a variety of pieces, some that look like they’re made of stacked children’s building blocks, others like shish kabobs of stones. She also begins clustering forms together horizontally on a single object, some resembling a gathering of bird-like forms, a kind of penguin huddle. They are somewhere between representational and abstract, a liminal space that radiates uncanny presence. It's like we're looking at some bizarre life-form from the original Star Trek series.

In the 60s, she starts working with new materials, especially marble, but also latex and rubber. The objects are increasingly organic, you could even say ugly, recalling the fecund and fungous underbelly of nature. They're also ever more ambiguous and open to interpretation. It makes for fun guessing games. Is it a diseased eye or a danish? Maggot sex or two potatoes? Burial mounds or tumors?

These organic abstractions have much in common with the sculpture of Eva Hesse, and in fact the two were featured together in seminal 1966 exhibition “Eccentric Abstraction” at the Fischbach Gallery in New York.

Sexual imagery also becomes a prominent theme, making us think of a much weirder version of Georgia O’Keefe. Penises, vaginas and breasts are everywhere. Hermaphroditic shapes too. The small bronze “Labyrinth Tower” is a building, a forearm arm and a penis. It also literally looks like poop.

The work also exudes menace, most strikingly in two installations. “The Destruction of the Father” is a subterranean table or altar is covered with bread and pieces of meat. While not immediately obvious, it's said to represent the cannibalistic consumption of a father by his children. “Confrontation" is also oedipal, dealing with the destruction of a relationship between two generations. It again features a table covered with bread-like shapes, some like muffins, others larger and over-leavened. Video taken of the gallery opening shows an accompanying performance featuring a parade of participants wearing latex suits with breast-like protuberances.

Bourgeois has said that she is not a feminist artist, and it’s evident that her work isn’t political. But it has some strong overlap with themes in feminist art. This is especially the case of “Hysteria” a stunning hanging bronze male figure with an arching back reaching towards his toes. Interesting that it’s a man, since hysteria was once considered a “woman’s disease.” Another example is her decision to change the name of the “Blind Leading the Blind” to “C.O.Y.O.T.E.” in honor of a prostitution rights group.

It's not only names she revisits. In the 1980s, her “Femme Maisons” reappear in sculptural form. The best example is the lovely hanging bronze “Spiral Woman,” a floating figure with a fecal cocoon spiral subsuming all but her arms and legs. More recently, she has revived her stacked-block tower, covering it with tapestry fabric — a double reference, one to her sculpture of the 50s, and second to her parent’s profession.

This backwards-looking tendency is most pronounced in her “cells” — room-like spaces, with a dramatic arrangement of objects. “Cell V” has two large weathered wooden balls enclosed by a series of doors. In “No Exit,” a old stairway penetrates a space enclosed by a metal screen. Less successful examples recall David Lynch, with a cluttered and heavy-handed arrangements of objects with specific personal psychological meanings, a visual language of memory: underclothes hang on animal bones, clenched hands made of marble sit on a mirror, spools of thread are arranged on a metal stand, a shelf holds a variety of old-fashioned laboratory vessels.

Bourgeois has said these cells are about pain. It’s a statement that brings to mind Frida Kahlo. And, like Kahlo, Bourgeois has made deeply autobiographical works fashioned with her own personal visual vocabulary.

Her more recent fabric-based figure works are refreshingly subtle. I especially liked “Three Horizontals,” which shows two armless female stuffed figures stacked above a shape that could be a heart or fetus.

We're captivated with her works' singular strangeness -- no matter if we don't always understand what it's saying.