A Sense of Female Experience

By ROBERT HUGHES

Primitive invocations that get beyond a litter of isms

Louise Bourgeois is certainly the least-known artist ever to get a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, an honor usually reserved for the Picassos or at least the Frank Stellas of this world. She is almost 71, French, a resident of New York City since 1938, and a mature sculptor by any conceivable definition of the word. Until quite recently not many people wanted to look at her work, and her recognition was slight, at least compared with the fame that surrounded that implacably durable Queen Bee of the art world, Louise Nevelson. Bourgeois belonged to no groups and was a complete loner; her work appeared to have a queer troglodytic quality, like something pale under a log, the vulnerable product of obsession but I with a sting in its tail.

That quality remains; but in the meantime, two things changed its status in the art world. One was the collapse of the idea that art had 1 only one way, the abstract track, forward into history. This made Bourgeois's idiosyncratic kind of late surrealism well worth examining. The second, which made it look more interesting still, was feminism. The field to which Bourgeois's work constantly returns is female experience, located in the body, sensed from within. "I try," she told an interviewer, with regard to one work, "to give a representation of a woman who is pregnant. She tries to be frightening but she is frightened. She's afraid someone is going to invade her privacy and that she won't be able to defend what she is responsible for."

This kind of subject is a long way from the normal concerns of sculpture, which impose themselves in a "masculine" manner on culture. What Bourgeois sets up is a totemic, surrealistic imagery of weak threats, defenses, lairs, wombs, almost inchoate groupings of form. Her work is by turns aggressive and pathetic, sexually charged and physically awkward, tense and shapeless. It employs an imagery of encounter to render concrete an almost inescapable sense of solitude. In short, it is physically, if not always formally, rich stuff, and one may be glad that the Museum of Modern Art and Associate Curator Deborah Wye have set it forth in such a detailed exhibition.

Bourgeois's most stringent and satisfactory works tend to be those based on either "primitive" totems or natural forms: coral polyps, breasts, clusters of buds and palps. The totemic pieces cluster sociably together in crowds, tall and etiolated, often made up of worn chips and fragments of wood threaded on a central armature, like shashlik on a skewer, and then painted. Bourgeois likes repetition with small variations: some of her larger pieces, like Number Seventy-Two (The No March), 1972, are composed of hundreds of marble cylinders, their tops lopped and slanted at different angles, clustered on a platform. They give an impression of preconscious liveliness--nature on the march. Their aura gets a little more sinister in a large carving, Femme-Maison '81, done in black marble: a waving cluster of long tubular shapes, frondlike rather than phallic, rustling and jostling against one another with a peculiar, irresistible energy, that rear up around a plateau on which reposes a small schematically carved shed.

At the same time Bourgeois's imagination has a nasty side, as real acts of exorcism must. The fantasies her art expels into the chaste gallery space have as much to do with incest and cannibalism as with the more usual aesthetic satisfactions of MOMA. The most vivid of them, and the crudest, is a sort of grotto full of pendulous brown stalactites, lumpy and breastlike.

A banal red light plays over them; in the middle is a table, perhaps a sacrificial altar, and the whole cave is strewn with what seem to be mummified joints of meat. These are not identifiably human; if anything, they resemble small legs of lamb. But they suggest the dread cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus in the Odyssey, strewn with fragments of unspeakable meals. The title is The Destruction of the Father, 1974.

"It is a very murderous piece," Bourgeois points out in the cata logue, with some understatement, "an impulse that comes when one is under too much stress and one turns against those one loves the most."

The same imagery recurs, in a slightly more distanced way, in her big room environment, Confrontation, 1978. Here the viewer is excluded from the central table, which is strewn with breasts, remnants of latex-covered food and other morsels, by a ring of white wooden boxes. These taper toward the top and, like versions of the dolmens in archaic ritual sites, press to be read as abstracted effigies of the human figure: a ring of watchers, backs shutting out the audience, absorbed in an obscure ritual.

Some may find such imagery not merely archaic but positively oldfashioned: invocations of the chthonic and the primitive have been standard modernist fare for three-quarters of a century. But Bourgeois uses her primitive quotations to get past the conventional groupings of modern art history--the litter of isms that tells us so little about the real meanings of art--and to rummage painfully between the layers of her own makeup. What equivalents can art find for depicting femaleness from within, as distinct from the familiar conventions of looking at it from outside through the eyes of another sex? What can it say about inwardness, fecundity, vulnerability, repression or resentment? How can it furnish a different substratum of meanings for the body? It is to such questions that Bourgeois's sculpture turns itself, not al ways successfully, but with a striking consistency and intensity. Some of it looks "unheroic," deficient in fully realized form, even incoherent: but these are by products of her effort to describe, by surrealist means, experiences that are automatically left out of heroic art. For such operations, Bourgeois may be the wrong surname, but it is good to see such an artist getting her due at last.

--By Robert Hughes

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