The London art scene is currently caught in the web of influential French artist Louise Borgeois’s latest exhibition. Adrian Searle reports
Louise Bourgeois turned 87 on Christmas Day. She could be just another batty old biddy, with her interminable reminiscences, her total recall and false memories, but for one irreducible fact: she is one of the fiercest and strongest artists alive. She is a sculptor, a draughtswoman, a teller of stories, an autobiographer, a kind of poet.
A selection of Bourgeois’s recent work – just 10 sculptures and 10 drawings – is on show at London’s Serpentine Gallery until January 30, fresh from Bordeaux, Lisbon, and Malm in Sweden. Like her earlier exhibitions in Britain, this is but another tantalising fragment of her life and art, yet her following among artists and her fascination to those of a theoretical, psychoanalytical disposition, is enormous. She’s both inimitable and highly influential. She makes her followers – I’d count Sarah Lucas and Mona Hatoum as typical – look like footnotes.
Age has not mellowed Bourgeois nor dimmed her talents. A deceptively impish old French lady in New York, her entire artistic life appears driven by violence, melancholy and personal pain. Her work is its exculpation, and often a cause of excruciating hilarity. There’s something of the burlesque about it, but it is a comedy of anguish.
The spider is a recurrent image in Bourgeois’s work: drawings of spiders; huge welded sculpted spiders; sag- bellied spiders with steel crustacean claws like giant dental probes. They have infested her work, not as some nightmarish manifestation of arachnophobia, but as a protective symbol, and as an amazing form full of life.
The spider is a weaver of webs, a symbol, perhaps, of the Bourgeois family trade, as repairers of old Gobelin tapestries. The spider is also the protecting mother. Bourgeois describes her own mother as “clever; patient, neat and useful as a spider. And as dangerous … The spider is a protector and a defence against evil.”
Here’s the spider, vast and implacable, rearing over a cage-like cell which contains nothing but an old chair with a sagging tapestry cover. Fragments of bone are also there, while a bottle of her favourite perfume (Guerlain’s Shalimar) and a charm-bracelet book dangle from chains in the cell. The little details in Bourgeois’s works always seem important. They give her work a rich texture, a tantalising allusiveness. They hint at dark things, secrets, private voodoo, a monologue we can hear but can’t decipher.
A smaller spider sits high on one wall in the dark. This sculptural mise-en- scne, Spider, from 1997, is the centrepiece of the Serpentine show. The door of the cage is ajar but you can’t go in. All her work feels like this. You can look, but you can never touch. It is a world of phantom presences and impassable thresholds.
Bourgeois uses her life and her memories and her feelings as her material, carrying it all with her like the spider’s hoard of embalmed flies, an old lady’s trunk of souvenirs. Her art both unwraps it all, and gobbles it all up. She even uses her old clothes: dusty, gauzy see-through things.
Some of the garments have been sewn up and stuffed, turned into limbless pouched bags, punchbag sagging torsos, carnival horrorshow mannequins. A roomful of clothes is arranged in a cell-like chamber, corralled behind a circle of old doors.
This, she has said, is not so much a conversation piece as a confrontation piece.
Such works ought to be obvious, too literal and horribly sentimentalising. The point is that these are Louise’s clothes, which present the history of her identification with her own body. These are her flirtations with fashion, her vanities; gifts and things she’d saved for and coveted over the years. Clothes which would always remind her of other times, and especially of the fact that her parents would vie for her affections with gifts from the great Parisian couture houses.
The fact that Bourgeois didn’t begin to have the recognition she merits till she was well into her 70s shouldn’t trouble us. Her work has always come from inner necessity and personal obsession, a need for personal exorcism rather than from the career-culture of the contemporary art world, something Bourgeois probably wouldn’t give a hoot about.
The current fixation with the next big thing, with fashion and fun and mindlessness, is, in its way, a defence against the fear of death, as well as the fear of seriousness, of profundity, of melancholy and the pain of memory and loss. Bourgeois is, like many old people, obsessed with youth too: her own youth, her own past. She is forever working through her childhood, her primal scenes, old betrayals. Her work might even be described as an act of revenge against the past. But she hasn’t much time for the psychoanalysts or the analytically inclined theorists who would claim her. She knew Jacques Lacan and described him as a word- gargler.
Her work is nothing if not a form of self-analysis. Her sculptures – sometimes quite literally – unravel and disinter the remnants of her own past. And in the unravelling, she makes new complications, for herself and for us. Which is why her art is not about objects or shocks, but is a kind of language. Looking at her sculptures I hear voices in my head: Silly little Louise; Louise go and play; Shut up Louise and don’t tell tales; Look what Daddy’s bought you. And then it all gets too excruciating and I have to turn away. Only to turn back and look again.