Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim

WARNING! Long-winded exhibition review dead ahead...

At the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection, we are greeted at the entrance by a large metal spider and what look to be two victims suspended in shiny bright cocoons from above. As Nancy Spector, the curator of the exhibition and the Guggenheim’s chief curator, acknowledges in the introductory text, the spiral of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim at 88th Street is a uniquely fitting venue in which to present a retrospective of this ever-avant-garde artist who has returned to themes and motifs throughout her career. Bourgeois’ work functions in a world of unstable, opposing binaries: open/closed, young/old, gravity/attenuation, benign/threatening, human/building, soft/hard, spiral/linear. Works cluster along the walls in chronological groupings; the architectural scale (and color) of the winding path at the Guggenheim lends itself felicitously to the presentation of these objects, and the narrowness of the presentation space focuses the attention by permitting only a few works in the viewer’s field of vision at any one time. Though the spiral ramp forces a linear narrative, its great benefit is its ability to disrupt this strict chronology: by merely peering across the vertigo-inducing open center, the visitor sees works that came before and glimpses of what will follow. In fact, it is largely by virtue of Lloyd Wright’s whorl of an exhibition space that the show coheres—one might almost hope that all retrospectives be shown here, for nowhere else is there the ability to experience both a linear (that is to say, chronological) progression as well as a cross-section of an artist’s oeuvre.

After the opening salvo of the spider and a brief introduction to her paintings, we are launched into Bourgeois’ career in 1940s New York while married to art historian Robert Goldwater—a more propitious time and place (and husband) is hard to imagine. It was during this time in the late 1940s and early 50s that Bourgeois created the sculptural series known as “Personages,” (left) whose totemesque, vaguely anthropomorphic wood and metal forms, notably “Portrait of C.V.” (1947-49; wood, paint, metal wire), “Persistent Antagonism” (1946-48; wood, paint, metal wire), “The Winged Figure” (1948; wood, paint, nails), and “Sleeping Figure” (1950, bronze), have their relatives in the sculptural art of central equatorial Africa (as the exhibition “Eternal Ancestors: Art of the Central African Reliquary” at the Metropolitan Museum so effectively demonstrated last winter). The slightly later wooden stacked sculptures, whose attenuation recalls Giacommetti’s emaciated figures, often present an escarpment near or at the top, frustrating the ascension to the topmost level and recalling Bourgeois’ quote that “Skyscrapers reflect the human condition. They do not touch.”

After a decade of absence, Bourgeois emerged in the 1960s to create an odd topsy-turvy world where phallic buds derive from clouds and breasts emerge from the earth to become “cumuls.” Extraordinarily adept at segmenting and de-humanizing the human body, she others it, rendering it insectlike and, by so doing, reinforcing its messy actuality and the earthy humor of human existence. Biomorphic forms (like “Lair,” 1962), which occupy one section look nothing so much as sculpted excremental blobs, have something of the honeycomb—or, in the case of “Fee Couturiere” (1963), the wasps’ nest—about them. Who—or what—lives in these funny little dwellings? What is hidden inside?

Though the uncircumcised penile tips—or are they preternaturally perky breast buds? Or are they fingertips?—poking their heads hopefully through drapery in “Cumul I” (1969; above) is enough to horrify one’s conservative relatives (one dare not say grandmother in this context), Bourgeois has a mastery of texture and form that renders these things all rather beautiful. Beautiful in the way that earthworms, or giving birth, or the relief of a long-awaited bodily function is beautiful. Or, in the case of “Sleeper” (1967; left)—a “cumul” wrapped protectively in a turtleneck and sitting atop two rough wooden timbers—the way a pig in a blanket carved out of marble is beautiful.

Beginning in the 1980s, Bourgeois became more willing to incorporate explicitly representational and figural elements into her work, referring more explicitly than before to memory. It was during this time that she began producing “Cells.” As individual installations in their own rights, what the “Cells” lose in efficiency they gain in narrative force. Dealing with surveillance, confinement, memory, and the interrelationships between physical and psychological pain, the range of sizes and media of these installations allowed Bourgeois to incorporate (and in some cases revisit) motifs and materials from different phases of her career. The often spiral configurations of doors that encircle the central spaces of many of the cells act as walls: as she does with that of glass windows, which are often so dirty as to preclude gazing through them to the luminous sculptural elements within, Bourgeois has perverted their natural function.

“Cell IV,” whose doors enclose a very finely carved pink marble ear across from a wood block with a large clock-like disk leaning against the wall, evokes a psychiatrist’s office, inviting the viewer to lean into the scene and whisper her secrets to the aural vessel. One of the largest and most sinister pieces in the retrospective, “Cell (Choisy)” (1990-93), encloses a marble scale model of the artist’s childhood home in a cage with dirty windows; a guillotine is poised above the only entry to the structure. Embedded in the structure of this cage and other cells, mirrors fracture the scene inside, imposing fractured, partial views on the visitor.

The soft sculptures, at the end of an arduous climb to the topmost level of the Guggenheim, have something of the taxidermy form to them. Not only are textile heads and bodies on display (as though hunting trophies, scientific specimens, or cadavers ready for autopsy), but certain stacked wood sculptures are reincarnated in quilted fabric blocks. The patchwork nature of the soft sculpture is an effective proxy for the nature of memory and the rediscovery of earlier forms and themes. The familiar textures of cloth, coupled with the explicit representations of human bodies, renders these sculptures perhaps the most viscerally disturbing pieces in the show. “Three Horizontals” (1998; fabric and steel), shows three pinkly patchworked figures coming apart at the seams and prepared for dissection on metal slabs. As they contract in size, their recognizability as human forms diminishes until the final, smallest figure is nothing more than a plucked chicken carcass with vestigial arm, leg, neck, and breast buds.

To be sure, Bourgeois maintains her sense of humor throughout—witness the last work of the show, “Couple IV” (1997): two headless and footless black fabric figures, one with a 19th century-era prosthetic leg, fornicate in a glass box. The overstuffed squeezability of these figures, sewn out of familiar, comfortable thermal waffle knit, is disturbingly at odds with the foreignness of the prosthesis and leaves one unprepared for the waffle-fabric scrotum nestled between the figures’ legs.

One gets the sense of exhaustion at the end of the show—not from the artist, but from the curators. Though Bourgeois has been making fabric sculptures for the past decade, the selection of cloth “soft” sculpture seems much more meager than other sections (the “cells” for example). The physical properties of weight and gravity seen in the stacked sculptures are certainly emphasized by the trek up the Guggenheim rotunda—the exhausting effort of that climb becomes conflated with the works at and near the summit (one is forcibly reminded, too, of Breugel’s spiral Tower of Babel, another favorite of Bourgeois’). The late work (what is discussed in Linda Nochlin’s catalogue entry as perhaps Bourgeois’ “Old-Age style”) almost seems a sparsely populated curatorial afterthought. After becoming steadily more massive over the course of decades—those huge multivalent cells!—that Bourgeois’ objects shrink in size should not, however, be seen as a diminishment of her capabilities.

One gets the sense, too, that Bourgeois arrived fully formed as an artist—there are very few fits and starts and no failures in evidence at this show, and there is a lack of artistic context that leaves this visitor dissatisfied. On a different note, the well-written and judiciously placed wall labels perform their function admirably—explanatory text for selected items whets the reader’s appetite (and wallet) for the oddly organized yet informative exhibition catalogue (though, styled as a glossary, good luck trying to find anything in it).

Overall, in surveying Bourgeois’ mastery of many different media, styles of presentation, and artistic reinvention, one must appreciate her chameleon-like nature, the best parallel for which is most certainly Madonna (or should we instead be saying that Madonna is pop culture’s Louise Bourgeois?). Though the presentation of the show, with all phases of Bourgeois’ long career represented, supports this reading, Bourgeois might as well have already cocked up her toes for all that the Guggenheim enshrines these different incarnations. Whereas the J.M.W. Turner show at the Metropolitan Museum down the street suffers from too much of a good thing, the Bourgeois show strikes this viewer as almost a little superficial; the arachnid in the center foyer notwithstanding, the absence of the spider series is a serious oversight. But perhaps, like a good actor, that is the mark of a good artist’s retrospective: leave them panting for more.