Thursday, June 3, 2010

Mother Wearing Bra Images

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)

"In the artists are guaranteed in advance the fact of being sane, as that will always be able to take their torment."
(LB)

Portrait Fillette LB, 1968, by R. Mapplethorpe

died Monday in New York sculptor Louise Bourgeois .

Born in Paris on Christmas Eve 1911, and daughter of former tapestry restorers who enjoyed a certain position, the artist moved to New York in 1938 and married a professor of American art. Over almost a century old, Louise Bourgeois devised a perpetual continuity between the work of living and artistic creation. His works clearly locked experiential aspects that, to be revisited, devenían creative experience. In his reference to the past work, especially infancy, is central. Not in the sense of an autobiographical allusion which traces the researcher could put in titles and themes of his compositions, but as a sort of cathartic asceticism in which the elements of lived experience are exorcised in the creative act. In 1982 he wrote:
"Some are so obsessed with the past to die buried under it. This is the attitude of the poet who never finds the lost paradise and is also the artist, who works for reasons that nobody can understand . Maybe what we both try to be rebuild a thing of the past in order to exorcise it, why the past has, for many people, an enormous power and beauty. Everything I've done has been inspired by my previous life (...) Every day do to forget your past or accept it. If you can not accept, you become a sculptor. "
Amiga artists like Mark Rothko , Joan Miró and Marcel Duchamp , Bourgeois pioneered the installation and performance art. Without however, gained public recognition until the 1970's, which, in his view, could only benefit their first productions bathing them for privacy, splendid isolation. The tortuous obsession with the love of father and mother, the overlapping of masculine and feminine (phallic breasts, penises split), the irruption of death in sex, but on the whole body (the breakdown and their combined symmetries and the dualities and homologies) are some constant presence in his work.

Janus Fleuri [Janus flower], 1968, bronze, 31.8 x 25.7 x 21.2 cm.


did not like to Louise Bourgeois was imposed to work the adjective "erotic", but in the case of the symbolic and aesthetic power that holds the body, just resigned to bring up the erotic scene:
"My job is not intentionally erotic, and I doubt it is, but before you go on to become the erotic aesthetic, who am I to tell you not? The content is involved with the human body, its appearance, its changes, its transformations, all they need , wants and feels its functions (...) The content is now the erotic message: everything occurs as a result of the presence of two people. Pleasure, pain, survival, in public or private, in a real or imaginary world. "
According account some autobiographical notes, was christened in honor of Louise Michel Louise , a kind of Rosa Luxembourg French her mother, feminist and socialist sympathizer, was a model. Given the deep interest which she awakened in everything related to women, Louise Bourgeois turn declared feminist however, remained outside of any membership and considered before all a big lonely.

Femme Couteau, black marble, 1970, 67 x 3 x 12, 5 cm.

About a work that explores the essence of the woman and the nature of the feminine, Femme Couteau (Women's knife), wrote:
"This marble sculpture, my Femme Couteau, includes the polarity of the women, the destructive and seductive. Why do women become women knife? not born as such. They did so through fear. In Femme Couteau the woman becomes a knife, is a defensive figure. To defend itself, identifies with his penis. A girl can feel terrorized by the world. Feeling vulnerable, as it can be injured by the penis, so try to take the same weapon of the aggressor. This is a problem that part of childhood, and the lack of a reasonable education and understanding. "
everlasting concern for the mother's love is present in works such as Fox She . In this piece, Bourgeois made of stone and the animal violence that permeated the mother-daughter: "I cut his head, slit his throat. And yet I would expect. (And here I think Winnicott , stating that the first object of choice must survive the destruction as proof of love.) According to the sculptor said, the figure represents an animal, a female, but not a female either, has several breasts , beautiful legs and a double mutilation throat and head. "Under his hips are a welcome retreat. And this is where I place myself (...) Fox She is a portrait of a relationship. It is an expression of faith that a child placed in their parents and violence established between the strong and the weak. This is the meaning of the work. "

She Fox, 1985 black marble, 68, 5 x 179 x 81 cm.

In 1973, after the death of her husband, Bourgeois sculpture created to mark a critical milestone in its path: Destruction of the father . The artist remembered his father (d. 1951) as a macho man. Being the third child of a marriage without sons, meant that they should forgive her for being a girl. As recounted in a text called Family Album, recalls that when he was born, his imaginative mother told his father: This girl is just like you, as you call it. That was how his father accepted. But the greatest disappointment would be the father to the daughter, holding for ten years a teacher amasiato with small Louise. Destruction of the father is a play about fear, and the impossibility of hidden love, and survive, to fear.

Destruction of the father , 1974, plaster, latex, wood and fabric, 237, 8 x 362, 2 x 248, 6 cm .

Above it says:
"This piece is basically a table, boring, terrifying family dinner table with the father head, who sits and gloats. And the other, the wife and children, what can you do? They sit there in silence. The mother, of course, trying to satisfy the tyrant, her husband. Children are full of despair ... So, in desperation, grabbed the man, threw him to the table, tore it apart and proceed to devour it. "
But who wants to see in this piece a totemic feast alluding to the influence of psychoanalysis, the artist will clarify the picture: no Freud, Lacan anything, it is not nothing but the real father, with all its symbolic imagery. At most, Freud and Lacan resembled something the father of the artist, like André Breton . At least that's what she said:
"Charcot was a modest person, just a scientist, but never a theoretician. On the contrary, Lacan was a guérisseur. Through his charm and verbal facility. It was not a scientist but a scammer. Freud and Lacan did nothing valid to the artist. barking at the wrong tree. They did not help anything. Simply I can not qualify for any of them (...) Breton, Lacan and Freud disappointed me. promised truth and provided only theories. They were like my father promised much and did too little. "
not think so grabbed Louise Bourgeois dislike for psychoanalysis. In 1990, he wrote a review of the New York exhibition The Sigmund Freud Antiquities, which he titled toys Freud, and portrayed an endearing way the creator of psychoanalysis (a children's collection and a reasonable man of genius full clinical and fear of his father). also came to believe that the analyst, alongside the Treasury and the lawyer, the best ally of the artist: "The psychoanalyst makes more reasonable the artist, the lawyer does smartest and richest Treasury.

Quotes taken from: Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the father, Sintesis, Madrid, 2002.