An Interview With Louise Bourgeois - Susi Bloch

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An Interview with Louise Bourgeois Author(s): Susi Bloch Source: Art Journal, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 370-373Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776230Accessed: 23-04-2015 13:20 UTC

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An Interview with Louise Bourgeois SUSI BLOCH

Introduction

This interview with Louise Bourgeois proceeded from a re- encounter with the artist's early work in the current Whitney exhibition, 200 Years of American Sculpture. Re-encounter here does not signify a regained familiarity with something known. As often before, confrontation with "examples" of Bourgeois' early work-and the curiosity and admiration they compel-serves to agitate the claim of an existing body of significant work that is unknown, inaccessible, and largely undocumented. While the two pieces at the Whitney estab- lish themselves within the context of the exhibition as part of the history of 20th-century American sculpture, it is clear that they exist as fragments both of this larger history and of the artist's history, which has yet to be investigated and recon- structed. Moreover, each history is dependent upon the other. The larger history, that of American sculpture, remains fragmented precisely because fragmentation has been im- posed upon the other-the history of the artist, the history of the artist's work. The circumstances contributing to the inac- cessibility and hence obscurity of Bourgeois' early work are complex. They have to do with factors as various as the seemingly hermetic quality of her work-rendered more hermetic both by the artist's idiosyncracies and the isolation of the work from the history of which it is a part-and, more to the point, the practice of history at the time the pieces, shown and unshown, were made, as well as the practice of history now.

Both artist and interviewer had reservations about the interview as the best format for an investigation and discourse concerning this work. In as much as an extended critical essay or monograph would have meant foregoing the imme- diate opportunity of focusing on the work in the Whitney as a means of drawing attention to Bourgeois in order to more properly and critically integrate her work into a history of

modern American sculpture, a discussion with the artist rele- vant to the two pieces in the Whitney, and the work of the late '40s and early '50s in general, seemed timely. The interview-of necessity short and problematically circuitous- only begins to touch on a few things about Bourgeois' early work. It does so through some repetition, which has to do with attempting to locate and focus what one is talking about and the words being used, in what emerges sometimes as cross-purpose of question and response.

SB Looking at your two pieces, The Blind Leading the Blind (1949) and One and Others (1951) in the Whitney show, what is immediately interesting and pertinent is that despite the confusion of the installation these pieces impose an integrity of space; that locked, closed ...

LB remote SB space and distancing of object that was so important in

the development of abstract sculpture, particularly your sculpture, at that time.

LB We have to point out a matter of date. The Blind Leading the Blind was exhibited at the Peridot Gallery on 12th Street in 1949, and the piece, Sleeping Figure, was part of that show. Although it has mistakenly been dated later, it was made in '47. My work which was very elliptical and direct at the same time was seen by Arthur Drexler who was a painter then. He took a shine to it and he offered me the show at Peridot. Sleeping Figure was bought by Alfred Barr for the Museum of Modern Art in '49.

SB You began making sculpture in '47, making work that seems to relate strongly in motif to the etchings and parables, He Disappeared into Complete Silence, worked on in '46, published in '47.

ART JOURNAL, XXXV/4 370


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Louise Bourgeois, One and Others, 1950-51. Collection of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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Louise Bourgeois, The Blind Leading the Blind, wood, 7' h., 1947-49. (Photo: Peter Moore.)

Louise Bourgeois, Sleeping Figure, balsa wood, 74'/2" h., 1947. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York.

SUMMER 1976 371


Louise Bourgeois, He Disappeared into Complete Silence, plate 2, etching, 1946.

LB They relate primarily in their symbolic geometry. Geo- metrical figures, circles, half-circles, points, lines, vec- tors . .. were my vocabulary and still are today. The basis of Euclidean geometry is that parallels never touch. Par- allelism excludes any kind of touching, distance remains the same in time.

SB What do you mean by symbolic geometry? LB I mean solid geometry as a symbol for emotional secu-

rity. Euclidean or other kinds of geometry are closed systems where relations can be anticipated and are eter- nal. It comes naturally to me to express emotions through relations between geometrical elements, in two dimensions or three dimensions.. .. In the Peridot exhibition the disposition of and relations between the figures, grouped in twos and threes or isolated, represents a readable floor graph.

SB The Blind Leading the Blind you identify as environmental; the Peridot show you conceived as an environment. Was the gallery space then understood by you as ideal?

LB Ideal? SB Well, the idea implies that the disposition of the objects

and the particular sense and abstraction of the forms aimed at creating the same dislocating, psychological warp of space that One and Others achieves as a single unit. In the gallery there is the complexity of overlap, a confusion between real space and configured space, between real and configured relationships.

LB Why confusion? They exist without overlapping. One is real space and one is a symbolic space.

SB One and Others excludes this duality. The scaling and closed cluster effect a purely illusory dimension of space in which the object is distanced.

LB That's because you see it as a viewer and not as a maker. I see it as a maker.

SB But one's position and identity as 'viewer' is something precisely determined by the structure of the piece. Al- though I co-habit the sculpture's space, can walk around it, can touch it, the piece always insists on and maintains its illusory, psychological distance.

LB Yes. SB In the Peridot exhibition where gallery space and sculp-

ture were conceived as creating an environment, that conceptual reality, analogous to that of One and Others in intention, was actually penetrated and disturbed by the viewer.

LB Well, I would say here that the space of the viewer becomes the space of the maker. You enter the space and manipulate objects within that space which is the privilege of the maker.

SB Was this the intention of your environment-that the space of the viewer be actualized as the space of the maker?

LB Yes. This is really the origin of the environmental sculptures, or later the Happenings. That is to say the necessity for the artist to function in a real space is carried on during the show.

SB Then the space remains a privileged space? LB It is a privilege that the gallery offered me and that I took

over completely. It was a concession of the gallery to the artist.

SB You used the gallery space then in a way different than was usual?

LB I took hold of the gallery, of the space that was given to me and used it. Instead of displaying pieces the space became part of the piece. Peridot worried about his floors. I explained that these pieces had to come without any kind of bases, coming directly to the floor on one point. As mentioned before, the figures, the distance between figures, compose a diagram of points. If there had been bases the bases would have isolated the figures not only from the spectator but from the other figures. The figures construct and inhabit their own social space. . . . The privileged space has certain characteristics. It is closed and exactly defined and belongs to the artist in the way the stage belongs to the performer for a certain number of minutes. The spectator is no longer merely a viewer if he is able to move from the stage of viewing to the stage of collaborating. . . . Dislocation is analogous to the state of passivity that is rejected and becomes a state of active being. In other words it is the dislocation, the transformation of a person who is passive, depressed through a crise de conscience, into a person who becomes suddenly active-the passage from death to life through the creative act.

SB One problem of modern sculpture was its necessity to create a space in which it could exist.

LB But the artist was satisfied with academic space. Nobody asked for anything more until a certain time in America- at an exact date, when the artist said I am not satisfied to be an artist, I want to be a participant-an active element instead of being a passive one. So it is a crise de conscience.

SB Was the idea of environmental sculpture or exhibition as an environment prevalent at the time of your show at Peridot?

ART JOURNAL,. XXXV/4 372


LB No, it wasn't prevalent at all; in fact it was the first one. There were seventeen figures circulating in the room; the show was photographed by Aaron Sisskind and was documented by Alfred Barr. The photographs show the figures in space as a diagram of positions. Euclidean geometry turns around the notion of point. As a conse- quence the line is seen as an infinite number of points. The vector we can experience as distance, a succession of an infinite number of directed points. The definition of a vector is simply a line which is a distance; we have attached to it the notion of time. All of this establishes this passion for the security geometry affords, and antici- pates or explains a certain kind of sensitivity.

SB Why did you start thinking in terms of an environment? LB The reason was a psychological one. These pieces were

presences-missed, badly missed presences. Now do you want me to talk about my personal life ... I don't like to do that.

SB No, not necessarily. We talked about this before-the question of the sublimation of content where abstraction is concerned and simply the residue of a resonance of meaning. More broadly, we also talked about difference in cause and effect; the difference between the conditions which motivate a solution and the conditions im- posed by the solution.

LB In this case it has to do with the way the environment appeared-I was missing certain people that I had left behind. It was a tangible way of re-creating a missed past. The figures were presences which needed the room, the six sides of the cube ... It was the recon- struction of the past.

SB But even when the "room" did not exist, the individual figure or presence, and clusters of figures or presences, as in the photograph of such a group stationed at the top of the stairs in your house which you showed me, main- tained their own discrete space, that illusory distancing. If you wanted to, I guess you could say that the quality of their remoteness is a condition of their pastness; they are only present, remotely, as past. . . The move to the environment of the exhibition, which becomes an event-this is something very different.

LB The dynamism of the presence in a claustrophobic space such as the top of the stairs under the roof was much more dynamic than the gallery. I accept that. But the gallery would not have permitted me to place my per- sonages in a closet which in effect is the way they were conceived. The gallery wanted the whole space to be used. But when you came to the Peridot you went two steps down and you had the very strong sense of something going on. You moved within an integrated work rather than around or between isolated works; you moved within the social space of the figures themselves.

SB The idea of the environment and the locked form and space of these sculptures, did this have something to do with the problem of making sculpture at that time?

LB No. I was less interested in making sculpture at the time than in recreating an indispensable past. The motivation was extremely strong. I showed you photographs of figures on the roof and the way they were grouped together. The figures on the roof had nothing to do with sculpture, they meant physical presences. That was an

Louise Bourgeois standing beside The Visitors Arrive at the Doors, 1947. The "past" explains the size.

attempt at not only re-creating the past but controlling it. SB Does One and Others involve the same idea? LB Yes. But it was done later, in 1951. So it was more

abstract and I did not need the presence of people who were the height of my brother, my parents, they could be much smaller.

SB One and Others becomes a more abstract distillation of those earlier figures and environment.

LB Yes, I hope ... I do not say yes, I hope so. In One and Others all distance has been reduced to zero. The forms touch each other and they function exclusively in their touching, their relation to each other.... There is such a shock after a show. A show is an experience and after a show the artist is a different person. He moves on-so does the work. So the space that was so indispensable for me when I needed a real space with real six-foot people, that need disappeared completely. It was re- solved and forgotten ... I could move in abstract space. D

Susi Bloch is an Assistant Professor at Empire State College (SUNY).

SUMMER 1976 373


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An Interview With Louise Bourgeois - Susi Bloch