Women in Art: Quiet Obliteration · Chapter 03 · Hold
Louise Bourgeois
Bourgeois built rooms you cannot enter out of doors that used to open. The salvage is the point.
4 min read
The Cells are built out of doors. Not representations of doors — actual salvaged ones, with their old paint, their hinges, the wear at the handle height where hands went for years. Bourgeois set them on edge in a rough circle and made a room out of them, and the room has no way in.
You circle it. You find a gap between two panels, or a stretch of wire mesh, and you look through. Inside there is furniture, or glass vessels, or marble, or a piece of clothing. You can see everything and reach nothing. The work puts you in the position of someone outside a private situation, which is a specific and slightly uncomfortable thing to be.
It is tempting to read the Cells as prisons. They are, but only half. A wall that keeps you in is the same wall that keeps everything else out, and the objects inside are handled with obvious care — placed, not dumped. Bourgeois said that each Cell deals with a kind of pain: physical, emotional, psychological. She did not say each Cell is a punishment.
A wall that keeps you in is the same wall that keeps everything else out.
She had been working this seam for fifty years by then. In the 1940s she made the Femme Maison drawings — a woman's body with a house where her head and shoulders should be. The house is not on her; it has replaced part of her. Domestic space as anatomy. The Cells are that drawing at full scale, with the viewer standing outside it.
The same double meaning is easier to see in her best-known public sculpture, Maman: a spider some thirty feet tall, carrying a sac of marble eggs under its body. Bourgeois called it a portrait of her mother — a weaver, patient and protective, and also a thing large enough to loom over you. Protection and threat, cast in the same bronze.
Find the hardware. A latch that no longer catches anything. A hinge screwed to a frame that leads nowhere. Then look for the one object inside that is soft — cloth, usually. In a structure made of wood, steel and glass, the soft thing is where the work admits what it is about.
Bourgeois converts the issue's terms from surface to architecture. Kusama and Martin work on a plane; Bourgeois works in a room, and shows that enclosure is never only one thing. This is where the phrase the door inside the trap comes from.
