Louise Bourgeois at Cheim & Read
Louise Bourgeois turned 90 last Christmas, and the questions that attend her work now include, inevitably, whispered doubts about her hands-on involvement in its creation. Well, judging from the sculptures themselves, there is a ferocious, passionate, self-centered, comic, limitlessly generative spirit at work, and it looks a lot like hers. Most telling, it is not afraid to address questions of aging head-on.
Bourgeois's long-running family narrative is visited once again in Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), part of an extended series of cagelike assemblages. Here the wife (that is, Bourgeois's mother), the husband's mistress and, perhaps, the angry woman-child herself are characterized in sartorial shorthand (a snazzy cocktail dress, a prim shirtwaist, half a puff-sleeved bodice). Newer and even more arresting--ruthless is not too strong a word--is a series of patchwork cloth figures. Sutured serviceably but without refinement, these soft sculptures are presented, like anthropological specimens, in woodframed glass vitrines. Obese, Bulimic, Anorexic is a trio of pink grotesques, one padded, the second--it seems to have a detachable stomach--angrily retching and a knobby-kneed third smiling inanely. If these figures' faces evoke ski masks--hence the balaclavas of certain 1980s terrorists--the open-mouthed howl of Rejection, an oversized head pieced together from white terrycloth that looks from a distance like bandaging or swaddling, addresses horror from a different angle. Gentler but no less hypnotic are four suspended rag-doll couples, each pair a different solid color and each clenched tight in what could be acrobatic lovemaking, or merely a tender embrace. Or, these inseparable couples could be holding on for dear life, dangling just slightly above eye level so we look up at them pryingly, like equally helpless children.
Not shown but illustrated in the exhibition's catalogue are stuffed textile versions of earlier, polymorphously sexual sculptures first executed in plaster and bronze--revisions that seem meant to be seen as toys for a provocatively feigned second childhood. In the exhibition, this connection is made most forcefully with a half-dozen totems made of stacked cloth cushions, baby-proof versions of figures first realized in the late 1940s in painted wood. The new totems come in a variety of regularly tapering shapes; materials include worn corduroy, faded linen and what looks suspiciously like baby blankets, in nursery colors of pale blue, yellow, creamy white and pink. One has four little fingerholds, upholstered indentations that evoke the tactile pleasures of infancy. There is a brutality to this self-cannibalism that is really rather stunning, not least because the totems are also so mockingly, irresistibly tender.
All of these elements--the bitter, seductive memories; the frighteningly knowing preemptive assumption of (false) childishness; and, not least, the unappeasable yearning for an irrecoverable past--were incorporated in the installation that served as prelude to this show. It involved two crude, low chairs angled toward an immense oval mirror, with a sound track of the artist singing French nursery rhymes. No Lacanianisms here: the positioning was such that the mirror did not return the sitter's gaze, but instead reflected the other chair. Clear self-reflection, Bourgeois seems to say, can't simply be had for the asking. If you really want to go back there, you've got to make the memories yourself.