Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine
This feature-length documentary explores Bourgeois' heady and challenging body of work
Reviewed by Wells Dunbar, Fri., July 31, 2009
Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine
Zeitgeist Films, $29.99Last year, when my girlfriend and I left the Guggenheim's retrospective of Louise Bourgeois, we felt assaulted. Bourgeois' body of work is heady and challenging; her earlier, midcentury work dealt largely in geometric design but evolved into tightly wound sculptures of enraptured figures, dysmorphic limb and genital abstractions, and increasingly ambitious installations. Her series of Cell installations in the 1990s internalized the trauma from physical to psychological: individual rooms dressed with sculptures, stitchings, and clothing, several of which can only be viewed voyeuristically through windows and cracks.
The feature-length documentary from directors Amei Wallach and Marion Cajori (who died before its completion) explores Bourgeois' oeuvre literally: The ornamentation of her cells is captured in ways the works can't be, as designed, in person. The camera trek through I Do I Undo I Redo – three massive, multistory towers, installed in the Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern – is suitably climactic. And head-spinning swirls beneath the bodies of Bourgeois' iconic spiders – dark, spindly-legged creatures pregnant with egg sacs – convey their dark grandeur. But the film also explores Bourgeois, the artist, through 1990s-era documentary footage of her at work in her Brooklyn studio. Age hasn't mellowed her; whether angrily sanding a sculpture or speaking about her childhood's impact on her work, Bourgeois, then in her 80s, is a flighty, combative subject. (She's still alive, at 97 years old.)
Interviews with friends and critics further flesh out the Bourgeois mythos: Her father's long-running affair with their family seamstress is the cornerstone of several pieces, threads of which run through her work with sewing, fabrics, and clothing. But while providing an easy shorthand for works such as The Destruction of the Father, the film traces the impact of other experiences on Bourgeois; disturbing footage of facial prosthetics from World War I (which Bourgeois' father fought in) mirror the exploded, organic sculptures she later created. It also traces the impact of Bourgeois' incredible career on the art world at large, starting in the late 1940s, building into the next decade, then lying dormant before returning strongly to broader acceptance in the 1970s. Outlasting the brainy winks of surrealism and the formalist exercises of the 1960s, Bourgeois ushered in a more personal, harrowing vision – her father's "sick heart," as seen in the spiders – that reverberates among today's enfants terribles.
Work by Louise Bourgeois is included in the Austin Museum of Art's current exhibition "The Lining of Forgetting: Internal and External Memory in Art."