Is it unusual for you to make happy work?
I transform it. I transform nasty work into good work. I transform hate into
love. That's what makes me tick.
I met Louise first in the early 1980s and I found her extremely intimidating.
I hadn't expected this tiny ferociously intelligent woman who rubbished most of
my questions, because they were seriously not very well thought through or
articulate and really that set the tone for our relationship. On my side total
admiration but as a person, I having met her on many occasions, was never
absolutely comfortable in her presence. Do you think of your towers, that this
piece or the three of them, in some way like your early personage figures?
They're very simple. The three personage are
the father, the mother and the child. Which is the father?
I don't care. I'm the child. I'm the child.
Louise was extremely intelligent and emotionally she could be like a baby.
I mean she had these polarities coexisting. She was very anxious. She was one
these people. When she had anxiety she could either make work or she could
attack. So she was very volatile. Art really did keep her sanity and her
balance, because she could oscillate between extremes. The fate of the work is
really to be destroyed. It is really what what I want. I want to do the things and
express my rage by breaking it. You understand that my dealer doesn't like that
and Jerry doesn't like that. Jerry works
like the horse over there. Louise was very clear about why she was doing
the things that she did in terms of her art. She would transfer her
emotional states into the material. You know she had a lot of aggression, a lot
of frustration and so she took the materials as a resistance that she was
struggling against and to cut something or to chip away at it or to separate it
and I think that that was her need to express on the outside what she was
feeling internally. This is the mistress, showing off all in white. She was
introduced in the family as a teacher. She slept with my father and she lived in
the house. She was there for 10 years. The motivation for the work is a
negative reaction against her. It shows that it is really the anger that makes
me work. What I think is interesting about Louise Bourgeois
is that she had this very traumatic and vivid, vivid childhood. There is trauma
there and I think Bourgeois realised early on that she needed that trauma. That she
fed off it and that she needed to wake up every day with trauma and those
memories. You know, some of her best works came out of addressing very
fundamental traumas and sadnesses in her life.
Louise was very depressed after the death of her father and she began
analysis. She did have a very difficult relationship with him but it's quite
obvious from her writings during the psychoanalytic period that she was
really in love with him and so a lot of her expression was really her
frustration in a way. They were very close. We could say with Louise's work,
that the early work really was dealing with the identification with the father and
maybe the aggression towards him and her frustration. The late work is really an
identification with the mother, who was a sower and a tapestry worker. I think she
made a shift in the work, where the last 15 years of her life she really never
referred to her father at all. It was really about the mother.
The spiders are interesting in Bourgeois. The first spider appears in a drawing in
I think 1947. She also wrote about a spider on many occasions and talked
about her mother being like a spider. There are multiple ideas about spiders.
They're weavers. They're makers. They're protectors and people are scared of them. So there's
an ambivalence between good and bad, strong and weak, safe and dangerous.
She really didn't make sculptures of spiders until the mid-90s and it was an ode to
her mother. You know she just saw the spider is benevolent. But it was also the
idea that the spider was really a weaver and would build this architecture out of
its own body, the same way she did. So it's a connection to her mother but it's
also a connection to her own artistic process.
The themes that come out of Louise's work are themes to do with life and
loving and living and suffering and dying and they are profoundly human
emotions. A continuous iteration Louise is writing in many of her titles is
'I do, I undo, I redo'. So there's this idea that through life we make things, we
unmake them, we remake them. Bourgeois's whole life was about trying failing and
doing it again. Art was a form of sublimation. It also gave her
access in a way to a hidden reality of who she really was.
It's an emotional record in a way, that she's given form to and there are things
that she cannot say. I think Louise lived in a visual world. The artist has the
privilege of being in touch with his or her unconscious. This is
really a gift. It is the definition of sanity. It is the definition of
self-realisation. Right. She described herself as a guerrilla fighter and that
that image has stuck with me. That there was so much she fought against from
early childhood, through adulthood, through middle age. You know, moving to
America. Having to fight her way as a woman. Making art saved her life.
In a strange way it sort of, you know, was a sort of therapy.
And so she was lucky that she found something that she needed to do that was also, you
know, life-saving. What she was, what she believed in and what she felt in the
work is totally unified. I think that's the brilliance really of what she
produced. I mean there is no real separation.