by Jean Frémon
Surrounded by breasts swollen with goodwill, a child howls. He’s lost, he’s beet red with fury, with unattainable desire. The thirst for love is inextinguishable. That’s just how it is. And we never get over it. Who can really ever get out of a void? A child. You are a parturient vacated. Don’t believe it. They make little mirrors. So that they can see in them what they want. Don’t be fooled; they reflect nothing but you, your dirty little secrets.
And the red-faced child sobbing into the rotundities. Hallelujah the Hills.
Mother, why did you abandon me. It’s the eternal refrain. Christian phraseology. We constantly fall back upon religious expressions. And yet you’re not a bigot, God knows. We distort it a little, that’s all. We transpose, we invert, we question the forms. How to sculpt absence? It’s hard enough to make a presence visible, but an absence? Suggest it . . . by the surrounding tension. No small feat!
And he, always a braggart: I’m like Saint Thomas, I only beeeleeeve what I seee, oui, oui. The finger in the wound, as in the Berlin Caravaggio. And isn’t that love? Come here, my little Thomas, put your finger in — feel how warm it is? The body of Christ, and the smell of blood — like it? And now do you believe it? You’ll be able to tell everybody. And that very moment, he disappeared. It’s now up to you to figure out the presences that are absences, and bleeding. A History of Flesh in Painting, three volumes, a history of blood and tears, a history of paint that drips, of nailed feet and hands, of a pierced side against a shadowy background. Incarnate that for me, said Maillol. That’s the whole point. We’ll never manage it. Even Serrano’s photos in the morgue bathe in the subject. You were born on December 25; doesn’t that give you at least a slight inclination for incarnation?
But as for him, the great chief father figure, he didn’t think much of the opinions of artists. They’re out of place, he said. OK, so let’s get out of place, let’s displace ourselves, embrace the distance, marry the foreigner, and a Jew at that, although he would have much preferred to see me marry that young dandy with the beautiful car who came courting. The son of a business friend, he looked on that favorably, a matter of plumping up the money bags, à la Balzac. So you left with your little suitcase and your wandering Jew, your hair blowing in the breeze. Runaway girl. With nothing left but your eyes to cry with. Those eyes that are his eyes. Plus bleu que le bleu de tes yeux, je ne vois rien de mieux, sang Piaf. You sing it to yourself to give yourself courage. Michaelmas daisies and morning glories, la la la, mais la couleur que je préfère, c’est le bleu, le bleu des bleuets. It slows down on the bleu-u-u-ets. The veil of the Madonna. You kept his eyes and his name. End of story.
*
Is it possible that somewhere deep down inside me there’s an explanation for my actions? Too late. Not worth looking for, as earlier with Lowenfeld. I listen to my cells, that’s all. It’s as if I can hear the millions of cells and bacteria vibrating inside me. What a racket. A whole prehistoric world. The spider is also prehistoric. We’re in collusion, you see. And the burrows, the shells, the nests, prehistoric constructions, organic architectures. Always correct. Fitting the precise dimensions of the space ideal for the species occupying it. This is true for sculpture as well. So I pile, I cut, I twist, I fashion, I excavate, I carve, I model, I mold, I turn, I drip, I chisel, I polish, I sand. I am what I make and nothing else. I make, I unmake, I remake. I make fullness surge; I organize voids. Turn things inside out like you do with a glove or the skin of a rabbit as you’re skinning it. I still hear the cry of the ragpicker passing early in the morning through the streets of Choisy with his rickety cart pulled by an old Percheron rescued from the cavalry, who left a little pile of steaming manure at every stop. Even Percherons make sculpture, you see. “Any skins, rabbit skins, any scrap iron for sale?” he cried out in his rasping voice to the gentry in their private boxes. In those days, everyone had three rabbits in a hutch at the bottom of the garden, even in the city. They weren’t going to be caught again by a siege, as in 1870. With the skins, they lined their slippers and made coats for the children. More warm voids to be filled. I make volumes and voids, nests, burrows, houses, rooms, cells. I watch myself making them, and I’m astonished. What’s it all for?
One void rhymes with another, that’s a fact. What can come out of a void. A cry! Does the cry fill the void or does the void void itself in crying? With a few old rags and ends of tapestries left over from Choisy, I fashioned a life-size screaming head. I stuck it on a pole and put it in a cage made of a metal trellis. The mouth is bright red. The eyes are blue, staring, terrified. I sculpted horror out of old rags. The virtue of orifices — they empty. Open the floodgates. Unleash it all. I think of Munch’s silent scream; I think of Bacon’s silently screaming popes, also in cages. And of the silent cry of the head on a stick by Giacometti, another maker of cages, and of the crying nurse on the steps of Odessa in Potemkin. I scare myself. How far do I have to go to make sure that the signals I send out to people like me are actually heard? It’s hardly sane to gesticulate so wildly, always dancing a jig, waltzing backward, overdramatizing, stirring up the crowd, just to get noticed. When I finally stop and take a look at myself, when the hysteria calms down, I feel a bit ridiculous. Now, now, my sweet, don’t get all worked up, go sit in a corner and just let it happen — the spider’s strategy. But that’s how I was made, too much or not enough. “Only too much is enough,” said Bacon when his friends tried to talk him out of ordering another bottle at the end of an already too-lubricated dinner. And so, there they are, my gaping holes, my surging volumes; they are figures, traps, devices designed to entice you, like those carnivorous flowers that give off dizzying scents that seduce the bees and then close up on them. I’m like the ragpicker; I recycle. With an old wool sweater soaked in plaster and stretched out, I made sculptures that are self-portraits. Louise B. scrap iron for sale.
*
What happens next: you stop getting up. What happened: little by little some things stopped and others began. You entered into the irreversible, that’s what. One day, you stopped taking airplanes, and all the exhibitions, here and there, happened without you. You said, Good. They can do it without me, the smiling, the petits fours, the blah blah blah, the brouhaha. You had to concentrate. Then the day came when you stopped going out to Brooklyn. Then the day when you stopped going out of the house. At all. And you say: the day when, but there was no “day when” — you just never went outside again, that’s all. But you kept on. Felix the Cat brought you the proofs of engravings, and you corrected them. You had a proof press installed in the basement. Jerry made appointments with visitors from five p.m. on. These were still days of real work. But every day it was a little bit harder to walk. No longer possible to climb the stairs up to your bedroom. So they put a bed on the ground floor in the small room just off the entry where you met with the seamstress. And then it happened that, little by little, you no longer left the bed. That happened to the Little Mother. That happened to you. The way of things. You slept so badly, so little, that at times, finally completely exhausted, you slept for three days straight. You heard everything that was going on. They whispered. They said: She’s sleeping. You heard them perfectly well, but you didn’t let on. They said: Let her sleep, she needs the rest. You suspected them of slipping you pills to give you some peace, sleeping pills. When you’re in bed, what else is there to do? But your head still worked, and it worked things out. You saw them negotiating all around you. But you said nothing. You saw fragments of your life as in a film. At times, it stopped, as if the film had broken. That used to happen when you showed silent films to the children, Charlie Chaplin, Felix the Cat — yes, him again. And then suddenly, there you’d all be in the dark. The smell of something burning coming from the projector, and you’d have to rewind it all by hand and then splice the two ends. It’s just the same. The film is broken everywhere, and the fragments file by out of order. It’s kind of fun, like an avant-garde novel, everything has exploded.
And so, there you are in yo
ur bed, but you are a bird. No one knows it, but you are a bird. So light. You set off when you want, you hover above the bed, you go as far as the window and then come back, far enough that they begin to get worried. But one of these days, you’ll fly away for good; that’s what’s going to happen. You’re no longer needed down here. It’s night, then day comes, then night again. Everything that comes goes away again. Like thoughts in the head. All those screaming heads, terrified, you loved making them, each one a little more sinister, with old scraps of cloth. And then the awe is there for good. Better to bird it for just a little bit more. Look Ma, I’m flying.
Louise Bourgeois as I Knew Her
Now, Now, Louison is a kind of portrait. In motion. At several stages of a life. A very long life. Threads of discourse, springing into the mouth of the speaker. An interior monologue. Written, but striving toward the illusion of speech. As a painted portrait gives the illusion of life, or a painted landscape the illusion of depth. It’s a portrait from memory. Any written portrait, unless it’s entirely imaginary, must be made of memory: there’s no model striking a pose, motionless, before the writer. Memory doesn’t exclude imagination; on the contrary, it requires it. So the book is not a biography; at most, it’s a life imagined. Like those written by Walter Pater, which I’ve always enjoyed so much. This book takes great liberties with reality, so it’s not by that measure that it should be judged. It cites no sources and is not encumbered by references. Louise Bourgeois, who was often so funny, once called footnotes cannonballs tied to the feet.
This is, therefore, a portrait made from memory moving through time. The movement and the time are both integral parts; together they create rhythm, the rhythm of the body and of the voice. They allow rhythm, texture, the tone of the model’s imaginary voice, to emerge by themselves.
Any painter will tell you that making a good portrait requires more than just a model to pose for you. You need much more — you need a deep familiarity that can only develop over a long period of time, the ability to put a hundred portraits into one. Which is why so many painters only do portraits of the people close to them. On the other hand, bad painters think they can do a portrait from a photograph . . .
It would be presumptuous of me to say that I knew Louise Bourgeois well. She was a complex, contradictory, unpredictable character, who really did live several lives. And yet I saw her regularly over a period of thirty or more years. And I witnessed her progressive but fairly rapid transition from a seventy-year-old artist with a large body of work behind her, but almost completely unknown to the general public, to an international star that the entire world wanted to meet. That transformation doesn’t appear in the book, because it didn’t change her way of being and speaking, and those alone are the things that I wanted to render — not precisely what she said, but again, her tone, her rhythm. And the best way to do that seemed to be to use the second person. Bourgeois speaks to herself in fragments and snatches; we’re in her head. We see her desire to speak, her reluctance to speak, her moments of rage, her self-possession when faced with overwhelming feelings. The portrait is built up of tiny strokes, one added upon another, like dashes of pencil.
And then there are the songs. The songs stuck in her head. Old French songs in an old exiled head. The songs that appear in the text are not necessarily the ones she sang herself. The story needs the words of certain songs to achieve its tenor, and so I put these words into her mouth. The words are there to draw a tune into the reader’s mind, as well as the pathos with which each singer — Edith Piaf, Charles Trenet, or Jean Sablon — sang those words. The songs add a bit of color to the drawing. They relax the tensions, calm things down, open a space for provisional reconciliations.
It’s a very short book; that’s what I wanted. But despite the length I’ve been writing it for over twenty years. I remember when it started: at the end of a dinner after the opening of the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1995, when a friend asked me what I was working on. Nothing, I replied. I’d published a novel a few months before, and I believed I had nothing else to say. (This was L’île des morts, which came out in 1994, a title that Louise detested because of the word dead, which frightened her. I won’t read it, she said when I brought it to her, which is a shame, she added, because I really like your last one. Some time after her death, I returned to her house one last time, after it had become the Louise Bourgeois archive, and I saw the spine of the first edition of Jardin botanique in the upstairs bookcase. L’île des morts wasn’t there. Not only had Louise not read it, she had, no doubt, simply thrown it in the trash. That was Louise.) Nothing more to say — that’s not possible, my friend replied. I’m sure you’ve got lots of things to say. I remained doubtful. What about all this, for example? All this what? Louise Bourgeois. The novel of Louise Bourgeois. I don’t mean a book of art history, I mean a novel. The conversation stopped there.
The seed germinated, and an idea began growing inside me, until it finally started taking form. 1995. Ten years earlier, I’d given Louise Bourgeois her first show in Paris. Up until then she hadn’t shown anywhere but in the United States. (I first encountered her work in 1979 in an exhibition at the Xavier Fourcade Gallery in New York. I retain a vivid memory of that exhibition, which included, at the back of the room, Partial Recall, a huge wooden construction painted white, as well as a large group of her wooden characters from the 1950s. I immediately wanted to meet her.)
After 1995, we didn’t work together as much, but I continued to visit her regularly, though I never said a word about the book I was writing. I knew that even if I came up with something decent, I would never publish it during her lifetime. I needed the freedom of imagination that she used so well in her own work, but which she would not have been able to allow someone who was writing about her. That’s how I felt, at least. Whenever I visited, she’d ask me what I was writing, and since I always had several projects underway I could always say something without having to mention the project about her.
The people who count in your life are permanently present in your head and in your heart. If that head and heart are those of a writer, they’ll begin to express themselves in words, in sentences, which in turn become characters that frolic and chatter in your head. If you start listening to them and writing them down, they’ll eventually become a book like this one.
Jean Frémon
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