“Space is just a metaphor for the structure of our existence, she says.” Andrew speaks solemnly, and I repress a giggle to respond in the same tone:
“So perhaps our castles, interior or exterior, are projections of our psychic lives?”
Am I here with him and Louise B, or am I still, as ever, with my Teresa?
Andrew zooms in on details, lingers on them, talks me through them, draws me into Louise’s motionless travels. Like everyone in her milieu, Louise rejected religion as such, considering that 140 religions on this earth are way too many. But since she believed herself to have a religious temperament, she signed up for the 141st, which is art.
In the beginning was fear. “Fear makes the world go round.” “It’s the story of someone so frightened by his love that he withdraws.” Fear turns into depression, together with an inexorable lowering of self-esteem. “A man and a woman lived together. On one evening he did not come back from work and she waited. She kept on waiting and she grew littler and littler. Later a neighbor stopped by out of friendship, and there he found her in the armchair the size of a pea.” But it’s a fortunate pea. It, or she, realizes “that you can stand anything if you write it down.” She starts snatching at all the ideas buzzing around her head, buzzing through the air like flies, and converts them into pen-thoughts, pink or blue, like butterflies. Once written down, these thoughts will become drawings, then paintings, then sculptures. For the little pea discovers that sculpture alone is liberating: it’s a tangible reality that encases emptiness, desertion, separation. Death. You must never think that the pea is interested in anxiety. Like her mother, it—meaning she, this woman—is conceptual, and assesses the situation objectively, scientifically, and not emotionally. “I was interested not in anxiety but in perspective, in seeing things from different points of view.” And: “I am not interested in the appearance of the body; I’m interested in how things work.” Obviously, since the body is a mechanism, and mechanisms are stronger than women and men and fear and death.
In the beginning was loss of innocence. “You cannot understand erotic forms if you are completely innocent, and a symbol is a symbol only if what it stands for is known.” Do sexual forms provide a way out of depression or emptiness, then? She clarifies by saying that to sculpt is “to record confidence or pleasure,” which take the place of depression and emptiness and modify them. Then it can be called “a formal problem,” that of reorganizing the world.
And that’s how the little pea became the architect of the world. The Aubusson tapestries played their part in this loss of innocence; French tradition is totally to be run away from—provided one revisits it often, it’s so terribly chic! The “tapestry” is henceforth named Restif de la Bretonne, Colette and Willy, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Céline, Antonin Artaud…all of them French. But, for the pea/woman who “travels herself,” it is also named Norman Mailer and the constellation of Americans whose courses she attends and whose shows she sees. They initiate her into the brazenness that culminates in this tribute to Francis Bacon: his inebriation doesn’t depict “things” but an “indisputably violent desire” of “terrific brutality”; “his suffering communicates.” “I want to share it.” “To look at his pictures makes me alive.”
From one beginning to the next, Louise Bourgeois confirms the vagabond destiny of creators from time immemorial, but especially during the twentieth century. Among the frontiers to be crossed were those of language, political regime, the family, the father. An absolute necessity for girls in particular, especially those who were born, like Athena, from the head of Zeus after he had swallowed their mother Metis, goddess of crafty thought. Equally important, never omit to jump every fence: Athena was the first, and already an accomplice of Ulysses the traveler, of course. It’s essential “to free oneself” from self and from home, and more so as a woman. “I married an American. I left France because I freed myself, or escaped from home.…I was a runaway girl. I was running away from a family situation that was very disturbing.”
Hannah Arendt felt great affinity with this line from Schiller: “Eine Mädchen aus der Fremde,” “A maiden from afar”—seeking the father, fleeing the father. Or rather, taking the place of the progenitor and faithful-unfaithful to the intellectual mentor; situating herself in the indefinite, cut loose from foundation. In perpetual re-foundation, perhaps, budding forth moment by moment? “Une éclosion de tous les instants”: that’s how Colette phrases her floral adventure in the company of her mother, the sublime Sido, recreated by the writing of a daughter endlessly nourished by the maternal tongue; cleaving to her rooted matrix. But cleaving away from the father, the captain with a wooden leg, the impotent writer with a “membered” need to write, and equally rejecting the trio of husbands—Willy, Jouvenel, Goudeket. Melanie Klein did something similar by reinventing psychoanalysis in order to understand mutism in children and making the cure for desire a thought cure. Klein had to leave, first her mother, and then Mr. Klein, who had given her three children; she had to tear herself away from German and struggle for English; finally she had to get away from Freud himself in order to found her own school—from depression, via matricide, to sublimation.3
Louise Bourgeois didn’t have to resort to such brain-clutching upheavals. More recent, more modern, and a lot luckier, an American in the cosmopolitan sense, she “only” had to reinvent the terrain of her “structures of existence,” and make far-fetched spaces in three dimensions. She “travels herself” (elle se voyage), to borrow the neologism of the journalist Stéphanie Delacour in Julia Kristeva’s metaphysical detective novel, Murder in Byzantium.4 Kristeva is Bulgarian by birth, French by nationality, a European citizen—and an adoptive American? She’s a journalist, a psychoanalyst, a semiotician, a novelist, and how many other things? She too is made up of mobiles and kaleidoscopes…
The father’s daughters rediscover the mother’s depths when they appropriate the father’s ambition, while taking tactful care of the male urge to power: “The phallus is a subject of my tenderness.…I lived with four men, I was the protector,” explains Louise B. Had she lived today my Teresa might have endorsed that sentiment, thinking of her own family, of father-uncle-brothers, and then confessors…These “runaway daughters of the father” thus manage to transmute their fear, and maybe they end up not being afraid, whether of the phallus, or of betrayal, or of fear itself, the fear that petrifies most “liberated” women into hardened militants.
“A bit psycho-babbly, don’t you think? These days, even in New York…it comes over as rather intellectual, for an artist. Not sure I’ll keep that bit.” Andrew moves the DVD on, unhappy with his art-star’s line on phalluses. I don’t blame him. I hide a smile. Men, really, ever since they turned into the second sex…On with our viewing!
It’s surely a prime achievement for a sculptor to rid himself or herself of rigidity. “I dream of being a reasonable woman,” is how Louise describes her latest metamorphosis. Out with stiffness and brittleness—and yet: “I was supposed to apologize for being only a girl. My brother was born later, of course.” “Ever since I was born, I was pushed into constant rivalry with other people.” Is that any reason to bend? To throw in the towel? Of course not! Though it’s never definitive, let’s try to attain serenity without dependency. “I feel good. I feel independent.”
Teresa “feels” as well, there’s no doubt about that, she burns with longing to feel herself being this or that. They were all at it, during the late sixteenth century: “little Seneca,” the towering John of the Cross, “Doctor in Nada,” cares only for “substantial words,” the kind that resonate viscerally, in the flesh, that are one with substance. If the soul were to be told, “‘Be thou good,’ it would then substantially be good.”5 Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises had the Jesuits wrap up their meditations with the “application of the five senses”: after cogitating they were to find repose in looking, listening, tasting, touching, smelling. Teresa, however, has no need to “apply” herself, for simplemind
edness or bobería comes naturally to her, she boasts of it, it’s a state that does not cancel the intellect but subordinates it to simplicity: “Here there is no demand for reasoning, but for knowing what as a matter of fact [con llaneza] we are and for placing ourselves with simplicity [con simpleza] in God’s presence, for He desires the soul to become ignorant [boba] in His presence, as indeed it is.”6 And the more this ignoramus feels, the more she feels herself, and the more she senses her friends and enemies, until she feels, and becomes, independent. Independent with His Majesty or of His Majesty? It makes no difference, since He was inside her by the time she began to write and to make foundations. She feels both things at once. The writing, fighting Madre is also a “runaway girl,” indeed the epitome of one—she who is always escaping from what precedes her toward what exceeds her and always re-founding herself by founding institutions. Tutti a cavallo…“Everything depends on your ability to sublimate,” says Louise’s voice on the DVD.
Is there a deconstruction of the father going on? Some of Bourgeois’ works, like The Destruction of the Father, would make us think so. Andrew’s film has wicked fun with this one, shadowing the artist through her labyrinth of paternal forms with an unabashed pleasure in their vacillations between tumescence and detumescence, deformation and formation. Suddenly my favorite filmmaker starts horsing around, I like him best like this, playing the fool without his deep-and-serious-writer mask on. He whirls away from the computer and bounces around me like a chimpanzee, shrieking at the top of his voice:
“Hey, Nobodaddy, Nobodaddy, Nobodaddy! Why art thou silent and invisible, father of jealousy? Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds from every searching eye?”7
Has La Bourgeois bewitched him? Jigging and giggling, oblivious of the deconstructive Seventies, Andrew is a carnival king. With a few lines of rhyming verse, he flies off into unbearable father love, it’s hysterically funny; is libertarian Christianity alone in legitimating and cultivating such a thing? Jesus the imagination is a silky tiger made of wrath and pity, and the revolution will be libidinal or it will not be. I dare you, go cross swords with the Commander, go taunt Daddy, see how you make out at squishing him into Nobodaddy! A burlesque dig here, an obscene jibe there, poor old fellow left to rot, coughing and cowering, who “jumps up off his seat and turns thrice three times around,” some passion! Nowhere else has Daddy love, confessed to death, pushed artists and others not belonging to that weird species into such a rebellious, savage tenderness, the banality of evil revised and corrected, male anality rehashed to the nth degree. They call it freedom and Andrew is acting it out to me this minute, jabbing a faux-sardonic finger at the ceiling.
“‘That ole Nobodaddy got stuck up there, burping and farting without a care! He read out a big sermon that made heaven shake, and then got to yelling for William Blake!’ That’s pretty good, getting Blake in there. In subtitles, or as voice-over? ‘Why darkness and obscurity in all thy words and laws, that none dare eat the fruit but from the wily serpent’s jaws? Or is it because secrecy gains females’ wild applause?’” My friend is getting quite carried away, capering and cackling; then he stops dead, and strikes a Gallic pose. “‘Upon seeing this, the moon blushed scarlet.’ Curtain.”
He stares at me with dark, crazed eyes. He’s not laughing now.
Silence.
If he only knew how his clowning vindicated my own very personal theology…But let’s not go there.
“Shall I paste that into Bourgie’s film? What d’you reckon? Too strong for her, maybe? Oh, she blasphemes with her dad’s organ all right, bingo! But it’s like she envies him…or like she’s holding back even so, do you feel that or not? Couldn’t be further from my poet-engraver, anyway. Uncommercial maniac.”
I think of Teresa, it’s far from her too: she’s into chess, not chisels.
“Mind you, Louise ain’t so bad for a woman. We’ll see at the editing stage. Ready for the rest?”
He presses Play, more calmly.
I understand his disquiet. Louise’s hand-to-hand combat with her father is also an indefatigable reweaving of the maternal web: it’s the restoration of Joséphine, the mother who was her companion in depression as much as in good sense. Before the artist found out how “ridiculous” life is. Becoming a mother herself—an experience Louise B accompanies and reflects, like a refracting mirror—led her inevitably to this detachment; but most mothers don’t know it. Andrew’s heroine, who is not an ordinary mother (But what woman is? Certainly not Madre Teresa!) turns space into a kind of fecund receptacle, a topography of udders and breasts. Cows, sows, women, all are “interesting, moving, live and flexible landscapes.” We’re a long way from your subtle dwelling places, Teresa, my love! Apart from the flexibility, the liveliness, the mobility, a certain simplemindedness, alma boba…
Warlike violence nonetheless persists beneath the decorous indecency that is always being petted and cajoled. It simmers like the tantrum of a child who is loved and yet quick to flare up, flounce off, blow her top. Who can stand anything if she writes it down and then makes of it a sculpture, which is her preferred script.
But then is this nomad nothing but an eternal adolescent, a phallus worshipper cloaking the dreamer of breasts? What is a woman, in the end? A woman must dare to be “arrogant and ambitious,” declares my writer’s latest muse. Great! Anything else? I won’t tell Andrew that Louise sounds like a feminist from Milwaukee, because I do know by now that if a woman isn’t minimally arrogant or ambitious she simply is not, period. But then…Oh, it would take too long, you’d have to write a novel!
Every beginning is a new life “organized around hollowness.” That’s quite a discovery. Does it apply to the female body? Maybe, or it’s an overstatement, we’ll see. For the time being the pea-woman is a “house-woman,” necessarily an empty one like the empty homes it/she left behind, clearly “a metaphor for existence,” for abandoned, abandoning, abandonistic space. Excellent start if you want to become a sculptor, or sculptress. Nice and particular, without precluding an element of the general. And so it was, claims Andrew’s film, that the arrogant and ambitious little pea took on the great Bernini himself, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, seventeenth-century virtuoso, Italian sculptor, architect, decorator, painter, playwright, and poet. Good gracious, that’s someone I didn’t expect to meet at Tate Modern! He adored La Madre and was the first, in my humble opinion the only, artist to see her with the eyes of a marveling connoisseur, in a way that still shocks the faithful. I have knelt before his sculpture in Santa Maria della Vittoria (not before Teresa, who only exists in her writings). Andrew doesn’t need to know this; it’s my secret garden. I’ve said too much already and can’t take any more of his sarcasm; today we are at the altar of the contemporary.
In the video still unfolding on my plasma screen, Louise pays due homage to the master of the baroque. But she objects to his love of drapery: “There was no emptiness [in this work], not an inch that was not filled with folds, as if emptiness was Bernini’s enemy.”8 It takes guts to stand before the Praxiteles of modern times and dedicate to him a great galumphing ball with a hole inside! Come off it, Louise!
I stop myself there.
“Hang on, hang on…from one beginning to the next…” Andrew’s squeezing it for all it’s worth. We are treated to Eye to Eye, Blind Mind’s Bluff, Harmless Woman, In and Out, and Passage dangereux, in sequence.
“Hey, did Louise ever go into analysis?” I’m reading a statement that’s splashed on the screen in an achingly avant-garde font: “Unconscious is something which is volcanic in tone, and yet you cannot do anything about it, you better be its friend, you better accept it and even love it if you can, because it might get the better of you, you never know.”
No answer. Andrew looks smug to have caught me out on my home ground. I continue, in a careless voice:
“Well, she’s read her stuff, as artists go! She talks the talk…”
“Yes,” murmurs Andrew, “but it’s embodied in the space of the works. That�
��s where words get canceled out, you see, in bronze, iron, glass, wood…”
He sounds husky and thoughtful, he really admires her.
B kept a diary, noting down the fleeting ideas or “butterfly-thoughts” that helped her to keep depression at bay. Those thoughts fed and illuminated the gestures of making. Finally the made objects in turn evolved into a mishmash of borrowings from here and there, a multifarious bric-a-brac compacted into private, provisional spaces, the thresholds of new departures. Plural landscapes of rebirth, labyrinthine buddings with multiple facets, kaleidoscopes of absent identities, polymorphous ambiguities, polytopical vitality.
“It’s a female thing, isn’t it, this perpetual starting over, you’d think it was a whole different person,” muses Andrew. Is he wondering aloud, or stating a fact? “Nietzsche was the great pioneer…but he went mad.”
“Syphilis, I believe.”
After all, I don’t really know. I think of Teresa’s re-foundings, her perpetual variations upon those same but always different states of prayer, loss, exile, loss of self, selflessness in Majesty, elucidation…
Teresa, My Love Page 50