After spending most of the last two days in my new studio on James North, there is something truly bittersweet and sad about coming back home tonight to learn that Louise Bourgeois, that veritable grand dame of contemporary art, has passed away today at the age of 98 in Manhattan.
Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois, 1982 (pictured with Fillette, 1968)
Even more than being an outstandingly unapologetic artist with that uniquely French capacity for dancing that fine line between the intellect and raw eroticism, what I admired most about Bourgeois was her way with words - her respect for their power, even as she defied and manipulated language to her own ends, even while making work that emphatically stood on its own spidery legs. At many turns in my training when my proclivity for writing seemed at odds with my practice as an artist, I only needed to look to Louise to know otherwise, to know that art and writing can think mutually through each other.
Once this news crossed my computer screen, I immediately went to my overloaded bookcase to find my one tiny monograph of Bourgeois’ work and, after a momentary panic when I feared an ex-pupil in England had failed to return it, paged it open to what I think might be a fitting closure-but-not:
The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos. It has two directions. Where do you place yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex? Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing control; the winding in is a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance. Beginning at the centre is affirmation, the move outward is a representation of giving, and giving up control; of trust, positive energy, of life itself.
(Louise Bourgeois, 1992. Extract from ‘Self-expression is Sacred and Fatal’. First published in Bourgeois: Designing by Free Fall by Christiane Meyer-Thoss.)
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