Louise Bourgeois’ Portrait, 1963 and Torso / Self-Portrait, 1963:
The Defiance of Gender Boundaries through the Self and Other
Heather N. Pardew
Several years ago I called a sculpture “One and Others.” This might be the title of many since then: the relation of one person to his surroundings is a continuing pre-occupation. It can be casual or close; simple or involved; subtle or blunt, it can be painful or pleasant. Most of all it can real or imaginary. This is the soil from which all my work grows. The problems of realization – technical, and even formal and esthetic – are secondary; they come afterwards and they can be solved.
– Louise Bourgeois (Wye, 35)
The work of artist, Louise Bourgeois, has undergone a myriad of analytical procedures; all of which stem from the numerous and intricate psychologies at work within her oeuvre. Frederico Sabatini explains that
It is what Italian philosopher Umberto Eco calls an "open work", a work which can be read at several different levels, according to several different factors, and which doesn't communicate a final unique message but, on the contrary, suggests a wide range of possibilities, an endless interpretation within an endlessly moving geometry of anxiety. (7)
Three general approaches, in particular, seem to have done Bourgeois’ work the most justice, however. The psychoanalytical approach lends itself mostly to an integration of Bourgeois’ childhood trauma and the conscious manifestations of that autobiographical history in her art. A less popular philosophical interpretation draws from her education at the Sorbonne in Paris and Bourgeois’ self-identification as an existentialist, while one of the most popular methods of analysis for Bourgeois’ work employs a feminist perspective. However beneficial in their own respect, these methods readily overlap one another. Bourgeois’ work, just as it defies relegation into a specific artistic movement, so defies such analytical classifications. In this paper, I will look at a central concern that, I would suggest, connects the aforementioned systems of dissection. I will propose that the fundamental concept of the Self and Other is one such theme that can be advantageous in understanding Bourgeois’ work. To illustrate this, I will use two of Bourgeois’ sculptural reliefs from 1963. An analysis of Portrait and Torso / Self-Portrait will be used as a mechanism to suggest that Bourgeois’ work defies gender boundaries in reference to the construction of Self and Other. I will argue that Bourgeois uses Portrait to destroy the overly binaristic notion of sexual duality while concurrently defining gender neutrality. I will conclude that this destruction of the gendered Other creates a sexually ambiguous zone which is crucial to her work’s poignancy.
I will begin by setting up an historical context for the works and follow with a formal introduction to each piece. It is necessary to discuss these works in relation to one another because they are, as is the notion of the Self and Other, interdependent. The Self cannot be defined without signifying the Other and vice versa. First, I will suggest that Louise Bourgeois’ Torso / Self-Portrait disavows the traditional feminized Other. I will propose that Torso is an anomaly in Louise Bourgeois’ gender construction because it is specific in its subject’s identity. I will go on to suggest that when Bourgeois’ work is too closely aligned with a Duchampian sensibility, it is pigeonholed into a counter-reactive position to phallocentricism, which is not her aim. Finally, I will give three supporting examples of asexuality in Bourgeois’ body of work that erode traditional notions of sexual polarization and gender constructions. Together, these will support the premise that Louise Bourgeois’ work dismantles the construction of a gendered Other in art and, by locating itself in an androgynous space, functions as a genuinely universal art forum.
Currently, Louise Bourgeois’ body of work spans a full seven decades. She has managed either to instigate or, at the very least, be present in every major art movement of the last century. Bourgeois began to study art in 1933 after receiving a Baccalaureate in Philosophy from the University of Paris. The next five years of her life were spent in various Parisian art circles. She studied under Paul Colin, Fernand Leger, and Roger Bissiere among a slew of other[1] vanguards inhabiting the city in the 1930’s. Her exposure to the French fin de siècle decorative arts of Art Nouveau and Symbolism was no doubt balanced by her time spent as a docent at the Louvre. (Storr, 28) She was arguably influenced by her marriage to one of the most influential art historians of the modern era; and Robert Goldwater was undoubtedly just as affected by his wife as she was by his pioneering work in African art and Primitivism. Cubism, Surrealism, Process and Conceptual art are just a few of the movements that have claimed Bourgeois. By sheer logic, ninety-seven years have put her in an exclusive position of artistic authority. Louise remains to be a prominent and visible force within the post-modern era. Rather than regurgitate the emphasis of Bourgeois’ presence within the development of 20th century aesthetic sensibilities, I would prefer to say that the art world has been, perhaps, more of a witness to Bourgeois’ artistic evolution than she has to it’s. For Bourgeois’ progression seems to have been much less submissive and affected by the former’s. Regardless of the delineations between these causes and effects, rarely can an artist claim such potent participation within the history of art. Bourgeois has hosted a salon every Sunday for the past 30 years in the same Chelsea brownstone that she and Robert Goldwater moved into in 1962, which is where my point begins. The following year she will produce Torso / Self-Portrait and Portrait.
The 1960’s marked a specific shift in Louise Bourgeois’ sculptural process wherein she moved to employ a dual methodology. On the one hand, she began to use latex in a way that invoked continuous growth and on the other hand, she used plaster to communicate conspicuous deliberation in form. (Wye, 24; Morris, 12) Bourgeois moved to these materials in an effort to describe emotions that her previous works in wood of the 40’s and 50’s could not facilitate. Marie-Laure Bernadac recalls that these expressions were “probably the most violent, repulsive, and disturbing that Louise has ever produced.” (73)
The shift of Bourgeois’ work in the 1960’s coincided with a retrieval of Modernist sculpture in the midst of the Minimalist movement. She recalled the language of Modernism while transforming its alphabet from figure to object. (Nixon, 225) While instigating the rebirth of Modernism, Bourgeois’ confrontational approach to the art-making process was simultaneously paving the way for the Postmodern movement. Her flirtation with disgust in this period conveys an honesty that is rarely derived from prettiness. Bernadac notes that the shift of Bourgeois’ work also “corresponded to a watershed in American art, as revealed by Lucy Lippard in the show that included, among others, the work of Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman;” this watershed was what Lippard referred to as eccentric abstraction. (Bernadac, 75) The pink rubber invitation to the show with the same title read that Bourgeois’ work “is less aggressively detached and more poetically mature than that of the younger artists, but like them, she does not ignore the uneasy, near repellent side of art.” (Lippard)
These works are literal manifestations of struggle in their form, material, and aesthetic. They express uncomfortable emotional dichotomies that force the viewer to both fight and submit to one’s impulses. Griselda Pollock refers to Bourgeois’ use of humor as both “gentle and vicious,” I would contend that this sense of paradox applies to nearly all of the emotions elicited by Bourgeois’ work of the 1960’s. (84) The aggressive subtlety of the work that Bourgeois produced in this decade displays Freud’s definition of the uncanny sensibility “as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.” (224) Freud’s understanding of the uncanny combined with preliminary and contemporary notions of the theory of the grotesque combine to illuminate the complexities in Bourgeois’ sculptural process of this period.
Torso / Self-Portrait was completed in1963 and debuted at Bourgeois’ first completely sculptural solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in 1964. The plaster wall-mounted relief measures 62.9 x 40.6 x 18.1 centimeters. Bourgeois built this piece up through addition; she sculpted and molded the plaster with a preordained resolve. It is, by definition, the trunk of the body. Rib-like appendages with botanical elements straddle a clinical reference to the spine. Two sets of spheres frame the piece above and below, referencing the buttocks and breasts. The proportions of Torso are human; the scale is relative, one would expect, to Bourgeois’ body. Bourgeois believed that the thorax was the “site of breath, of life;” this is seen in her early drawings that navigate between the spinal column and the pelvis, which she saw as the foundational elements of the human body. (Bernadac, 36) The torso harbors the respiratory organ (breath) and circulatory organ (life); it is the shell and derivation of one’s being. Perhaps, for Bourgeois (an artist with such distracting biographical and psychological complexities), it is the simplest way to express one’s Self.
The texture of Bourgeois’ Torso is crumbly and coarse while simplified organic lines shape the work. The color is bright white – a sterile unsentimental hue reminiscent to bone. It is a factual, almost painful representation of oneself that is harsh and unsympathetic. Bourgeois has said that “this is the way I experience my torso…somehow with a certain dissatisfaction and regret that one’s own body is not as beautiful as one would like it to be. It doesn’t seem to measure up by any standard of beauty.” (Bernadac, 49) Torso’s unattractive detachment attests to an objectivity that can never be fully realized when describing oneself. It is an attempt by Louise Bourgeois to singularly define her Self. She chooses to express this effort with the core of the body and with the title, Torso, which also alludes to an unfinished or mutilated work of art.[2]
Portrait (1963) was first exhibited at Lucy Lippard’s Eccentric Abstraction exhibition in 1966. The latex wall piece measures 26.6 x 17.7 x 7.6 centimeters. Portrait is an abstracted sculptural relief produced by poured latex. If an accumulative process produced Torso, it is evident that the development of Portrait was through a process of negation. The plaster is poured and dries in mobility. It is then peeled and ripped and cut and allowed to form itself. Francis Morris explains that this work “seemed absolutely counter to the reigning fashion in New York for hard-edged Minimalism,” he goes on to say:
Lippard recognized the allusive, suggestive qualities of Bourgeois’ work as well as its sensuous appeal, aspects of expression missing from cool self-referential Minimalism and its emphasis on neutral industrial materials and systems of production. (14)
The proportions of Portrait are analogous with that of a framed face in human scale. The texture is bubbly and intricate, with complex interior cavities. The lines are organically random, while the color is muted and muddy. The sense of shifting connotes an eruptive volatility and stickiness in texture. Portrait expresses pliability and reparation through the flexible latex material. The formlessness conveys loss of control and movement. Mignon Nixon explains, “implicit in a work such as Portrait is the proposition that negativity can be thought; the negativity that critics ascribe to Bourgeois’ latex pieces derives from their attack on form.” (“Fant. Realities,” 190) This attack on form is the balance to Bourgeois’ plaster works of the same time. One method constructs, while the other method destroys.
The sculptural embodiment of movement in Portrait confronts a static representation of humanity, as though Bourgeois is suggesting that true representation of another is never definitive. The pouring and flowing of latex through which Portrait develops suggests metamorphosis, while the cavernous forms facilitate an investigative engagement with the work. The literal immeasurability of the relief speaks to the complexities involved in the expression of another. Bourgeois has said, “People feel each other; perceive eachother, turn toward or away from each other […] fated to work together as part of an ongoing phenomenon […] always perceiving others and adjusting to them. (Crone, 91)
I would argue that references to bodily functions are apparent in Portrait and that this is Bourgeois’ way of finding the lowest common denominator between people. The reference to bodily functions adds to a sense of naked vulnerability. This piece induces anxiety and fascination equally. From Victor Hugo’s initial ponderings on the subject of disgust to Mikhail Bakhtin’s modern interpretation, the theory of the grotesque is readily available for work within Bourgeois’ construct of the Other.[3] Although the work is aesthetically disruptive, it communicates sincere absurdity about the human condition, which is curiously revolting and attractively ugly. Bourgeois’ acknowledgement of this truth conveys a sense of beauty that the form alone cannot. Portrait’s gruesome charm is an expression of the irksome duality inherent in our relationship with Others.
Bourgeois produced a sculpture in 1962 entitled Feminine Portrait. This is significant with regard to the representation of Portrait because the lack of a gender signifier in the latter work negates any consummate femininity in it. My assertion, however, is that the lack of a feminine signifier in Portrait does not default the work into masculinity; the fact that the work is not specified as feminine does not mean that it should be labeled as masculine. Mignon Nixon poses this question when she discusses the phallic signifier. “The phallus, it seems, can represent sexuality with or without difference. What, then,” she asks “of the “sex which is not one”?” (“Fant. Realities,” 229)
For Bourgeois, gender is distinct when the subject is specifically gendered; i.e. her Self-Portrait is feminine, the portrait of her husband (Portrait of Robert (1969)) is masculine, etc… The definition of Bourgeois’ Self as feminine proves the intent of ambiguity in describing the Other. A pre-meditated construct of gender neutrality in Portrait is made apparent in relation to the subject of Self-Portrait; this pre-meditation is reiterated through Bourgeois’ other specified references such as Portrait of Robert (1969), Portrait of Jean-Louise (1947), and Feminine Portrait (1962). Countering Bourgeois’ distinctions of gender, the torsos of Alberto Viani and Gaston Lachaise both serve as clear examples of specified gender with neutral titles, while Brancusi’s Torso of a Young Man leaves almost no room for ambiguity in form or association. Brancusi’s Torso is identified as a male figure just as Bourgeois’ Torso / Self-Portrait is identified as a female. It is necessary to address Bourgeois’ Self-Portrait because it requires the Other to define what it is not. It survives, not on a definition of itself, but on the counter definition provided by the Other. Russian semiotician, Mikhail Bakhtin, explains:
In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding--in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others. (“Outsider,” 12)
The idea that the one must rely on the Other to understand the Self is reinforced by Nietzsche when he explains that
…we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, […] for us the law ‘Each is furthest from himself’ applies to all eternity – we are not ‘men of knowledge’ with respect to ourselves.
(Crone, 71)
Though this notion is normally applied to definitions of gender in an effort to define by negation, it is not an absolute truth. The definition of Self depends upon the presence of the Other, but this cannot be presumed to be the case with gender. Femininity and masculinity are not necessarily interdependent. Aspects of Jung’s theory on the Anima and Animus allude to such a sexual sovereignty:
Even if no women existed, it would still be possible, at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted […]. The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man. (338)
A recurring problem in critical theory and the language of art history is that it is built upon polarities. Traditional art theory presumes that the absence of masculinity is, by definition, feminine.[4] Thus, the absence of dominant masculinity in art is positioned as the Other. In the introduction to The Second Sex, Simone De Beauvoir establishes the assimilation of the “Woman as Other” notion. De Beauvoir explains that man is an inherent Subject, while “she [woman] is the Other.” I am arguing that Bourgeois’ work confronts this presumption by dismantling the notion of gender from an oppositional framework. Griselda Pollock argues that
The work of artists who are women like Louise Bourgeois thus present us with the serious business of finding belated ways of appreciating this extraordinarily charged and challenging body of works without falling prey to either a reductive ‘overfeminisation’ (seeking only those signs that we can reclaim as ‘Woman’: the sign of the feminine within a phallocentric order), or to a total ‘underfeminisation’: a lack of attention to the question of sexual difference by trying to escape reductive feminism in order to treat her as a serious sculptor. (83)
Pollock’s reference to a phallocentric order references a Duchampian sensibility that plays with gender reversal through material and association. Pollock contends that this notion of reversibility reiterates jejune sexual definitions in a way that is not conducive to Bourgeois’ work. This is generally reiterated by De Beauvoir when she notes that if woman were able to define herself as the subject, “she would invent equivalents of the phallus.” (44) The phallic equivalent suggested by De Beauvoir and Pollock is apparent when Bourgeois and Duchamp are described as counterparts to one another. Marcade explains:
the question of eroticism and the difference of the sexes is the nodal point of [Bourgeois’ and Duchamp’s] different proceedings. Many pieces by both artists play on the reversibility of the feminine-masculine polarity. (”Louise Bour,” 112)
This simplistic description of Bourgeois’ relationship to Duchamp reiterates what many art historians consider the situation to be. (Nixon, “Fant. Realities,” 225; Marcade, 112) The artists have been presented as two sides of the erotic coin. I would argue, however, that Bourgeois’ work does not simply play with ironic reversals of gender but instead does something completely different.[5] Though she was close in proximity to the Surrealists, I cannot be convinced that the most productive way to read Bourgeois’ work is as Duchamp’s feminine counterpart. Of her relation to the movement, Bourgeois has said that “the difference between me and the Surrealists was that they saw life as a joke and I see it as a tragedy.” (Greenberg, 35) I would contend that Duchamp’s lighthearted plays with sexuality and eroticism come from a position of authority based on a binary worldview that Bourgeois’ work attempts to undermine. Portrait works to deconstruct the sexuality of the Other through an amalgamation of the sexes. Bourgeois manages to identify the Other as different without assuming it is, therefore, oppositional. Inherent in this identification is the destruction of reductive gender dualism; Bourgeois’ work thus, challenges the presumption that male is the reverse of female.
It has been suggested that Portrait of 1963 references a preliminary meditation for Bourgeois’ Rabbit of 1970.[6] The latter is an anatomically correct disembowelment of the creature; the former is designated as a creature only through its title. In form, the likeness is apparent. One senses an uncanny kinship with the hung being, but somehow there seems to be no apparent reference to sexuality. Rabbit possesses no distinguishable sexual organs and the sculpture itself is too figurative to derive any kind of physical metaphor from composition other than that of the crucifix. I would contend that Bourgeois’ Rabbit functions in a realm that does not necessitate a gendered reading. Bourgeois’ Heart of 1970 seems to share this asexual disposition. While sexually neutral, it retains humanistic qualities and while it retains those humanistic qualities, I would argue, that it is still expressed and experienced as the Other.
Based on these works, it seems quite possible to read the Other as identifiable, while neither feminine nor masculine. There is an uncomfortable familiarity in Bourgeois’ representation of the Other in Portrait, one that is new and yet reminiscent. The viewer can relate to Bourgeois’ Torso because there is a frame of reference, but Portrait is so successfully abstracted that one cannot help but think of everything and nothing at the same time. In reference to Bourgeois’ subjective and objective expressions of humanity, Christian Leigh notes:
Subjecting herself to the grisliest of dissections, [Bourgeois] insists that we the viewers look as intently as she does, not only at her, but at ourselves as well. Here is where her radicality lies. She illuminates the responsibilities we must insist on and the choices we must make by personalizing them first and only thereafter universalizing them. In so doing, Bourgeois gives license to an uncanny utopia whose foundation is laid within the self and whose force pours continually out. (69)
The associations derived from Portrait are sincere precisely because of their ambiguity. It is an honest reflection of the Other because it is unclear, undefined and misunderstood. The only way to relate to Portrait is through its peculiar disposition. As something more than a reflection of the Other, Portrait can be seen as a reflection of the interaction with the Other. Bourgeois describes this interaction as the Toi et Moi (you and me).[7] This concept, for Bourgeois, is grounded in the relation between two people, which she considers a problematic necessity. (Rinder, 288) A more general understanding of this predicament can be seen as the uncomfortable dependence on an Other that is necessary to fully understand and recognize our Self.[8]
By rejecting a specified gender, Bourgeois’ Portrait establishes a sexually neutral Other. It is the paradox of definitive ambiguity that allows Bourgeois’ expressions to function as universally poignant works of art. It may be no clearer than in Sleep II of 1967, which is argued by some to be one of her most erotic works of art. (Wye, 25; Honoré, 270) Sleep II expresses tensions between states of repose and vigil, associations of male and female, and textures of hard marble and soft form. (Honoré, 270) Bourgeois has said of the piece, “the element of Sleep was so important for me. It was like a self-portrait that stayed for many years and was incorporated into other pieces.” If Bourgeois saw one of her most “explicitly sexual” pieces as a sort of self-portrait, what then does this do to its sexual association? Does it not, therefore, negate any overtly phallocentric notion of the piece? I would argue that it does not; instead, it serves as a testament to its neutral gender and dismissal of feminine difference. Nixon refers to William Rubin’s interpretation of Sleep II as such:
[He] cautioned that “when themes of sexuality are pressed too literally a set of emotions interposes itself between the viewer and the work in a manner unconducive to aesthetic contemplation.” By way of example he contrasts two works, Sleep II (1967) and Torso / Self-Portrait (1963), observing that if the phallic character of the former can be “savored and absorbed, like the sexuality of Brancusi and Arp, within the framework of the appreciation of the whole,” this is not the case with the latter, “despite the fact that it is an arresting work. (“Fant. Realities,” 229)
Rubin dismisses the phallus as something that represents sexuality “with or without difference,” instead he suggests that it is universally representative. This reiterates De Beauvoir’s premise that maleness is, and always has been the Subject, the One that is not the Other. It is interesting that Rubin can make such a sexual distinction between Sleep II and Self-Portrait when Bourgeois herself saw them as one in the same. Bourgeois completed a painted wooden sculpture entitled The Blind leading the Blind in 1949. I would contend that Rubin’s musing might be similar to what Bourgeois had in mind when she said of the piece, “the Blind Leading the Blind […] is the old men, you follow them and they drive you down the precipice.” (Bourgeois, 1975)
Bourgeois did not specify Sleep’s gender, for the same reason that she did not specify Rabbit’s. For her, this distinction is not necessary for the works to function. I am suggesting that their sexuality might be, to Bourgeois, a moot point. On being a woman artist, she has said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what art made by women is […] There is no feminine experience in art, at least not in my case, because not just by being a woman does one have a different experience.” (Nixon, “Fant. Realities,” 18) Bourgeois’ expression of the Other in Portrait functions in the same sexually autonomous manner as she suggests above. While it is a description of something that is not the Self, it is not necessarily one’s opposite. I would conclude with the suggestion that Bourgeois’ interpretation of the Other is neither feminine nor masculine but rather – that of a foreign concept that feels awkwardly familiar.
I have suggested that through Louise Bourgeois’ negation of femininity in the Other, the affront made on her oversimplified position as Duchamp’s counterpart, and her inclination to express ‘sexless’ works of art, she grounds herself in an epicene environment. I am convinced that such conditions render her work truly accessible. Bourgeois’ work chlorinates muddy waters, it defines the unclear, and distinguishes the indistinguishable. This is not to say that anything is anymore definitive, but to suggest that she illuminates the indeterminate. It is granted that categorization makes for easy ingestion and things are less irksome to absorb when they are specifically defined. To use an appropriately crass metaphor, Bourgeois’ work induces a welcomed indigestion. Sabatini argues that Bourgeois’ artistic career traces a “generalized outrage at a universal inability to communicate or to find answers, not only because the right questions are not being asked, but also because the right answers might not exist.” (Sabatini, 7) Especially when we revisit Bourgeois’ comment concerning her work as a whole this is especially illuminating. For, according to Bourgeois, formal and aesthetic considerations are subordinate to her aim. The enigmatic relationship of One to an Other is the unsolvable question that she continues to ask through her work. It is this simple but prophetic formula that explains why Louise Bourgeois has continued to be a consistently significant voice within in the history of art since the beginning of the 20th century.
Illustrations:
Figure 1: Torso / Self-Portrait, 1963 Figure 2: Portrait, 1963
Figure 3: Torso of a Young Man, 1916 Figure 4: Torso, 1930
Figure 7: Heart, 1970
Louise Bourgois[15] Figure 8: Sleep II, 1967
Louise Bourgeois[16]
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[1] Some of her mentors, along with Paul Colin (1934), included Roger Bissiere at the Academie Ranson(1936-7); Othon Friesz at the Grande-Chaumiere (1937-8); She was an assistant to Yves Brayer and Charles Despiau at the Academie Scandivavie (1938); Marcel Gromaire and Andre Lhote. See Morris for more biographical information.
[2] See “Torso.”
[3] For more on the theory of the grotesque see Hugo; Bakhtin (1968); Campbell.
[4] This presumptive tendency is examined and reaffirmed by Griselda Pollock in “Old Bones and cocktail Dresses: Louise Bourgeois and the Question of Age.” Further analysis of this concept by Pollock can be found in Old Mistresses; Women, Art and Ideology(1981) and Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art (1987).
[5] Pollock argues from a similar position that counters Bernadac’s interpretation of the “feminine inversion” and the effect that such an inversion has on differencing. Pollock concludes that Bernadac’s neglect of Duchamp within Bourgeois’ work, in effect, reconfirms a phallocentric ideal. (80)
[6] Bernadac explains that “this flayed figure recurred in a more dramatic and complete fashion in Rabbit (1970).” (73)
[7] Bourgeois produced several pieces using entitled Toi et Moi, two from 1997 in cast and polished aluminum as well as a screenprint in 2006.
[8] Frederic Sabatini expands on this when he says “Although [Bourgeois’] art is based on her experience, it doesn't speak only to the primacy of our intimacies, but to also the ways we must engage in social interactions to give plausibility to our identities.” (Sabatini, 6)
[9] Image obtained from Artstor.org on October 19, 2008.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Image obtained from Artstor.org on November 29, 2008.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Image obtained from Artstor.org on November 29, 2008
[14] Ibid.
