Memories

Up until about 11 when I left primary school and circumstances changed, the bath overrunning would be a regular occurrence. The bathroom led into my parents’ bedroom, and so if it overran everything touching the floor got wet. Socks that were midway through being paired were drenched in the deluge. The four of us children would be sat trying to cellotape the t.v. together so that it’d play past the first few minutes of The Little Mermaid, and suddenly we’d hear a call from the next room and charge through, armed with towels and sheets to mop up the water. Mops never seemed to cross our minds. The whole bedroom would be a swamp for the first ten minutes, after which it would feel spotless and smell of soap. I really liked clearing it all up, and then getting back to banging the side of the monster of a television we had. I always seemed to be the one who’d be trying to get that fixed, too. 

Louise Bourgeois at the Freud Museum

Louise Bourgeois at the Freud Museum

I wasn’t expecting much, partly because of the size of the Freud museum and partly because I have never seen any of Bourgeois’ sculptures in the flesh (no pun intended.) Due to this I didn’t have a very high view of her, prior to seeing this exhibition. 

Her works were seamlessly integrated into the permanent exhibits at the Freud Museum. Her 1968 bronze and gold-plated hanging sculpture, Janus Fleuri, was suspended above Freud’s infamous couch. The form, both phallic and breast-like in its volume, seems to act as the power governing the room. Freud wrote extensively on sex, and here it is, reasserting itself - the museum’s text pointed out this, saying that Bourgeoius’ work, which focuses so much on sexuality and the psyche, highlights one of Freud’s main points, generally not as questioned in the museum. 

Another bronze had areas where the patina was highly worked, with other areas of the surface less so. This created a tangible sense of touch. The object had been experienced, felt. It had a history. This sensuous quality is a common thread in all her work; the bath towels and berets and cotton all generating different sensations. I loved that in some works the way she has arranged/sculpted a piece feels completely in opposition to its material. One relatively small (under 300m in height) piece in pink marble had an undulating surface of round protuberances, smoothly rendered in the marble, yet with their dynamic nature retained. This can also be seem in her piece using filled berrets as breast-like additions to a form. The way each hat works together, held in position by one another and tangibly filled with ‘flesh,’ keeps the work alive, as though it is fleshy as weighty.

Upstairs were more textual works, shown beside an assortment of pieces of writing Bourgeois wrote while undergoing psychoanalysis. Here the relevance of Freud is most highlighted. Her worries about her failure as a mother, daughter, artist, person, friend… are heart-renderingly, bleakly shown to the viewer. In a steady script, her writing flits from French to English to French again. Sentences do not end. One fully engages with her anguish at her failure, at not being wanted, at wanting to create work of value. 

One particular piece struck me : ”The drawing is the most basic form of psychological release. The modern artist is caught in a dilemma that he considers art as a psychological release and at the same time wants to have an audience.” 

Some art requires an audience, some does not. I feel as though my work inherently relates to the audience’s take on it, while artists who were fully involved in their own creative journey, such as Michelangelo, van Gogh, da Vinci, do not require such attention. 

The exhibition’s commentary highlighted that the return of the repressed comes down to ‘the life we had before we had a life,’ - childhood experiences, trauma. The slightly child-like, playful elements of Bourgeois’ works take on new meaning. They also relate the way in which Freud looked to humans for symptoms to the way that the artist’s symptoms of their creative process are their output, their work always reveals something about them. The concept of time was addressed - ‘time does not exist in the unconscious, the impulses and instincts that emanate from the unconscious into the conscious mind are timeless and unchanging.’

One of the last things I say were various material works enclosed in ‘cells.’ These glass cabinets had a meshed roof, as though they were prison cells for the creatures Bourgeois created. This Bacon-esque sensation of entrapment and lack of freedom is of interest to me. The pieces are strung up like pieces of meat to be viewed and ridiculed, it is as though they are on display to the public as fragile, yet dangerous, trapped beings.