Narrative inside out: Louise Bourgeois' spider as theoretical object

Oxford Art Journal

Volumn 22, Issue 2, 1999, Pages

  Bal, Mieke ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 62649091323     PISSN: 01426540     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/oaj/22.2.101     Document Type: Review

References (50)

1. Memory is the most frequently invoked topos in discussions of Bourgeois' work. See for example Charlotte Kotik, 'The Locus of Memory: an Introduction to the Work of Louise Bourgeois', in Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993, Charlotte Kotik, Terrie Sultan and Christian Leigh (eds.) (The Brooklyn Museum and Abrams: Brooklyn, NY, 1994), pp. 12-28.
2. Rainer Crone and Petrus Graf Schaesberg, Louise Bourgeois: The Secret of the Cells (Prestel-Verlag: Munich/London/New York, 1998). I will try to avoid overlap with this study, an attempt which entails sacrificing aspects of the 1997 Spider that would otherwise require commentary.
3. In Reading 'Rembrandt': Beyond the World-Image Opposition (Cambridge University Press: New York, 1991), I theorized about this aspect of visual art in terms of propositional content.
4. In Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1999), I have argued that the term 'theoretical object' is better suited to foregrounding both the theoretical thought and the visual articulation of that thought in visual objects.
5. The term 'theoretical object' is related to the term 'meta-painting'; see Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1997).
6. Marie Darrieussecq, 'Dans la maison de Louise/Louise's House', in Louise Bourgeois: oeuvres récentes/Recent Works (capcMusée d'art contemporain: Bordeaux; Serpentine: London, 1997).
7. Significantly, in patriarchal cultures, the word 'house' is ambiguous. It refers to the dwelling place - the local and architectural meaning - as well as the lineage - the historical and hence, narrative meaning; see Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1988). This founding ambiguity resonates, I contend, in Bourgeois' series Femme Maison.
8. It is as a consequence of one of the most baffling features of Bourgeois' work that my analysis of this one installation cannot be taken to 'stand for', or represent, the work as a whole, except to the extent that its very complexity is representative of all her other works. Nor can my analysis be considered comprehensive, due to another major feature of her work. The strong impact on the viewer which, I contend, is another major feature if not medium, or at least part and parcel of it, makes my own participation in the construction of the analysis not only inevitable but also necessary - paradoxically - to do it justice.
9. I saw Spider in the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, in August 1998, and in the Serpentine Gallery, London, in January 1999. These were two widely differing experiences. The impact of the exhibition space and the neighbouring works in a specific show is both important and difficult to analyse. A significant feature of the work seems to involve offering permeability to such contingencies; yet, writing about that aspect puts my readers at a disadvantage. It is precisely that temporal and spatial existence in the world which characterizes the experience of the work that cannot be fixed in writing, or in photography. On issues of exhibition, see my book Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (Routledge: New York and London, 1996).
10. From Benjamin's description of a dialectical image (Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul with Rachel McNicholl and Jeremy Gaines (Routledge: New York and London, 1996), p. 69.
11. While not at all claiming a naïve spontaneity of visual experience as the fabula of this account, I have not rearranged my notes, which were detached, but contented myself with shaping sentences out of them, much as the 'secondary elaboration' that Freud rightly claims to inform any narrative given in a wakened state of a dream experienced during sleep (Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in James Strachey (ed.), Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. V (Hogarth Press: London), pp. 533-621. Whereas this elaboration - this description - is therefore inevitably secondary, it is still, to remain within the Freudian framework, pre-analytical, preceding as it does the 'free associations' that bring the work of censorship, through displacement, condensation, and visual elaboration, to the fore.
12. On the theoretical point, see, for example, Gérard Genette's 'Frontiers of Narrative', in Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (Columbia University Press: New York, 1981), pp. 127-44.
13. Svetlana Alpers' seminal study The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984), while based on opposition between (Dutch) descriptive and (Italian) narrative art, docs not provide a definition of description, nor does she discuss the difficulty of separating the two modes.
14. Even though this insight has not prevented the space/time opposition between image/word to continue to flourish. On Duchamp's Optical Machines, see Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1993).
15. For an elaboration of trauma, see Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1997).
16. On cultural memory, Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer (eds.), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (University of New England: Hanover, NH, 1999).
17. This was Schroedinger's answer to the question posed to him in 1944 while he was in exile from Germany: 'What is the characteristic of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive?', cited by Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (Columbia University Press: New York, 1995), pp. 66-7. In the same paragraph, Keller refers to Schroedinger as 'the father of quantum mechanics'.
18. For an example of this, but also, for extensive visuals, see the detailed study edited by Kristina Hermann Fiore, Apollo e Dafne del Bernini nella Galleria Borghese (Silvana Editoriale: Milan, 1997).
19. See, for example, Pamela Askew's study Caravaggio's 'Death of the Virgin' (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1990).
20. A striking example, up to its subtitle 'genius under commission', is Bert Treffers' study of a few paintings by Caravaggio, Caravaggio: genie in opdracht. Een kunstenaar en zijn opdrachtgevers in het Rome van rond 1600 (SUN: Nijmegen, 1991).
21. For this argument, see my book Quoting Caravaggio.
22. Rosalind E. Krauss, Bachelors (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 54; emphasis added.
23. Krauss, Bachelors, p. 68.
24. 'Primal' as in Freud's concept of the primal scene, that occurs when the child witnesses parental intercourse and fails to understand it. This primal visual experience is formative and can be traumatic in the sense explained above. Within the short duration of the experience with a Cell, the subliminal sense of house is just such a formative experience that is strong in its impact even if the precise nature of that impact cannot be pinned down. See for a definition of primal scene, J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Norton: New York, 1973).
25. Both these authors use their respective concepts to develop a notion of 'visual thought' as a richer, thicker substitute for narrative. On Walter Benjamin's development of his concept of thought-images and the ungrasped symbolism, see Weigel, Body- and Image-Space, esp. pp. 80-3.
26. Bollas' account of the multiply-split subjectivity in dreams is eminently apt to help rethink psychoanalytical criticism of visual art, Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis and the Unthought Known (Columbia University Press: New York, 1987).
27. Freud's work on visual art (in)famously falls short of the visual impact of his theory. See, for example, his essay on Leonardo. The argument I am making here is at the core of Hubert Damisch's essay on Piero della Francesca in Un souvenir d'enfance par Piero della Francesca (Editions du Seuil: Paris, 1997, to be published in English by Stanford University Press).
28. See Christiane Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois: Konstruktionen für den freien Fall/ Designing for Frce Fall (Amann Verlag: Zürich, 1992), pp. 68-75.
29. See my discussion of the problem of intentional criticism, specifically in relation to narrative, in 'Abandoning Authority: Svetlana Alpers and Pictorial Agency', in Celestes Brusati, Mak Meadow and Walter Melion (eds.), Taking Pictures Seriously (in press).
30. On the flawed logic of anteriority-based 'contextualism', e.g. Norman Bryson, 'Art in Context', in Ralph Cohen (ed.), Studies in Historical Change (University of South Carolina Press: Charlottesville, 1992)
31. who draws on Jonathan Culler's justly famous author's preface to his book Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (University of Oklahoma: Norman and London, 1988).
32. Lacan's analysis triggered an impassioned debate, Jacques Lacan, 'Seminar on "The Purloined Letter"', trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, in John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (eds.), The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida & Psychoanalytic Readings (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1988), pp. 28-98.
33. See Anne Lowenthal (ed.), The Object as Subject: Studies in the Interpretation of Still Life (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1996)
34. and esp. Hanneke Grootenboer's superb discussion of trompe l'oeil painting in Towards a Non-Perceptual Mode of Looking: Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and Trompe l'Oeil Painting (University of Rochester: Rochester, NY, 1999).
35. See Deleuze's updating discussion of Leibniz's ideas on perception: Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, foreword and trans. Tom Conley (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1993).
36. Also, Serres on Leibnizian mathematics: Michel Serres, Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques, vol. 1: La communication (Presses Universitaires de France: Paris, 1968).
37. For the relevance of baroque mathematics and especially, baroque scale for contemporary art, see my Quoting Caravaggio.
38. As presented, for example, by Rosalind Krauss' now classic study Passages in Modern Sculpture (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1977).
39. For an analysis of such relations to, for example, Rodin, Picasso and Brancusi, see Crone and Graf Schaesberg, Louise Bourgeois, pp. 71-80.
40. Mignon Nixon, 'The Critical Negation of Louise Bourgeois', in 'Reconsidering Louise Bourgeois' symposium, Courtauld Institute of Art, November 1998.
41. Michael Baxandall made this argument long ago, in an effective deconstruction of the notion of 'influence' in Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Meaning of Pictures (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1985).
42. Another sculpture, from 1967, is titled Homage to Bernini (85).
43. See Anne Wagner's incisive comment on this work in 'Bourgeois Prehistory, or the Ransom of Fantasies', in this issue.
44. Mieke Bal, A House for the Sleep of Reason (in preparation).
45. One of the consequences of this point for the language of criticism is the need to involve the analytical idiom of narratology. See Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2nd (revised) edn. 1997).
46. I mean the term performative quite strongly here. It is derived in the first place from J. W. Austin's groundbreaking turn of linguistics from semantic to interactive, How to Do Things with Words (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1975 [1962]).
47. After several revisions (e.g. Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages [Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY, 1983]
48. this concept has become productive in cultural theory (Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' [Routledge: New York, 1992]). The theatrical resonances of the term should not be ignored either.
49. See Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media, Art, and Cyberculture (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, IN, 1998), esp. pp. 3-35.
50. For a tenacious recurrence of these dichotomies in discussions of visual art, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985).