Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day?

Louise Bourgeois’ deeply personal artworks reveal her life-long fascination with psychoanalysis and the unconscious mind, her family, and her experience of motherhood. Presented across two disparate gallery spaces at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), this exhibition unpicks and accentuates the duality present in artworks drawn from Bourgeois’ seven-decade career.

Hovering, nine metres above me on wiry legs of steely elegance Maman, 1999, Louise Bourgeois’ celebrated spider sculpture, a metaphor for her mother, greets me as I arrive at the AGNSW forecourt. Momentarily, Maman pulls me into a play of scale, a frequent tactic in Bourgeois’ work. I become aware of my size in comparison to the sculpture, a reversal of the usual size difference. Today though, I am also aware of reviewing the work of an artist of the calibre and renown of Bourgeois. She is a towering figure of twentieth-century art, and one whose work has already been considered critically from psychoanalytic, feminist, and surrealist positions.

The exhibition’s title Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day? appears in several of Bourgeois’ artworks, including the 2007 sculpture of an oversized vanity mirror which features in this show. Here the viewer is plunged into another surreal play of scale. The title of the work, in blue lettering, is caught and reflected in the huge mirror, where the viewer also catches themselves. Exhibition curator and head of international art at the AGNSW Justin Paton chose this title for its ability to encapsulate the dichotomy present in Bourgeois’ oeuvre. The exhibition includes over 120 works, shown across two discordant gallery spaces: “Day,” a white-cube presentation of work spanning Bourgeois’ seven-decade career; and “Night,” where artworks dating mostly from the 1990s onwards, haunt the subterranean Tank.

Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She moved to New York in 1938, where she tirelessly created art until her death in 2010. Immediately apparent in this exhibition is the personal nature of Bourgeois’ work: her preoccupation with motherhood and the family (she had a complex relationship with her father, and she raised three sons of her own), her focus on relationships and connection, and the approximately thirty-four years she spent in psychoanalysis—commencing just after her father’s death.

Bourgeois was fascinated with the unconscious mind, the foundational ideas of Freud and Lacan in psychoanalysis influencing her. At a time when these psychoanalysts’ work was framed through a male subjectivity—written using he/him pronouns, pitched erroneously as a universal default—Bourgeois was charting her experience of female subjectivity and the unconscious in a visual medium.

Bourgeois’ work ascribes primary importance to motherhood and in doing so brings to mind the work of Bulgarian-born French feminist, psychoanalyst and linguist Julia Kristeva. In her 1980 book, Desire in Language, Kristeva asserted that motherhood was the vital, missing piece in both Freud’s and Lacan’s work. While Bourgeois rejected being labelled a feminist during her lifetime, her work has exerted lasting influence on feminist artists after her.

In the “Day” section of the exhibition, Bourgeois’ later textile works are featured including The Good Mother, 2003. In this soft sculpture, a woman is tethered from her nipples to five small white spools of thread—her children, duties, and responsibilities. Further on I encounter the touching 10AM Is When You Come to Me, 2007, a series of forty etchings on musical score paper where the hands of two people reach, wait, touch, separate, and reconnect; all rendered in bright red ink. Created near the end of her life these etchings form an emotional score of human connection.

In the dark, atmospheric “Night” section of the exhibition, spot-lit sculptures hang from the ceiling as if halted in their ascent or descent to other realms. The shining, headless body of the bronze sculpture Arch of Hysteria, 1993, is suspended in the throes of “trauma and transcendence,” as states the exhibition text. This work references the controversial studies by French physician Jean-Martin Charcot (a teacher to Freud). Charcot photographed “hysterical” women—documenting their bodily contortions under the inexpressible and over-powering emotions they experienced. Here Bourgeois has chosen to make her hysterical figure male.

Projected onto the wall of the Tank is a posthumous collaboration between Bourgeois and American artist Jenny Holzer, famous for her large-scale, politically charged text works. Holzer has drawn from Bourgeois’ extensive collection of night writings to create this text-based work.

Bourgeois’ strong and insistent voice echoes throughout the exhibition via the inclusion of film and audio recordings.

While the eeriness of the Tank is apt for dredging the dark, nocturnal musings of Bourgeois’ mind, I can’t help but feel this section of the exhibition could have
easily slipped into the territory of Halloween spookiness, thankfully it doesn’t due to the strength of Bourgeois’ work.

As I make my way up the white, spiral staircase from the Tank, I am left with the impression that Bourgeois is a wonderful storyteller—funny, peculiar, frightening, loving stories—drawn from her own life and experience. Bourgeois doesn’t shy away from darkness or strangeness, there is little traditional beauty to be found here, rather she powerfully reflects on the complexity of life in its rawness and mystery.

This review was originally published in issue 66, Artist Profile 

EXHIBITION
Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day?
25 November 2023 – 28 April 2024
Art Gallery of New South Wales