An Interview with Louise Bourgeois

Abstract

This interview with Louise Bourgeois proceeded from a re-encounter with the artist's early work in the current Whitney exhibition, 200 Years of American Sculpture. Re-encounter here does not signify a regained familiarity with something known. As often before, confrontation with “examples” of Bourgeois' early work—and the curiosity and admiration they compel —serves to agitate the claim of an existing body of significant work that is unknown, inaccessible, and largely undocumented. While the two pieces at the Whitney establish themselves within the context of the exhibition as part of the history of 20th-century American sculpture, it is clear that they exist as fragments both of this larger history and of the artist's history, which has yet to be investigated and reconstructed. Moreover, each history is dependent upon the other. The larger history, that of American sculpture, remains fragmented precisely because fragmentation has been imposed upon the other—the history of the artist, the history of the artist's work. The circumstances contributing to the inaccessibility and hence obscurity of Bourgeois' early work are complex. They have to do with factors as various as the seemingly hermetic quality of her work —rendered more hermetic both by the artist's idiosyncracies and the isolation of the work from the history of which it is a part—and, more to the point, the practice of history at the time the pieces, shown and unshown, were made, as well as the practice of history now.