Louise Bourgeois
at the Arts Club of Chicago, through January 3 Louise Bourgeois: Drawings 1947-1997 at Rhona Hoffman, through December 31 D’Nell Larson at TBA Exhibition Space, through January 17
Pink Days and Blue Days evokes a complex variety of emotions, some doubtless not consciously intended by the artist. Still, it’s hard to believe Bourgeois wasn’t thinking at all about the way that women’s fashions make women into objects of display, especially since the title suggests the kind of chatter that advertisers aim at women and the blue cloth beneath the jewelry is printed with fashion drawings labeled “Fall 1932,” “Spring 1946,” and the like. But Bourgeois’ work isn’t really about clothing, or even primarily about women’s roles. Instead, partly because she fills out some garments with frames or pillows, every dress, every blouse, seems to represent a human figure. The bones then become really creepy, suggesting puns such as “bonehead” and conferring on the human a hint of mindless savagery, or at least an animal nature. These dresses are the products of civilization, but they also hold–or once held, since the empty dresses also imply corpses–the beast within.
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The two arms of another untitled 1996 pole piece hold a red smock with a long feline tail and a bronze coil resembling the spirals kids make out of clay. There are fine aesthetic oppositions here: between the soft red dress and the impermeable bronze, between the matte cloth surface and the reflective metal one, between lightness and weight (though this also calls attention to the real weight of the hanging dress). But on purely aesthetic terms the forms don’t work well together, even as opposites; the disparities in size and shape are too great. Instead I found myself thinking of the bronze as a coiled snake, and of the piece’s diptych form as a reference to the many Renaissance diptych paintings of Adam and Eve. Bourgeois’ “Adam” articulates the phallic reference many have found in the biblical Satan–and Eve’s tail might refer to snakes too. Our bestial nature goes back to the original biblical beast: none of us is free and pure.
All these chaotic feelings about the dangers of everyday life ultimately enriched my perception of one of my favorite works in either show, an untitled abstract 1950 drawing that’s a dark mesh of contrasting groups of curved lines, colliding with one another, obliterating one another, overlapping. What could have been an idle design here becomes a drama of aggression and annihilation, of pride and fear.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Untitled piece by Louise Bourgeois/ “Uncrontrollable Torrent” by Louise Bourgeois/ “Almost Paradise” by D’Nell Larson.
