Trafficking in your own trauma was perhaps the hallmark of being a woman in the digital world; there were clicks to be had in revealing your most painful memories. It feels like we’ve moved on now, and for good reason—fetishizing female pain is not the same as empowering women. But where did it all go? The prevailing digital aesthetic now is one of sterilization, extreme minimalism. Even advertisements for Thinx, the period panties, employ a pleasant pastel color palette on which blood is smeared, and a cool, unbothered font. We were in agony—have we simply been fixed? Is everything okay, just like that?
The opposite impulse, to foreground blood and bodies instead of making them more palatable, characterizes the work of Louise Bourgeois. Famous for her sculptures, the artist also made thousands of two-dimensional pieces, on prints, in books, and on fabric, which are currently on display in a new exhibition “Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait,” at the Museum of Modern Art. The effect of the show, which is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, is to travel through the artist’s process, her emotional and artistic evolution; to be forced through her ecstatically traumatized vision of her life, and come out anew.
Long before LiveJournal, Carrie Bradshaw, or Twitter, Bourgeois was writing about herself; she just wasn’t showing it to everyone. Beginning in the 1940s, the content of her work was provocative, sexual—sculptures containing holes, apices, shafts, mouths—but she was reluctant to discuss her biography. That is, until 1982, when she published Child Abuse, a project in Artforum to coincide with her retrospective at the MoMA, the first for a woman artist at the museum. Child Abuse was “perversely confessional,” as Joan Acocella recalled in The New Yorker. It accounted for the inspirations behind her figures of women, as household objects and carved open, dissected creatures, and the anatomies of men, mostly their genitalia. She told the story of her father, a master tapestry restorer in France, who had cheated on her mother with a teenage governess, in the most distraught, painfully inarticulate terms: “Instead of / which she betrayed me.” Then her mother died young, and the betrayal was doubled. The words were printed on the magazine’s pages, strangely artless and awkward in their appearance, next to images of Bourgeois’s sculptural work.
Rather than turning people off, her sudden willingness to divulge the details of her personal life coincided with a postmodern, feminist wave of artists and art critics, who clamored to exalt Bourgeois as an antidote to the yawn-worthy abstractions and surrealisms of the modern male New York set. Her popularity endures in the same light; it’s easy to see, in this latest exhibition, why her work would resonate with a third-wave audience used to the high-traffic Instagram post, a hashtag, a phrase on a phone case, or a T-shirt. Fillette, the giant penis in latex over plaster, is missing from the current show, but two of her giant spiders are on display. Prints and fabric books say, “Merci Mercy,” “Keep Me Together/Do Not Abandon Me/Hold My Bones Together,” and “Mr. No Thank You.”
It’s the sheer volume of Bourgeois’s work here, not unrelated to its curation, that hits with incredible force, in which the repeated forms of spirals, pillars, veinlike tubing, umbilical cords, phalluses, faces, and traumatized, paralytic bodies become a refrain in a nightmarish lullaby. Lullaby, in fact, a series of 25 screen prints, is composed of blot-like shapes superimposed, like spills, onto sheet music–style paper. They are Rorschach tests—you can pick out some images, a penis, of course, or an acorn, but you wish you couldn’t. The impression is one of being taught something you don’t want to learn, something grotesque.
That’s the singular, surprising gift of this show, compared with the other installations and exhibitions of the work of Bourgeois. Instead of the commanding, instant impact of a lone sculpture like Maman, her most famous spider, or Fillette, or one of her beloved Cells, the overwhelming amount of serial works shown together display the artist’s intense anxiety, and its relationship to her practice. The figure of Saint Sebastian, in a staggering series of images, begins as a side view of a woman in light ink, watercolor, and pencil; then she has a cat’s face coming out of her own head; then she has voluptuous thighs, hips, buttocks, and breasts; finally, she has no head at all, cut off in cross section, like a cadaver or the stump of a tree, with arrows pointing to her body parts like in a diagram. The first drawings to the last drypoint prints span eight years, and the catharsis they offer is not one of redemption, but of purified pain.
Bourgeois is known for saying, “The subject of pain is the business I am in.” Roberta Smith shrewdly called Bourgeois’s work “product” in her review of “An Unfolding Portrait” in The New York Times, which I might push further into “content”—especially as the items in MoMA’s huge collection are now digitized online. There is much here that will be cut up and spliced across the Internet, and wallpapered onto social media. But perusing the images on my computer at home, hours after seeing the exhibition in person, I felt their loss, no longer under the huge weight of the 1,200 pieces that the walls, tables, and ceilings of the museum’s rooms also bore. I realized that if I wrote down on paper or in a diary as much as I’ve written online and in text messages over the last 15 years, I might fill such a space. I don’t think I have a chance now.
In her own words, Bourgeois has said, “My early work is the fear of falling. Later on, it became the art of falling. How to fall without hurting yourself. Later on, it is the art of hanging in there.” This inheritance of survival is undoubtedly the labor of women, or it has been, historically—now the waters we swim in are murkier, since we’ve been told we are no longer drowning. And yet there is much pain left to be endured. It’s like we spent the last few years getting everything off our chests, and then hit “send,” as if the work of understanding ourselves and improving our circumstances has simply been archived. Witnessing Louise Bourgeois’s life in art is to understand that it is never over.