Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois And A Story Of Modern Art

Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois And A Story Of Modern Art

The art of Louise Bourgeois stages a dynamic encounter between modern art andpsychoanalysis, argues Mignon Nixon in the first full-scale critical study of the artist's work. Apivotal figure in twentieth-century art, Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, France) emigrated to New York in1938 and is still actively working and exhibiting today. From Bourgeois's formative struggle withthe father figures of surrealism, including Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp, to her galvanizingrole in the feminist art movement of the 1970s, to her subsequent emergence as a leading voice inpostmodernism, this book explores the artist's responses to war, dislocation, and motherhood, to thepredicament of the woman artist and the politics of sexual and social liberation, as a dialoguewith psychoanalysis.Convinced that she could express deeper things in three dimensions, Bourgeoisabandoned painting for sculpture in the 1940s, founding her art in one of the twentieth century'smost radical and controversial accounts of subjectivity, the object relations psychoanalysis ofMelanie Klein. Rejecting the Oedipal narratives of Freud and the dream imagery of surrealism for theobject world of the infantile drives, Bourgeois turned to the child analysis pioneered by Klein, thefigure Julia Kristeva has called the boldest reformer in the history of modern psychoanalysis.With Klein, Bourgeois thinks the negative -- fragmentation, splitting, and formlessness -- where wemight least expect to find it, in the corporeal fantasies of mother and child. This turn to themother and the death drive at once in child psychoanalysis, Nixon contends, not only finds powerfulexpression in Bourgeois's art, but is echoed in the work of other artists, including Marcel Duchamp,Jasper Johns, Yayoi Kusama, and Eva Hesse, and in a return to Klein in recent art.Fantasticreality, Bourgeois calls the condition of her art. Starting from Bourgeois's investigation, througha multiplicity of forms and materials, of the problem of subjectivity on the very threshold ofemergence, this book argues for a new psychoanalytic story of modern art.