Childhood As Memory, Myth and Metaphor by Crimp Catherine;

Author:Crimp, Catherine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Bourgeois Dolls

Many of the works of Bourgeois are toy-like. Several of these are doubly connected to childhood, since they also represent child figures. Here I take a sample of Bourgeois’s numerous toy-like figures, examining how they beckon viewers to play with the boundaries between art and life.

Bourgeois’s Portrait of Jean-Louis (1947–1949), named after her first biological child (Bourgeois’s first son, Michel, was adopted), therefore overtly refers to the artist’s family life and status as a mother.1 We can, of course, study the sculpture separately from its history. It resembles a strange doll but also a skyscraper, a small child, and a penis. The theme of the architectural body can be discussed in terms of a modernist vocabulary as well as a more personal one, and suggests links with animism that critics have widely discussed.2 But what if one accepts Portrait as a female artist’s portrait of her son? Since it cannot stand alone it must be mounted on the wall, or held like a child or toy. Its size and vulnerability suggest that the act of making sculpture can potentially inform a view of motherhood, rather than the opposite, since the work is subject to the artist’s creative and destructive whims. Ultimately, though, Portrait presents an unfathomable relationship: the small, vulnerable sculpture, the traces of the artist’s hand, the vanishing point shared by work and life. The small figure hanging in its glass case may look abandoned. Perhaps that abandonment, after the intimacy of making (we might even call it gestation), is what makes the sculpture, and all sculpture, most like a child.

Childhood is generally defined as coming before puberty.3 Bourgeois calls the opposition of childhood and sexuality into question, making constant visual connections between them. This often takes the form of a joke. Fillette [Little Girl] (1968), a large latex-and-plaster penis, looks more like a sex toy than a children’s toy.4 Yet the title Fillette suggests a vulnerable object to be treated with maternal tenderness, like the earlier Portrait. Deborah Wye said that holding Fillette was like holding a baby or a doll: ‘The urge to rock this scanda lous object is almost irresistible.’ (1982: 27) But again, there is room for maternal ambivalence. Indeed, while Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous photograph shows Bourgeois cradling Fillette like a baby, the sculpture is normally strung up on a hook: Brian Sewell recently condemned this as a sexist attack on masculinity (2007: 43–44).5 Without going that far, I would say that the vulnerability of objects as children is fundamental in Bourgeois’s formal vocabulary. This claim does not depend on psychoanalytical tropes, or indeed on biographical details or even on Bourgeois’s thematic commentary.6 Over many decades, Bourgeois undermined and remade physical forms. Where these forms evoke bodies, the boundaries between old and young, male and female, and human and animal tend to break down, as do the distinctions between different body parts, and between the body and what it excretes or inhabits. This remaking is almost always connected to childishness and play: the metamorphic

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