In den wenigen freien Zeiten noch immer, immer wieder der Genuss der Bourgeois-Aufzeichnungen, von denen viele zu denken geben, andere zu Widerspruch verleiten und wieder berühren, weil ich kaum eine Künstlerin kenne, die eine so zärtliche Verbindung zu ihren Arbeiten hat.
Blind Man´s Buff 1984. Marble, Photo: Robert Miller Gallery
aus einem Interview mit Louise Bourgeois
(by Ingrid Sischy)
If you ask young artists whose work really speaks to them, may will answer 'Louise Bourgeois.' They are not alone. Bourgeois just might be the busiest artist around. She's been having exhibitions all over the world - from a huge, Impressive show at the Fondazione Prada in Milan this past spring to a major retrospective opening at the Yokohama Museum of Art In Tokyo In November. She's also been responsible for some of the most Inspiring public sculptures of our time, such as a piece called The Welcoming Hands, installed at the tip of Manhattan in Battery Park. (Les Bienvenus, a work with a similar theme, has been placed in Choisy-le-Roi, France, where the artist grew up.) On September 29, President Clinton awarded Bourgeois the National Medal of the Arts, the nation's highest honor for visual arts. Despite always been: the real thing, through and through - witty, wise, and absolutely possessed and obsessed by her work.
INGRID SlSCHY: What do you think it was, Louise, that made you want to be an artists?
LOUISE BOURGEOIS: It was when I discovered that artists can be useful. Did you ever hear that an artist was useful?
IS: What one hears is usually the opposite. that artists are useless.
LB: [laughs]
IS: So how come you had a different take?
LB: My parents were involved in the arts; they repaired tapestries. And when the draftsman failed to come when he was supposed to on Saturdays - he worked all week at the Gobelins - my mother panicked. So she said, "Can you help?" And I said, "Yes, I'd love it."
IS: Aha. So you were useful even as a kid. How old were you then?
LB: I was twelve.
IS: And how did your parents know that you'd be able to do it?
LB: At school, art was important, and from the beginning I was an overachiever. That is to say, if you flatter me, or if you look at me the right way, I will kill myself to please you. It's very painful to be an overachiever. Anyway, in art class I was not any better than anybody else, to tell you the truth - but I tried to make believe that I was. And I worked like a dog. I knew how to use a pen. So when the draftsman did not come, I would sit in for him. That is the way it started. And I still have this philosophy today: Artists have to be useful. They have to fill a role.
IS: And what did your parents do with the tapestries? Sell them?
LB: Certainly. Often to Americans whose tastes were dictated by the Puritan tradition. If you look at the tapestries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there are genitals everywhere. And the American puritanical attitude absolutely forbid that. So one of my mother's duties was to cut them out and put a bunch of flowers there, so it would not offend the moralities of the collectors.
It was because of the collectors that I learned English: I had to deal with them. And to this day, I find it very difficult to talk to collectors.
IS: Especially since you don't put flowers where people want them.
LB: Right. [laughs]
IS: [laughs] How was it when you told your parents that you wanted to be an artist?
LB: It made my father climb the walls. To him artists were parasites who seduced women and abandoned them.
IS: Your parents have always figured large in your work. Tell us something about that.
LB: There are very significant reasons for it. For instance, my mother contracted the Spanish flu at the end of the war in 1918. In France it was called the Spanish flu. But it was a plague. Everybody thought that people would die like flies, but she recovered, even though forever after that she had emphysema. And my second nature, you see, was to please. To please my father, I took care of my mother. We treated the tapestries and we repaired them. And by extension I treated my mother and tried to repair her. I spent all my time repairing things.
My mother was not very interested in sex after being sick. So a mistress was a logical consequence. My father did not want to have any more children around. He had enough. And he wanted to make sure he would not be accused of having enfants with his mistress, so she had to be a foreigner. It was a legal precaution. She was always a foreigner who came to France to teach us English, so she had a useful place in the house. But if she became pregnant, he sent her back to England.
IS: And she didn't become pregnant?
LB: They did. There were many.
IS: These are some of the things that come up In your work, which is why it's so powerful - there's nothing like real life. You have always worked with memory and the stories of your life. Why?
LB: Yes, right. I want to get rid of them. And in order to forget all these histories, you have to forgive. If you are resentful, you keep the thing alive. So the way to go on is to get rid of it, in order to forgive in order to forget.
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