Simon Critchley on Contemporary Art

An article for The Brooklyn Rail

Al Held, 'The Big A' (1962)

Philosopher Simon Critchley shares his thoughts on contemporary art: '[...] despite such confusions of reference and the horrors of the contemporary art business model—or perhaps even because of it—I want to defend contemporary art, up to a point. It is simply a fact that contemporary art has become the central placeholder for the articulation of cultural meanings—good, bad, or indifferent. I am middle-aged enough to remember when literature, especially the novel, played this role and when cultural gatekeepers were literary critics, or social critics, often from literary backgrounds. That world is gone. The novel has become a quaint, emotively life-changing, and utterly marginal phenomenon. The heroic critics of the past are no more. I watched this change happen slowly when I still lived in England in the sensation-soaked 1990s and recall, as a kind of cultural marker, the opening of Tate Modern in 2000 and immensely long lines queuing up to see a vast spider by Louise Bourgeois in the Turbine Hall. It was clear that something had shifted in the culture.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Francis Bacon: Five Decades
• Damien Hirst on Francis Bacon
• David Lynch on BBC's The Culture Show

Louise Bourgeois Exhibition: The Return of the Repressed

Freud Museum, London · 8 March 2012 - 27 May 2012

Louise Bourgeois, CELL XXIV (PORTRAIT), 2001. Photograph: Christopher Burke, © Louise Bourgeois Trust

The following is an exhibition announcement from the Freud Museum in London:

Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed
Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith

The Freud Museum London is delighted to announce an exhibition of works by Louise Bourgeois. Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed will show original documents from the artist’s recently discovered psychoanalytic writings, as well as drawings and sculptures, in the house of the founding father of psychoanalysis. Following its first showing in Latin America, the exhibition has been re-imagined for the unique setting of the Freud Museum London, which was discussed as a venue by Louise Bourgeois before her death. Appropriately, in the final home of Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna Freud, this exhibition will explore the artist’s complex and ambivalent engagement with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and lived in the United States from 1938 until her death in 2010. She became one of the best known artists of the 20th century, whose work has inspired a rich commentary from academics and critics alike. What is not generally known is that she also undertook a psychoanalysis spanning three decades. The exhibition is based on the discovery of two boxes of writings by her longtime assistant Jerry Gorovoy at the beginning of 2004, and two more in early 2010. These constitute an archive of over one thousand loose sheets recording her reactions to her psychoanalytic treatment from 1951; several texts refer directly to Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, whom she saw from 1952 to 1982. In some cases these texts complement existing diaries that she kept throughout her life, while in others they serve to fill in the gaps for those years in which she did not keep a diary.

The exhibition will raise fundamental questions about the relationship between art and life, and the therapeutic nature of art itself. To curator Larratt-Smith, who has served as the literary archivist of the Louise Bourgeois Archives since 2002: ‘The discovery of the psychoanalytic writings has enriched and augmented our understanding of Bourgeois’s work and life immeasurably. They represent a distinct contribution to art history as well as to the field of psychoanalysis.’ The exhibition foregrounds the importance of these writings, displaying nearly fifty original manuscripts for the first time and ranging from sketches, notes, dream recordings, lists and drawings.

Sculptures and drawings on display will include pieces such as The Dangerous Obsession (2003), the woven fabric text I Am Afraid (2009), and drawings and four gouache on paper works from the 2007 series The Feeding. Janus Fleuri (1968), sometimes considered the most significant of all Bourgeois’s works, will also come into Freud’s home. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Louise Bourgeois and Balzac's Eugénie Grandet

Louise Bourgeois and Balzac's Eugénie Grandet

How Balzac's novel related to Bourgeois' life and art

Louise Bourgeois. Photograph: Robert Mapplethorpe

Phillipe Dagen traces the influence of Honoré de Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet on the work of sculptor Louise Bourgeois:

In the last weeks of her life Louise Bourgeois, who died last May, was still working, her energy focused on the heroine of Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet, whom she saw as the archetypal daughter broken by an odious, all-powerful father. Born in 1911, into a Parisian family almost as conventional as the one Balzac described in 1833, Bourgeois would have suffered a similar life of painful resignation, had she not become an artist and subsequently moved to New York.

"I love that story. It could be the story of my life," she told an interviewer in September 2009. In keeping with this rationale, her work, particularly in the closing decades of her life, drew on autobiographical elements, with her father in the role of the domineering adulterer who thought women were doomed to a subservient position. Her installations, sculptures (bronze spiders), drawings and engravings relate directly or allude to her youth and family life.

Grandet is thus the ultimate incarnation of a tragic destiny and Balzac's home in Paris the place for the last rites of exorcism that Bourgeois had prepared. She wanted her final work, still as powerful as ever, to be shown in this house, rather than a big museum or gallery. Obviously because it is Balzac's home, but also because the place is just right, with small, rapidly oppressive rooms, narrow staircases and gloomy wood-panelled passages. The works themselves feel cramped. The exhibition at Maison de Balzac, Paris (until 6 February) starts with an imaginary portrait of Grandet, which might well be a self-portrait of Bourgeois herself at the age of 20. [Read more]

Philippe Dagen, 'Louise Bourgeois: Moi, Eugénie Grandet - review'

Guardian Weekly, 4 January 2011

Originally appeared in Le Monde