Louise Bourgeois
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the third section, Janis Jefferies explores ests, and political persuasions today use their successors are joining the fray of how group activities like cake decorating websites, blogs, videos, podcasts, and today’s interdisciplinary and technologi - are a form of performance art revealing tweets to form communities, exchange cally minded art discourse—with or longings for intimacy and community. ideas, and sell goods. Black and Burisch without them” (14). This anthology offers The anthology’s final section, “New in particular address corporate uses of a one-sided conversation because, aside Functions, New Frontiers,” brings technology to appropriate “alternative from Fariello’s historiography, the views together Lacey Jane Roberts’s thoughts and DIY lifestyles” and then depoliticize of the studio craft community, itself on the use of queer theory to reshape them through the sale of “hobby com - diverse in ages and preoccupations, are craft’s identity, and Andrew Jackson’s modities for affluent consumers” (204). not provided. Also beneficial would be exploration of the motivations of men Craftivism was a subculture that has an expanded explanation of how the involved with crafting. The final been legitimized, historicized, and com - experimental craft practices of boomer- contribution is a transcript of Buszek’s modified by galleries, museums, and aged artist educators, fiber artist Ann interview with Margaret Wertheim that publishers relying on the very same tech - Wilson of the School of the Art Institute frames the science writer’s organization nology for educational, promotional, and of Chicago for instance, have established of crocheting circles to create models of sales purposes. Stevens’s Gen-X’ers are, a place for conceptual craft practices and hyperbolic space within the context of after all, at ages 31 to 47, old enough to be craftivism in the contemporary art world. gender bias in artistic and scientific established professionals capable of rep - That being said, the anthology is a signif - communities. resenting their own interests. Through icant and useful contribution to burgeon - The anthology’s contributors reiterate this anthology, Buszek strives to generate ing scholarship on contemporary craft. • that the “nonhierarchical and decentral - “a much-needed dialogue” between the ized” properties of the Internet and social generations, because “many of the Mary Caroline Simpson is an Assistant media initially united craftivist groups emerging, conceptually focused artists” Professor of Art History at Eastern globally and enabled conceptual craft have made “surprising, subversive, and Illinois University. Her current research artists to build community and promote poignant” work that “actually depends focuses on Chicago art collector and their work free from the control and on and pays homage to the trails blazed fiber arts innovator Claire Zeisler. influence of boomer-aged curators, deal - by their predecessors” (13). Portraying ers, and journal editors dedicated to the the elder studio craft community as pri - Notes preservation of traditional studio craft marily either oblivious or hostile to 1. See Howard Risatti, “Metaphorical (14).While younger people typically take change, Buszek, Stevens, and others Implications of Function, Material, and to new technologies first and push their warn that it ought “to pay close attention Technique in Craft,” Skilled Work: use in new and often unanticipated direc - to this new generation of crafters or risk American Craft in the Renwick Gallery (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution tions, individuals of disparate ages, inter - obsolescence, as those who would be Press, 1998). Louise Bourgeois: works new poignancy by Conscious and Unconscious discussing them explicitly in this catalog in the context of by Philip Larratt-Smith Bourgeois’s other works and of Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation the artist’s Freudian self- Publishing, 2012 questionings of her life as a child and as a mother. Larratt- Reviewed by Jan Garden Castro Smith links I DO to the good mother , I UNDO to the bad t the Qatar Museums Authority mother letting her milk drip as (QMA) gallery the exhibition the baby goes hungry, and I A“Louise Bourgeois: Conscious REDO to the mother’s self- and Unconscious,” on show for most of examination and redress of her Fig. 1. Louise Bourgeois, book cover with Untitled (No. 7) the first half of 2012, featured thirty state. These towers each have (1993), pink marble, 13" x 36" x 15", on two timbers, each works created between 1947 and 2009. different kinds of spiraling, 15" x 39" x 15". One work that will remain in Qatar is the precipitous stairs, and various giant spider Maman (Mother), first shown kinds of mirrors that reflect the viewer’s recall them as being three to four stories at the Tate Modern’s giant Turbine Hall persona through different, distorted tall; they are listed as 6,000, 4,500, and in 2000 with three monumental towers, I lenses; they are ingenious, well-crafted 9,000 cm. tall (ca. 200, 150, and 300 feet), DO, I UNDO, I REDO .1 The towers were art works that demonstrate how subtly respectively. Larratt-Smith calls Maman not shown in Qatar, but the exhibition’s Bourgeois’s team has been able to realize the fourth tower, stating that the artist curator, Philip Larratt-Smith, gives these her most ambitious constructions. I was summoning her own mother, FALL / WINTER 2012 49 unconsciously linking her fear of the public here” (9). Her Excellency sees forming an X. The hands are a symbol or abandonment with her fear of death, and Bourgeois’s spiders as linked to her sign of human interconnections. creating, as in the towers, a mother who memories of her mother; she adds that Other works in the exhibition range is both good and bad (the spider eats her the spider in the Holy Qur’an wove a from red gouache “flowers,” created in young). Finally, for Larratt-Smith, web that protected the Prophet from his 2009, to a womblike, bronze hanging Bourgeois herself becomes the master enemies. This information further piece Fée Couturiére (1963), to fabric spider, creator, and tale-spinner. His universalizes the spider and gives webs and a fabric head, and metal and concise yet powerful essay contains Westerners and non-Muslims added marble sculpture pieces, including Cell fresh psychoanalytical insights into the insights into another culture. XV (for JMW Turner) (2000), a work in artist’s work: The exhibition title, “Conscious and which water spirals together from two Unconscious,” is related to a slender sources. Entrenched psychic conflicts sculpture with two sorts of towers. A This exhibition catalog seems condemned the artist to a life of stack of sponge-like white fabric shapes important both for the intimacy of its repetition…. Thus art was at once recall the spinal column and stand for theme and for its range of work focusing an indication of her underlying order and the conscious mind. Nearby, on on layered psychoanalytical readings psychic disorder and a means of a pole, a blue rubber pear shape is pierced about relationships between children making herself whole. It was both with five needles, each holding a small and their mothers. This universal subject symptom and cure. In the place of spool of thread. “The thread represents deserves more attention worldwide; it’s Freud’s talking cure, which she the unspooling of time, the sewing of the refreshing to think that the exhibition has rejected as inadequate, Bourgeois mother-weaver, the spider’s web, the opened some minds to women’s (and found another ”royal road to the fragility of human relationships, and the human rights) issues as well as to art that unconscious” in the making of art, tenuous linkage to memory,” according requires some thought. which she called her ”form of • to Larratt-Smith (15). psychoanalysis” (12–13). The dual language QMA catalog, in Jan Garden Castro is Contributing The catalog introduction by QMA English and Arabic, is richly illustrated, Editor for Sculpture and for Ceramics: Art Chairperson Her Excellency Sheikha Al and the cover image (Fig. 1), two life- & Perception . Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al- sized pairs of pink marble hands Thani states that Maman ’s new home clasped together, suggests closeness, Notes (since 2011) at the National Convention warmth, and friendship between people 1. See my article on the towers, “Louise Center Qatar Foundation “has already and cultures. In the full untitled work, Bourgeois: Turning Myths Inside Out,” inspired writers, artists and members of the four limbs stop below the elbow, Sculpture , 20:1 (Jan/Feb 2001): 16–23. Agnes Martin reinforce Martin’s claim that “The cause to her credit that she will never be edited by Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, of the response is not traceable in the “canonical” in this sense, because her and Barbara Schröder work” (232). The question with which work is singular in its treatment of ges - Dia Art Foundation and these essays grapple in light of these ture, scale, seriality, and image, as well Yale University Press, 2011 effects is: what could such phenomena as the complexities of meaning that are mean? How are the artist’s ambitions never fully independent from her per - Reviewed by Vittorio Colaizzi and conditions, as well as the conditions sona and career. This singularity makes of the viewer, inscribed upon them? her an especially appropriate artist to be he impression emerges, through Issuing from a colloquium sponsored housed in Dia:Beacon; her work needs reading this anthology and by the Dia Art Foundation, in conjunc - the luxurious attention that is less avail - Tremembering the work, that Agnes tion with a series of focused exhibitions, able when placed in a room full of Martin’s paintings are somehow not this anthology is, of course, a claim for obligatory heavy-hitters of either there. Their qualities and effects are of a Martin’s importance, but at the same Abstract Expressionist or Minimalist second order, not directly tied to their time, particularly in the essays by Rhea generations.