Review: [untitled] Author(s): Julia Bryan-Wilson Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Dec., 2007), pp. 823-826 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25067365 . Accessed: 23/03/2011 10:00 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin. http://www.jstor.org BOOK REVIEWS: BRYAN-WILSON ON NIXON ?23 The between their a munication. poet and painter belonged ularly the presumed intimacy mixed itwith spit, and molded figure of to two art was different politico-historical and cul practice and their fraught personal cir my father. When the figure done, I tural a moments?Renaissance and Baroque cumstances. started cutting off the limbs with knife. I in historical What to an artist like Lou see as shorthand?and their artistic do, then, with this my first sculptural solution" (p. ise her of sad projects, however linked, ultimately di Bourgeois, who, despite share 265). While Nixon lets this brief anecdote not own and is still sane and verged. Tasso did always play by his ness, suffering, struggle, hover in her text without further explica well into her nineties? Nix rules; Poussin made those rules the basis of thriving Mignon tion (these are the concluding sentences of his refined art. on's beautiful new mono and provocative her final chapter), it perfectly encapsulates Fantastic Louise and a graph Reality: Bourgeois her overarching premise about the central David is Modern Art the case nei quint Sterling Professor of Story of makes that ity of aggressive play within Bourgeois's art. Comparative Literature and English at Yale ther Surrealism-?which the artist herself This creation and dismemberment?indeed, Yale disavowed?nor are sufficient sin a University [Department ofEnglish, biography creating in order to dismember?of sub 63 Street, Room 109, P.O. Box on University, High gular lenses for understanding Bourgeois's stitute father keys into Klein's emphasis 208302, New Haven, Conn. 06520-8302]. art. Nixon think ei Neither, though, does the fundamental roles that incorporation, ther term be should completely discarded. oral sadism, and destruction play in psychic Billed as the "first full-scale critical of as children come to under Notes study" life, especially Fantastic an Bourgeois's work, Reality posits stand themselves relationally. Nixon hones 1. Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: A Humanis between art and in on interplay psychoanalysis Kleinian negativity; mourning, aggres ticTheory ofPainting (New York: W. W. Norton, without reductively psychoanalyzing the art sion, and death are vital to her accounts of 1967); Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Demp ist.When Nixon turns to the of the in distinction to Freud's stress sey,Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and theLove of question psyche, she does so not out of a morbid on the As Nixon Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, trauma, pleasure principle. states, "Poussin's Osserva fascination with an artist's demise that 1996); Anthony Colantuono, early Bourgeois's work "argues for the potential or zioni sopra la pittura: Notes Aphorisms?" Studi then focus to the short career gives sharp of sculpture to encompass the death drive: Secenteschi 41 285-309; Elizabeth (2000): Crop it is seen in much on as an preceding (as writing to enact destruction and persis per, The Ideal ofPainting: Pieiro Testa's D?sseldorf early Instead, she the tent but one linked to an Notebook (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Woodman). explores signif trend, indissolubly and The Domenichino icance of the death drive at the 1984); idem, Affair (New beginning equally primitive and tenacious tendency Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). rather than at the end of life: that within is, towards sublimation" (p. 268). Sculpture, 2. I out an error in translation as point Unglaub's infantile subject formation delineated by with its dimensionality in space, its surro on page 106, where it isMarino's Venus who the us pioneering object-relations psychoana gacy, its scale, and its bodily effects, tells takes Adonis on her lap and not the other way Melanie Klein. about the bread around: the mistake is not so trivial, since it lyst something intersubjectivity; While art has been to father makes that much clear. would suggest a departure from the passivity Bourgeois's subject and-spit that marks Adonis the feminist on as an throughout Adone. psychoanalytic readings, informed Rather than relying psychoanalysis and model for the book's most 3. Timothy Hampton, Writing fromHistory: The by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, explanatory art, Rhetoric in Renaissance Literature Luce as ofExemplarity Irigaray, Nixon's pioneering book potent contribution is that it presents art N.Y.: (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990); serts her art is above all As as that Kleinian.1 and psychoanalysis equally illuminating, and Riccardo Bruscagli, Studi cavallereschi (Flor Nixon out, herself was interconnected discourses the ence: Societ? Editrice Fiorentina, 2003). The points Bourgeois regarding in the and theoretical ram of formation. classic critical description of Tasso's divided steeped practical process subject as a case imaginative sympathies is in Sergio Zatti, ifications of Klein's work. In fact, in the The book is organized series of L cristiano e il a studies that chrono 'uniforme multiformepagano: Saggio mid-1960s, she considered becoming child proceed only roughly sulla "GerusalemmeLiberata" Il (Milan: Saggia an arc analyst; Nixon makes the case logically, tracing through Bourgeois's tore, 1983). persuasively career from the 1940s to the 1990s as she that "Bourgeois's investigation of child anal 4. Matteo Residori, L 'idea del poema: Studio sulla with the intention of a thera both inhabits and subverts her role as a de Gerusalemme conquistata di Torquato Tasso (Pisa: ysis becoming informs the of fiant and an Scuola Normale Superiore, 2004). pist consistently development daughter (vis-?-vis Surrealism) a ambivalent mother femi her art" (p. 7). Nixon does not force (for contemporary onto nist In Defer Kleinian template Bourgeois's objects; art). chapter 1, "Discipleship: instead, she a lucid be ence and Difference," Nixon outlines Bour MIGNON NIXON presents dialogue tween the art and the geois's charged relationship with the "father Fantastic Louise and a theory, explicating Reality: Bourgeois resonances between Klein's influential theo figures" of Surrealism, including Marcel Modem Art and that the Story of ries about childhood aggression and the Duchamp Joan Mir?, arguing Mass.: MIT 2005. 352 artist's work a to Cambridge, Press, artworks, while also using the artist's prac constituted "rebuttal" 103 b/w ills. as a male-dominated Surrealism Nixon pp.; $40.00 tice springboard for her extended med (p. 23). in of archival itations on Klein's case studies. She suggests engages readings photo Suicide. Madness. Institutionalization. Acci that the art "extends, and at times contests" graphs, such as one from 1947 in which dent. Illness. The of of a seated biographies many the vast but neglected theoretical terrain of Bourgeois kneels alongside Mir?, the women artists associated with and influ to demonstrate how child psychoanalysis (p. 6). In Nixon's deft Bourgeois burlesques enced Surrealism contain a of the idea of at the feet of her by litany trag text, Bourgeois's work talks back to the the "discipleship" edies?think of Leonora Car a Surrealist masters in order to transform it Kay Sage, ory and furnishes powerful discursive tool Frida Kahlo, Francesca within the terms of rington, Woodman, for understanding Klein. feminism. Eva and Kusama. Art Hesse, Yayoi historians The conversation between Klein and Nixon maintains that Bourgeois is both recite these bleak details over and over like in an astute reader and a reviser of Surrealism. Bourgeois clarifies, particular, the sculp them to us make tural of Yet transference as incantations, willing help element Bourgeois's work (though Bourgeois's negative is, sense of the of art to Nixon unsettling power these Nixon does not limit herself Bourgeois's admits, "transference nevertheless" ists' works. We their lives un at plunder (or sculptural practice, looking also drawings, (p. 28), and her close ties to the Surrealist to to their art. timely deaths) give shape performance documentation, personal pho milieu?and to Freud?continue to inform for Perhaps women, Surrealism's emphasis tographs,