Huss Post are delighted to announce our very own Page 3, your fortnightly one-stop-shop for awesome and inspiring women!
We kick off this week with artist Louise Bourgeois.
Enjoy, Hussies!
I first came across Louise Bourgeois when I was writing a school project in the noughties. Now, I have to confess that my sole reason for choosing her as the subject of an art essay was one of pure convenience - the Tate was running a retrospective of her work and my teenage logic said that dictating the audio guide couldn't possibly count as plagiarising, natch.
To be honest, Louise and I didn't get off to the best start. Bourgeois was nicknamed "Spiderwoman" after her giant eight-legged sculpture, Maman, which loomed over Tate patrons on the Southbank that winter. This didn't go down well with someone who has to meticulously check all the bedsheets each night and sleep in sweltering heat with windows firmly closed to discourage lurking arachnids.
Despite this, I was totally won over by the exhibition, which forced my little pre-feminist brain to consider constructed gender roles for the very first time.
The horrific spider - Maman - a looming maternal figure both petrifying and protective, is just one manifestation of Bourgeois' intense exploration of gender roles and the ambiguities of the gendered female condition. Bourgeois described the monstrous spider as an "ode" to her mother, a weaver. The spider's web represents the woven fabrics of her mother's profession, family ties, and the spider's capacity to catch mosquitoes and flies, saving the family from poison and trauma. For every moment Bourgeois rails against oppression, repression, and performed roles, she simultaneously memorialises the comfort and inner strength of the traditional 'mother' figure, etching out the interior conflicts that a woman faces in the construction of the female self.
To a large extent her work also discusses the gendering of spaces. In a series of installations entitled Cells, Bourgeois elaborates upon the concept of architectural spaces as houses for memory. Claustrophobia-inducing rooms of red and black, womb-like, protective, and intensely uncomfortable, enclose traumatic childhood memories. Her father is a constant spectre in her work and a symbol of betrayal (the young Bourgeois watched his affair with her English tutor, Sadie), and Bourgeois presents these traumatic memories as boxed within the enclosed semi-domestic space of her installations.
Perhaps understandably, expressions of sexuality have a huge presence in Bourgeois' work. Her anthropomorphic sculptures were pretty amusing to my teenage self. The innocuously-named Cumul I, for instance, turns out to be quite an unnerving rock formation of bulging penis-eyes. Expressions of female sexuality are tainted with simultaneous allusions to torture: Bourgeois was preoccupied with the double-standards that are intrinsic to traditional gender roles.
For me, Bourgeois addresses all the inherent conflicts involved in the construction of a female self in a society that demands paradoxical behaviour from its women. She reflects back the often nightmarish female psyche unflinchingly, capturing all the confusion that I sometimes feel when faced with conflicting expectations.
That's why Louise Bourgeois is perfect as our inaugural Page 3 icon. Her art explores the notion that no woman, no human in fact, can be summed up as an uncomplicated result of their own choices. For all those who try to stifle feminist protests against Page 3 by branding it as a harmless institution that women enjoy featuring in as an expression of emancipation and empowerment: Bourgeois suggests that, however they might appear to the world, no one is the straightforward sum of their choices. Women have histories. Women are shaped by the behaviour of people around them and the societies they inhabit. Women are as complicated and three-dimensional as they come.
At last, a female heroine who isn't one-dimensional. Louise Bourgeois. Spiderwoman.
LK
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