6/3/2016 Courtney Fiske on three documentaries on Louise Bourgeois - artforum.com / film

http://artforum.com/film/id=40433 1/2

cafiske log out ADVERTISE BACK ISSUES CONTACT US SUBSCRIBE search

ARTGUIDE IN PRINT 500 WORDS PREVIEWS BOOKFORUM A & E 中文版

DIARY PICKS NEWS VIDEO FILM PASSAGES SLANT

FILM

Nick Pinkerton on “Talesof Cinema: The Films ofHong Sang­soo”Amy Taubin on EvaHesse (2016)Tony Pipolo on the 16th“Open Roads: New ItalianCinema” at Film SocietyRachel Ellis Neyra on theart of Beatriz SantiagoMuñozLinda Norden on “In Time(The Rhythm of theWorkshop)” at the MADNick Pinkerton at the 2ndNitrate Picture Show

Newest Headlines

Digital Arts MagazineTriple Canopy Moves toChinatownGerman Cultural ExpertClaims Syrian Troops AreLooting PalmyraYung Ma AppointedCurator by CentrePompidou, in Partnershipwith K11 Art FoundationSenate Concludes PrivateMuseums “Should DoMore” to Merit TaxExempt StatusLouvre and Muséed’Orsay Shut Down andEvacuate Artworks Due toThreat of FloodArtists Campaign AgainstMexico City Building thatInterferes with Land ArtNational Gallery of ArtNames AlexanderNemerov Next MellonLecturerWexner Center for theArts Appoints MichaelGoodson Senior CuratorIndonesia’s First Modernand Contemporary ArtMuseum Unveils Design

RECENT ARCHIVE

NEWS DIARY PICKS SLANT

“EVERYTHING I DO WAS INSPIRED by my early life,” Louise Bourgeois divulged to Artforum on theoccasion of her 1982 retrospective at MoMA, the venue’s first to fete a female artist. The statement, couchedin bold cursive beside a photograph of a young Bourgeois boating with her governess, cemented theorthodox line about her art, promulgated by critics who mapped her work onto her words. Read throughBourgeois’s backstory, her sculptural forms all source to childhood dramas: the various triangulations amongherself, her obliging mother, her imperious father, and the mistress he kept. Rehearsed without question orpause, Bourgeois’s biography stiffens into a sort of straitjacket, intent on stuffing prismatic, paradigm­shiftingwork into pat Oedipal narratives.

The tense complicity between Bourgeois the persona and Bourgeois the artist animates Brigitte Cornand’strio of documentaries, filmed during the final fourteen years of the artist’s life. The longer of the three—C’estle murmure de l’eau qui chante (The Whisper of the Whistling Water, 2002) and La Rivière gentile (TheSweet River, 2007)—converge on Bourgeois’s West Twenty­Second Street brownstone. Shots of thenonagenarian painting by her window or sketching grids in blue Sharpie thread through installation views ofearly works, pages from yellowed journals, and traversals of her cluttered yet kempt apartment. The mostrecent, Grabigouji: La Vie de la disparition (Grabigouji: Life of Disappearance, 2012), consists of recordedphone conversations between Cornand and Bourgeois played over still shots of nature and places from theartist’s past: the river Bièvre where she attempted suicide, the building on Boulevard Saint­Germain that herfamily called home.

For an artist famously beset by debilitating depressions, the Bourgeois who emerges is surprisingly calm. Oldage, it seems, has faded her emotions to paler hues: less the anxious saturation of Matisse’s The RedStudio, 1911; more the watery red of the gouache she favors. Cornand’s style is casual and unobtrusive, herdigital camera handheld or steady, depending on the demands of the shot. Rarely does she prod Bourgeoisto decode or disclose. When the artist reveals, she does so of her own accord, her recollections prompted byphotographs or surfacing unaided, like the melodies of the half­remembered songs she hums.

If these films have a secondary subject, beyond Bourgeois herself, it’s how an artist whose work so hinges onmemory adapts as those memories grow gauzy and leach at the edges. “I’m feeling a bit broody,” she tellsCornand in gravelly French over a fixed shot of a tawny moon. “What bothers me is that I try to rememberthings from the past, but I can’t seem to piece it together.” One of Bourgeois’s quirks is a fondness fordictionary definitions, which she asks Cornand to read aloud from Le Petit Larousse as aide­mémoire.“Rebus,” Cornand recites as Bourgeois transcribes in her notebook, “drawings or signs that must bedeciphered phonetically.” The definition—a metaphor, perhaps, for Bourgeois’s diffusely allusive forms—cuesan anecdote from the artist’s past. Its protagonist, predictably: her short­tempered father.

As one might expect, Bourgeois remains fixated on her family saga. A lengthy discursion on tapestries turnsto her father’s betrayal (yellow, it so happens, is the color of cuckoldry) and her perceived failure to measureup to her mother. In a recurring sequence, Cornand captures Bourgeois at her worktable as the artist stringsevocative fragments in voice­over. “The floods in Sologne. The wet Paris pavements by night. The beachesin Trouville, Houlgate, Villers, Cabourg, Honfleur,” Bourgeois intones in French, her back turned to thecamera. Cornand echoes her lead’s circular sense of time by filming excerpts from Bourgeois’s diaries inconfused chronological order. An April 2001 entry declares “no thing to do with the values de MarcelDuchamp” beside two hastily sketched urinals; in the ensuing entry, dated June 1974, Bourgeois grieves the

Oedipal Complex04.19.13

Brigitte Cornand, Grabigouji: La Vie de la disparition (Grabigouji: Life of Disappearance, 2012), digital video,color, sound, 47 minutes. Louise Bourgeois.

links

6/3/2016 Courtney Fiske on three documentaries on Louise Bourgeois - artforum.com / film

http://artforum.com/film/id=40433 2/2

PlansAnton Kern Gallery isLeaving Chelsea forMidtown

loss of her husband, Robert.

At times, Cornand indulges the myth that Bourgeois’s art issues from a purely personal etiology. “Once upona time there was a father, a mother, a child, a river, bridges, a mistress, and cars. Therein lies the tragedy,”the filmmaker avers at Grabigouji’s close, her camera trained on a sunlit country road. Such statementsbetter cloud than clarify Bourgeois’s achievement. More interesting are the moments that reveal how theartist’s fugue­like fable circles around, but never quite settles on, her work. Watteau and Odilon Redonpepper a meditation on the Bièvre; a musing on memory leads to mentions of Henri Michaux, René Magritte,and Eugène Ionesco’s “La Cantatrice chauve.” When her rehearsed drama relents, new interpretive avenuesappear. In the case of Bourgeois, it’s best not to always take the artist at her word.

— Courtney Fiske

Brigitte Cornand’s The Sweet River, The Whisper of the Whistling Water, and Grabigouji: Life ofDisappearance play Saturday, April 20, at the French Institute Alliance Française in New York.

PERMALINK COMMENTS

DIARY PICKS NEWS VIDEO FILM PASSAGES SLANT ARTGUIDE IN PRINT 500 WORDS PREVIEWS BOOKFORUM A & E 中文版

All rights reserved. artforum.com is a registered trademark of Artforum International Magazine, New York, NY