Destrucción del padre / reconstrucción del padre

by Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois apenas requiere introducción. Sobre todo cuando a los noventa años recién cumplidos acaba de estrenar una nueva exposición en España de sus obras tan sugerentes y provocativas. En esta compilación de escritos suyos, el lector encontrará una visión íntima y amplia del artista y la mujer, en toda su grandeza. La escultora empezó a escribir a los catorce años. Desde entonces, no ha dejado de escribir y dibujar. Destrucción del padre—el título viene del nombre de la escultura que creó después de la muerte de su marido en 1973, y que algunos críticos citan como un hito en el desarrollo de su obra—contiene textos formales y lo que la autora llama “pensamientos de bolígrafo”: una mezcla de texto y dibujo a menudo relacionado con sus dibujos finales y sus esculturas, con relatos o poemas inscritos en los márgenes. Para esta prolífica artista, escribir es una forma de expresión cuya importancia ha ido incrementado a lo largo de los años, particularmente durante períodos de insomnio. Su escritura es compulsiva, pero también perfectamente meditada, avalada por su formación intelectual, conocimientos de historia de arte y sentido de forma literaria (ha publicado numerosos artículos sobre artistas, exposiciones y actos artísticos). Bourgeois ha sido entrevistada en varias ocasiones por periodistas, artistas, y escritores. En estas entrevistas, ha expresado su punto de vista acerca de su obra, revelando algunos de sus secretos y descubriendo la conexión existente entre algunas de sus obras y ciertos traumas infantiles. Este libro ofrece una selección de sus escritos y sus comentarios en varias entrevistas y confirma el estrecho enlace que existe entre su obra y su biografía, además de presentar nuevos aspectos de su pensamiento y trabajo creativos.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Essays, Poetry, Art History, Memoir, Biography

191 pages, Paperback

First published May 18, 1998

About the author

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and print-maker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

Reviews

[Rebeca · Rating 5 out of 5]

"To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer.”
Louise Bourgeois on art, integrity, the trap of false humility, and the key to creative confidence – wisdom from a lifetime of her previously unpublished diaries and letters.

[natàlia · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Cuando era pequeña, todas las mujeres de mi casa usaban agujas. Siempre he sentido fascinación por las agujas, por el poder mágico de las agujas. Las agujas sirven para reparar los daños. Tratan de conseguir un tipo de perdón. No son nunca agresivas, a diferencia de los alfileres”.

Es probablemente mi cita favorita de todo el libro, y, aunque podría decir que era difícil escoger sólo una, no ha sido complicado elegir esa.

Es un libro al que volveré constantemente. Por necesidad, probablemente. Está cargado de feminismo (muchas referencias a los cuidados y al trabajo emocional), de recuerdos y de todo tipo de pensamientos e ideas sobre el arte.

“Siempre he vivido en ciudades con río” podría ser una metáfora, pero es simplemente Louise Bourgeois <3

[Emily Morgan]

Saw the Bourgeois exhibition yesterday and oh my gosh!!! I wish they were selling this book there, though. It is out of print, out of stock everywhere :,((

[Thoranna · Rating 5 out of 5]

not done, but I highly recommend this if you want to get inspired

[Ella Eyckmans · Rating 5 out of 5]

*gaat op zoek naar een Louise Bourgeois cult*

[Paula Rello · Rating 5 out of 5]

es la mejor

[Zabetta Camilleri · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's amazing how someone who can express herself so amazingly in visual arts can also have the capacity to write some amazing insights



however the same concepts are discussed over and over and over again



an obsession with her childhood - almost as if none of her grown up years had any influence on her art

[Caterina Pierre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Talk about buying a book and leaving in on a shelf for a while: I bought this book back when it was released in 1998, I suspect because there was to be a question about Louise Bourgeois on some qualifying exam during this time when I was a graduate student. Like many books I "read" in grad school, I likely skimmed it to get the gist of it for the exam. The physical book then went into my book storage and I forgot about it. Recently, I wanted to develop a lecture for my classes on Bourgeois, and thought I might dig it out. It has become a bit rare, I think: rather than go digging, I thought I might just re-purchase it. It was hard to find online, and when I did come across a copy, it was expensive. Since 23 years had passed since I bought it, it took a lot of digging to find it, but my husband found it. I finally sat down a few weeks ago to read it cover-to-cover.
Almost everything in Deconstruction of the Father can be found published elsewhere: there are some unpublished pieces of her writing in this compendium, but the majority of it consists of interviews and texts gathered from a variety of previously published sources. However, if one was to try to gather all of those items individually, it would take a lot time and a lot of money. This book brings together 75 years of Bourgeois's writings, letters, interviews, diary excerpts, and thinking about art in one place, making it invaluable to any Bourgeois scholar, teacher, or fan of the works.
Bourgeois was an enigma wrapped up in a conundrum. More has been published since 1998 on her years working with a Freudian psychoanalyst, but this book establishes the basis, through primary source materials, for her constant struggle with her family drama and how that drama reveals itself, over and over again, in her works. Most Bourgeois scholars know the basics: she felt abandoned by her father, who took Louise's English tutor and nanny, Sadie, as a mistress; and she felt abandoned by her mother, who tolerated the father's behavior and then died, abandoning Louise for real. The writings collected in this text illuminate some of the events of her life that then become the basis of meaning for many of her works.
Having the collection of writings put together in this fashion also allows the reader to see reoccurring themes more clearly -- for example, I was surprised at how many times the death of her childhood pet dog, Pyrame, came up and appears in the work -- as well as topics on which Bourgeois contradicts herself (sometimes art is all about sex and death, sometimes it is never about that). In some cases, you can tell that she really hated being interviewed; there's an interview with the BBC where she seems to be breaking things in the presence of the interviewer. She seems to have also had a trepidatious relationship with feminism. Sometimes she admits to being a feminist, and sometimes she doesn't. At one point at the end of the book, she stated in a diary entry from 1992: "The sculpture speaks for itself and needs no explanation. My intentions are not the subject. The object is the subject. Not a word out of me is needed" (p. 364). That line must have been particularly funny to the publisher, who was in the process of publishing a 384-page book of writings that, to the artist, weren't really necessary.
At one point in the writings published herein, she claims she never saw a therapist; we now know that she worked with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, whom she began seeing for psychotherapy in 1952, after the death of her father, and then again after the death of her husband, art historian Robert Goldwater. This lie is pretty interesting. Bourgeois's essay "Freud's Toys" is included in this collection, and it might have been useful to put in some of the psychological writings that she did while under Lowenfeld's treatment. If she had worked with Lowenfeld for so long, why deny it? The only answers that come to my mind are that the body of free-association writings she did while working with Lowenfeld was too vast to include here, and because Bourgeois was still alive in 1998, and some of that material, unpublished here but published later in other books, was deeply personal. Some things are better left "unsaid" until that point in which the writer is no longer around to admit or deny any of it.
Ultimately though, Deconstruction of the Father is a core primary source text that should be in the library of any serious Bourgeois scholar or sculpture specialist who works on twentieth-century art. That is, if you can get your hands on a copy of it all these years later. Support your local library and read it there.

[Sacha]

I was actually looking for an autobiography, this is the closest thing I could find - a recollection of diaries, enterviews and statements. It's an absolutetly stunning book. Louise is obsessed about her childhood - i guess we all are - but she uses it as a force of creation and recollects it so many times you feel engulfed in her personal simbolism - the spider, the penis, the destruction.
I particularly loved her reminescences about this famous Mapplethorpe portrait of her. Look at this old lady holding a penis! Naughty!

But this sculpture is called "fillette" - "little girl" in french - and it represents Louise's view of the phallic symbol - something fragile, that had to be taken care of. As a mother of three boys and a woman in a male-predominant area such as the art world she knew that very well. And she speaks about her impressions of Mapplethorpe and any famous male artist she had to deal with: "this is my attitude towards men, you have to be prepared and work at it. it is a very strange attitude, but it is consistent. you have to prepare everything. you have to feed them, tell them they are great, you literally have to take care of them. they constantly get insulted, they turn what you say into the opposite. I mean, it's really a job"
Her cynism, symbology and and power are so great, read this very slowly to be sure I absorbed it all. I wish she had an autobiography.

[Paulita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Libro de cabecera.

[Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is simply the best collection of Bourgeois’ writing in existence. I will reference it forever.

[PJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting how it backgrounds the art and foregrounds the artist.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

queen

[Mara Faundez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gran artista, pensadora, escritora, poeta.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louise Bourgeois has been able to look at her life at a distance which I find to be the hardest things a person can do. She understands people, events, she is able to analyze situations, her personal life and challenge belief systems.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm in adoration. I wonder if Ms. Bourgeois is in need of an adopted daughter?

[reading is my hustle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not going to even attempt to review this book because I would end up sounding like a fawning idiot with daddy issues and a penchant for older lady artists.

Seriously.

[K · Rating 1 out of 5]

Usually I love diaries and letters. This was all way way too abstract. No blood. No juice. Just complicated thoughts about the relations of forms.