Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed

Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed
Edited by Philip Larratt-Smith
London: Violette Editions, 2012.
₤ 49.95/ US$ 75.00. ISBN 987-1-900828-37-6

Reading Louise Bourgeois’s journals is an intimate, visceral experience. Due to my eagerness to “read” Bourgeois, I skipped the texts by art historians and psychoanalysts and plunged into her writings, which is volume two. Philip Larratt-Smith’s concise editor’s note says that most original spellings, capitalizations, and spacings have been maintained and that the artist’s most intensive period of psychoanalysis was 1952-66 with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld. These journals give us glimpses of those years and writings up to 2008. Larratt-Smith’s  six-page introduction informs us that Bourgeois’ psychoanalytical writings were found by the artist’s assistant Gerry Gorovoy only at the beginning of 2004 and in 2010 (the year Bourgeois died at age 98). The artist also kept letters, diaries, notebooks, and loose sheets of writings. This volume is an artful, chronological compilation from all of these sources, and footnotes identify topics, books, and people Bourgeois mentions. A wonderful feature is a clearly dated and labeled range of photographs of Bourgeois at almost every age – from her own childhood with her parents to the wedding photo upon her marriage to Robert Goldwater to Bourgeois alone and with her husband and three sons. The images, for the most part, show an outwardly composed, fashionably dressed girl and young to older woman. Some images seem pensive; however, they all contrast to the writings, which have a haunted quality, even a Goyaesque nightmare quality. Bourgeois seems obsessed with ideas about suicide and death. Clearly, we all live with death, but Bourgeois – like fellow Parisian Christian Boltanski – seems to have made death a frame for life even more than her art suggests. Boltanski — due in part to his childhood when his Jewish father hid from the Nazis and the aftermath of WWII when his family’s stories reinforced the trauma of the Holocaust — posited that death is something we all live with every minute.

Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape

Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape
edited by Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale
New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012
240 pages, 200 illustrations, $60 hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-500-09367-2

As part of a touring Miró retrospective, which started at Tate Modern last spring and is currently up at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (through August 2012), curators Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale have published Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, a monograph covering the entirety of the artist’s career. In contrast to your typical retrospective catalogue, The Ladder of Escape emphasizes how Miró and his work were affected by the political history of his native Catalonia, Franco’s Spain, and World War II.

The Art Life: On Creativity and Career

The Art Life: On Creativity and Career
by Stuart Horodner
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 2012. 183 pages, 34 color and 6 black-and-white illustrations, $25
ISBN: 978-1450790659

Stuart Horodner’s new book, The Art Life, is not exactly an art book, not exactly career advice, not exactly a guide to creativity, and not exactly a dictionary of quotations: but it’s a combination of all those things. In 12 chapters and an introduction, Horodner’s preface lays out the trajectory of his own career (he’s now the Artistic Director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center), and in the introduction, he says that the “various opinions revealed within these pages might serve as a compass for orienting yourself as you deal with the practical and philosophical matters that shape every art life.” That is, not just artists but everyone involved in the various branches of the art world. He also states explicitly that this is not “a guide to professional practices. It will not tell you if or how to approach galleries or where to apply for funding.”

On the High Line: Exploring America’s Most Original Urban Park

On the High Line: Exploring America’s Most Original Urban Park
by Annik La Farge
New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012
218 pages, 400+ color illustrations, $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-500-29020-0

In the three years since the High Line opened, it has become New York’s favorite park. Planted on the abandoned elevated railroad tracks that cross more than 20 blocks of the Meatpacking District, West Chelsea, and Hell’s Kitchen, the High Line is a unique public space, where people can get away from the city for a moment and look down on the hustle and bustle from a calm garden space. In On the High Line, lifelong New Yorker Annik La Farge thoroughly presents the park and its environs, providing histories of the railroad and its transformation over the years, the buildings around it, the changing nature of the neighborhoods it traverses, and its plants and wildlife.

Louise Bourgeois: Conscious and Unconscious

Louise Bourgeois: Conscious and Unconscious
by Philip Larratt-Smith
Doha, Qatar, 2012: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing
112 pages; ISBN: 9789992194638

The exhibition “Louise Bourgeois: Conscious and Unconscious,” organized by the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) and shown at its gallery from January 20–June 1, 2012, features 30 works created between 1947 and 2009. One work that will remain in Qatar is the giant spider Maman (Mother), first shown at the Tate Modern’s giant Turbine Hall in 2000 with three monumental towers, I DO, I UNDO, I REDO.  I discussed these in Sculpture at that time. The towers were not shown in Qatar, but the current exhibition’s curator, Philip Larratt-Smith, gives these works new poignancy by discussing them explicitly in the catalogue in the context of Bourgeois’s other works and of the artist’s Freudian self-questionings of her life as a child and as a mother. Larratt-Smith links I Do to the good mother, I UNDO to the bad mother letting her milk drip as the baby goes hungry, and I REDO to the mother’s self-examination and redress of her state.

Nevin Aladağ: Sahne | Stage

Nevin Aladağ: Sahne |Stage
Edited by İlkay Baliç
Istanbul: ARTER, 2012
96 pages; $15 euro / $20 USD
ISBN: 978-975-6959-57-2

Running now through May 27, 2012, Nevin Aladağ’s exhibition “Sahne|Stage” populates ARTER’s Istanbul galleries with fantastical curtains of hair. In each composition, the brightly colored, artificial strands hang from a pole, alternately parted in the middle, pulled back, even braided or in loose pigtails. Elegant and evocative, these allusive works manage to convey specific hairstyles as well as functioning stage curtains. The larger works are interactive, and visitors can step into a recessed wall space behind the hair and perform as if on a stage or watch others doing so. This performative theatricality also extends to the works themselves—synthetic and often neon colored, they are  flamboyant costume wigs that don’t even try to look like real hair.

Art Spaces Directory

Art Spaces Directory
Edited by Eungie Joo and Ethan Swann
New Museum/Art Asia Pacific, 2012
$45 448 pages, paperback
ISBN: 978-0984562534

The foreword by Lisa Phillips, Director of the New Museum, explains the scope of this huge publication by the museum (in collaboration with Art Asia Pacific magazine and the Museum as Hub initiative) in connection with its recent “The Ungovernables” exhibition, for which Eungie Joo was the curator. The book contains essays by Victor Albarracin, Elaine W. Ng, Reem Fadda, Naiza H. Kahn, transit.org, and Catalina Lozano, and a conversation with Christine Tohme and Stefan Kalmár, but most importantly it includes single-page descriptions of 400 art spaces in 96 countries, arranged by regions. These art spaces are, as Phillips points out, “crucial venues to foster communities as well as platforms for younger artists.”