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Lot Essay
Blind Man's Buff is a dramatic and intensely bizarre-looking sculpture that explores sensual and textural opposites. Looking like a biological homunculus of sexual form it is one of the most successfully resolved of a number of sculptures that Bourgeois made in the late 1970s and early '80s that incorporate a landscape of 'udders' into themselves. Carved out of marble, the essential element of Blind Man's Buff is what Bouregois has termed "polarisation". By this she means the deliberate setting up of an emotional tension between clear formal opposites: between the soft rounded forms of the udder landscape and the cold hard nature of the marble from which they have been chiselled, as well as between the implied softness of these mammary-like forms and the rigidity and stiffness of the sculpture's construction and its clearly phallic form.
These opposites are emphasised in Blind Man's Buff in an extreme way. The soft-rounded shapes of the udders seem to burst out of the illusionary folds of the sculpture's bloomer-like drapery with the disturbing fertile energy of an alien biology. At the same time the smooth undulating and erotic landscape that this plethora of mammary forms establishes is dramatically contrasted with the jagged surface of rough-hewn rock towering above it. United in a strange, bisexual but seemingly unknowable form, these elements combine to form a work that both entices and repels the viewer in a way that is significantly heightened by Bourgeois' extremely sensual response to the material. "I enjoy a material I can wrestle with", Bourgeois has said of marble, "the marble you cannot hurt: whatever you take away, whatever you chop away, whatever you sand away...you change that piece, but you do not destroy it. This is the kind of relation I enjoy with people. I enjoy people who can give me good resistance and take care of my attacking impulses... There are many kinds of aggression, all kinds of emotion. And what you have to say...it cannot be emotional. It has to be defined. It is a form of articulation, marble (is) much more sensuous... I have fun carving marble. I can't destroy it. I'm not going to be destroyed either, by the way."("Louise Bourgeois : interview with Barbara Flug Colin" reproduced in Frigate: the Transverse Review of Books, www.frigatezine.com 2000.)
Strongly phallic in shape but bursting with a fertile female energy, the sensuality and enticing tangibility of Blind Man's Buff sets up an enigma that undoubtedly relates to its title and the idea of someone physically exploring their environment by feeling their way around in the dark. At the same time however, the notion of blindness for Bourgeois, is also strongly connected - through the childhood memories that lie at the root of all her creativity - to eroticism and sex. "Blindness came from the blush I experienced at the side of the people around me, everybody," she has recalled, " As I say, my father was promiscuous. I had to be blind to the mistress who lived with us. I had to be blind to the pain of my mother. I had to be blind to the fact I was a little bit sadistic with my brother. I was blind to the fact that my sister slept with the man across the street. I had an absolute revulsion of everybody - everything and everybody. Mostly for erotic reasons, sexual reasons." (cited in Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father, London, 2000, p. 179.)
Fig. 1 Louise Bourgeois in a latex costume designed and made by her, on the steps of her New york City home, 1975, archives of the artist, photograph: Estate of Peter Moore and VAGA, New York
Fig. 2 Louise Bourgeois, Nature Study, 1984, polished bronze, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
These opposites are emphasised in Blind Man's Buff in an extreme way. The soft-rounded shapes of the udders seem to burst out of the illusionary folds of the sculpture's bloomer-like drapery with the disturbing fertile energy of an alien biology. At the same time the smooth undulating and erotic landscape that this plethora of mammary forms establishes is dramatically contrasted with the jagged surface of rough-hewn rock towering above it. United in a strange, bisexual but seemingly unknowable form, these elements combine to form a work that both entices and repels the viewer in a way that is significantly heightened by Bourgeois' extremely sensual response to the material. "I enjoy a material I can wrestle with", Bourgeois has said of marble, "the marble you cannot hurt: whatever you take away, whatever you chop away, whatever you sand away...you change that piece, but you do not destroy it. This is the kind of relation I enjoy with people. I enjoy people who can give me good resistance and take care of my attacking impulses... There are many kinds of aggression, all kinds of emotion. And what you have to say...it cannot be emotional. It has to be defined. It is a form of articulation, marble (is) much more sensuous... I have fun carving marble. I can't destroy it. I'm not going to be destroyed either, by the way."("Louise Bourgeois : interview with Barbara Flug Colin" reproduced in Frigate: the Transverse Review of Books, www.frigatezine.com 2000.)
Strongly phallic in shape but bursting with a fertile female energy, the sensuality and enticing tangibility of Blind Man's Buff sets up an enigma that undoubtedly relates to its title and the idea of someone physically exploring their environment by feeling their way around in the dark. At the same time however, the notion of blindness for Bourgeois, is also strongly connected - through the childhood memories that lie at the root of all her creativity - to eroticism and sex. "Blindness came from the blush I experienced at the side of the people around me, everybody," she has recalled, " As I say, my father was promiscuous. I had to be blind to the mistress who lived with us. I had to be blind to the pain of my mother. I had to be blind to the fact I was a little bit sadistic with my brother. I was blind to the fact that my sister slept with the man across the street. I had an absolute revulsion of everybody - everything and everybody. Mostly for erotic reasons, sexual reasons." (cited in Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father, London, 2000, p. 179.)
Fig. 1 Louise Bourgeois in a latex costume designed and made by her, on the steps of her New york City home, 1975, archives of the artist, photograph: Estate of Peter Moore and VAGA, New York
Fig. 2 Louise Bourgeois, Nature Study, 1984, polished bronze, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York