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Lot Essay
A fantastical construction in which two protruding mounds form a concave enclosure from which arms and hands appear to embrace a number of bulbous protrusions, Louise Bourgeois’s Cove, 1988, radiates an unexpected mixture of forms. An exceptional example of Bourgeois’s central concerns with sexual and psychic repression, Cove, cast in bronze during Bourgeois’s lifetime, features a smoldering yet luminous dark patina that opens suddenly onto a burnished cold and silver luster. The artist affixed her own base to this example, rendering the pedestal an intentional inverse reflection of the upper configured group. The notion of the base on which a sculpture rests is here upended in the dialogue between upper and lower forms, for only a tenuous balance is established that seems could be overturned at any moment. Cove carries forward certain formal tropes that appear in Bourgeois’s work over several decades, the underlying thematic being the body in dialogue with itself. What makes this example unique is the fusion of several disconcerting addresses to the viewer that combine the notions of harbor, protection, nurture as well as a sense of isolation and menace. These binary opposites mirror the logic of body parts in pieces that resist and finally to undermine the overriding aesthetic narratives of a unified pictorial organization on which twentieth-century modernism insisted. Further, the sense of a conflation of parts, out of order, upends another artistic narrative: Minimalism with its serial repetitions comes to a standstill here in Cove, where the pile-up of parts seems to mock the systematic organization of minimalist repetition. The arrangement of parts itself is radical, as is the overbalancing of Cove’s registers: the rounded forms interspersed within grasping, but ultimately weakened severed arms, seem to long for a scene of reparation.
Artists from Marcel Duchamp to Jasper Johns turned to bodily fragments to break through the barriers erected by the cult of the machine-made sculpture, the “specific object,” and the supporting critical discourses. Duchamp’s Coin de Chasteté (Wedge of Chastity) and Johns’s Target with Four Faces, 1955, for exampole, take up this notion of a body in pieces. Duchamp’s erotic object and Johns’s playful, yet psychically complex repetitions of the half-hidden face positioned above a target both leave imprints of the handmade. Cove, too, retains the rough-hewn surface seen in the hands and the smaller protuberances that leave the trace of the handmade. The bulbousness of this work engenders a sense of assembled human organisms, and from this it is easy to convert the object of our vision into the viewer as subject. That Bourgeois is the subject of her work is without doubt. The notion of the mirror image, whether between viewer and artwork or artist and object became an internal organizing design of Cove, where the two large ovoid shapes, the “meta-arms” of the cove, abut in a way like the Janus Fleuri, 1968. Among her most celebrated works, Janus Fleuri combines the male and female body parts, juxtaposing two phalluses suspended between female genitalia. The sculpture parallels the two-head ‘Janus”—the Roman god who sees into the future and into the past—symbolizing Bourgeois’s own looking back, inward, and out again across the span of her own life.
Cove is also a landscape, literally and metaphorically. Of the land, the name refers to the rounded recess, whether of shoreline or mountain cave, a recess that protects from fear, that defers withdrawal, and buffers fragility. Among the most sensuous, poignant and heart wrenching sculptures in all of western art is that of Michelangelo’s Pietá. Michelangelo drew on the definitive iconographical structure of Madonna and Child depictions through the centuries: the convex form, its significance consisting in the maternal arms wrapped around or supporting the Christ child. To say that Cove is a projection of that form is only to point to the obvious depths of feeling conveyed in Bourgeois’s rendering.
The spatial compression of Cove, however, also reconstructs the interior psychic turmoil of her past, the sense of the family betrayal she experienced at the hands of her father, and the desire both to connect to and control those who loved and abandoned her. Autobiographical references appeared early in her work. Paintings titled Femme Maison depict the hybrid forms in the vein of Surrealist symbolic portrayals, conjuring the interstices of psychic drives, such as in the erotic fragmentation of Hans Belmer’s La Poupée series and Alberto Giacometti’s Woman with Her Throat Cut. Cove hovers between abstract and representation, between symbol and fact, and between tactility and optical charge. Its clustering of figures and shapes balanced precariously, totem-like, over a pedestal renders psychic and natural landscape in such a way that as Bourgeois states, “Our own body could be considered from a topographical point of view: a land with mounds and valleys, and caves and holes” (L. Bourgeois, quoted at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bourgeois-amoeba-t07780 [accessed 10/13/2017]).
Artists from Marcel Duchamp to Jasper Johns turned to bodily fragments to break through the barriers erected by the cult of the machine-made sculpture, the “specific object,” and the supporting critical discourses. Duchamp’s Coin de Chasteté (Wedge of Chastity) and Johns’s Target with Four Faces, 1955, for exampole, take up this notion of a body in pieces. Duchamp’s erotic object and Johns’s playful, yet psychically complex repetitions of the half-hidden face positioned above a target both leave imprints of the handmade. Cove, too, retains the rough-hewn surface seen in the hands and the smaller protuberances that leave the trace of the handmade. The bulbousness of this work engenders a sense of assembled human organisms, and from this it is easy to convert the object of our vision into the viewer as subject. That Bourgeois is the subject of her work is without doubt. The notion of the mirror image, whether between viewer and artwork or artist and object became an internal organizing design of Cove, where the two large ovoid shapes, the “meta-arms” of the cove, abut in a way like the Janus Fleuri, 1968. Among her most celebrated works, Janus Fleuri combines the male and female body parts, juxtaposing two phalluses suspended between female genitalia. The sculpture parallels the two-head ‘Janus”—the Roman god who sees into the future and into the past—symbolizing Bourgeois’s own looking back, inward, and out again across the span of her own life.
Cove is also a landscape, literally and metaphorically. Of the land, the name refers to the rounded recess, whether of shoreline or mountain cave, a recess that protects from fear, that defers withdrawal, and buffers fragility. Among the most sensuous, poignant and heart wrenching sculptures in all of western art is that of Michelangelo’s Pietá. Michelangelo drew on the definitive iconographical structure of Madonna and Child depictions through the centuries: the convex form, its significance consisting in the maternal arms wrapped around or supporting the Christ child. To say that Cove is a projection of that form is only to point to the obvious depths of feeling conveyed in Bourgeois’s rendering.
The spatial compression of Cove, however, also reconstructs the interior psychic turmoil of her past, the sense of the family betrayal she experienced at the hands of her father, and the desire both to connect to and control those who loved and abandoned her. Autobiographical references appeared early in her work. Paintings titled Femme Maison depict the hybrid forms in the vein of Surrealist symbolic portrayals, conjuring the interstices of psychic drives, such as in the erotic fragmentation of Hans Belmer’s La Poupée series and Alberto Giacometti’s Woman with Her Throat Cut. Cove hovers between abstract and representation, between symbol and fact, and between tactility and optical charge. Its clustering of figures and shapes balanced precariously, totem-like, over a pedestal renders psychic and natural landscape in such a way that as Bourgeois states, “Our own body could be considered from a topographical point of view: a land with mounds and valleys, and caves and holes” (L. Bourgeois, quoted at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bourgeois-amoeba-t07780 [accessed 10/13/2017]).