The Good Mother (detail), 2003
(Picture: © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021. Photo: Christopher Burke)The French-American artist Louise Bourgeois is most famous for her spiders, like the vast steel arachnid that bestrode the bridge over the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern when it opened in 2000. There are several in the Hayward’s new show, subtitled The Woven Child, and they are intimately linked to its main theme: Bourgeois’ obsession with textiles and fabric in the final two decades before her death in 2010.
She always linked spiders with maternity (the Tate work is called Maman, French for mother) and specifically her own mum. For Bourgeois, the spider “is a repairer” and her mother restored antique tapestries. The young Louise would help her out, drawing in the missing bits of damaged textiles, before her father sold them in his Paris gallery.
There are two spellbinding Cells – the atmospheric architectural spaces punctuating Bourgeois’ last two decades – where she links the two. Lady in Waiting is a claustrophobic wooden sentry box with dirty, flaking sash windows at two ends. In the middle is a tapestry-covered armchair, sitting in which is a female doll made with the same fabric, from whose stomach emerge steel spiders’ legs, like needles. From her mouth, threads stretch to spools on one of the wooden window frames.
The figure lurks ominously. There’s a violence in those weapon-like legs and a tension in the threads, so easily broken if we were to raise the windowpane. When Bourgeois wrote about a Lady in Waiting spider a decade earlier, she’d described it as “almost invincible” and yet “peaceful”. But it’s not quiet, it’s disquieting. Like all Bourgeois’s best works, it’s unsettlingly ambiguous.
Spider, the show’s largest work, is similarly pregnant with enigmatic power. A cylindrical steel cage sits beneath the body of the spider, its sharp legs extending into the surrounding space. Inside is another threadbare fabric-bedecked chair; fragments of tapestry are on the cell’s walls. Hanging inside are trinkets on chains – stopped watches, an open locket, a bottle of Bourgeois’s perfume – and a flaccid bodily rubber form, from which huge needles protrude. She spoke of these spaces as sanctuaries and refuges – especially where they contain textiles. But never do they appear comforting, and they’re not meant to. Bourgeois said that “the sense of reparation was deep within me” but to repair, one first needs damage or, given Bourgeois’ bodily preoccupations, wounds.
And throughout the show I thought of injury as much as healing. Many of the works feature sculptures made with patchworked fabric, sewn with raw, loose, untidy thread, with what the critic Linda Nochlin has called a “deliberate ferocity”. Especially on the many fabric busts and bodies Bourgeois made, the textiles appear like crudely applied bandages. Bourgeois always emphasised that her sculptures were metaphors for emotional experiences – the physical distress implies psychic trauma. The heads, beyond the first few Bourgeois made, were eventually realised in many fabrics, and as standalone sculptures, they’re the least interesting of Bourgeois’ late works – too reductive, too obvious, too numerous.
She’s at her best as a sculptural collagist, bringing together materials in tense arrangements, with a brutal sense of opposites – the knife hanging above a terry-fabric mutilated body; the cow bones used as limbs and heads from which Bourgeois’ mother’s delicate clothes hang; the prosthetic limbs like weapons or fetish objects attached to lumpen bodies in her Couples sculptures.
One of her last works shows that this stark, vicious sculptural sense stayed with her to the last. In a huge wooden display case, a pendulous rubber lozenge like the one in Spider, this time in dark blue, is pierced by needles attached to spools of thread. Next to it, on a stainless steel slab – how can one not think of a mortuary? – is an oblong cushion, and on that are repeated circular forms, like the clusters of breasts in Bourgeois’ earlier works. But look close, and they’re berets, of the kind she was so often photographed wearing late in life. At one end of the cushion is a crude, bright red, bodily hole.
It’s a remarkable piece, a fitting ending to a powerful show – as if Bourgeois is confronting her own mortality (she died in 2010, aged 98), her artistic legacy and, as usual, the messy, painful, erotic and absurd realities of being human, with a defiant, sardonic, even triumphant laugh.
