For the visitor, the Hayward Gallery’s extraordinary new exhibition of the late work of the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois is a major undertaking. Thanks both to its size – the show gathers together some 90 collages, sculptures and installations, many of which have never been shown here before – and to the ever-confounding spaces of the gallery itself, inside it takes a little while to get oriented. The eyes must adjust to the Hayward’s permanent dusk; the body must fight a powerful sense of expectation. You want both to rush around in a frenzy and to commune with everything for minutes at a time. In the end, I did two circuits, one fast and one slow, and even then I wasn’t satisfied. Enfolded in the dark pleats of Bourgeois’s mind, the longest glance still seems somehow to be cursory. Here is a series of caverns, each one of which demands to be fully explored.
What’s strange about this spirit of investigation is that Bourgeois’s practice would appear to work against it. Delicate though she may sometimes be, nuance is more or less unknown to her. This is art that’s easy to read, the messages it semaphores close to trite at moments (this may be one reason why the exhibition’s curator, Hayward director Ralph Rugoff, has kept his own interpretations to a minimum). What else could Femme Maison (2001), in which a fabric house has been stitched to a female torso, be about but the burdens of women? What more can be said of Do Not Abandon Me (1999), a piece that comprises the figure of a naked woman and her newborn baby, once you’ve finished speculating to which of them – mother or child – the fear suggested by its title most applies?
