Part 2
I just called Louise Bourgeois a “shaykha .” What is that? In the part of the world where I come from, it’s a word coming from the root “shaikukha” which means “old age.” It’s an Arabic word used to mean the eldest member of whatever social group, a person that all the community highly respected. It’s part of a broad “eastern” tradition of elder wisdom that stretches all the way to Japan. It’s not associated to either religion or gender. The shaykh of the fishermen is the eldest of the fishermen, etc. The main thing that makes the expertise of the shaykha special is that they have seen too much; if you make it to 90 for example you’ve witnessed several whole generations – that’s a lot of wisdom.
Officially, Louise Bourgeois was the shaykha for all artists on the planet.
This morning my partner about the subject and she started to tell me her memories of seeing Louise Bourgeois at the Tate. Unfortunately I wasn’t in London at the time. I’ll bet that seeing an artist like Louise Bourgeois filling the Tate was such an inspirational and life changing experience to any artist. Even more, knowing that the work on show was much of it produced by a woman in her 90s would make any decent artist feel a mixture of aspiration, humility, jealousy and shame. The same kind of feeling you get when you see Michelangelo’s David and you learn that he made that when he was just 26 years old.
She said: “I didn’t go the show because Louise Bourgeois was female, I went because she’s a great artist, but yes I was fascinated by her explorations of the female world and female point of view. I also saw that she struggled with this and its relevant dichotomies throughout her life and that’s something I can relate to.
“ I loved the most her perfect marbles, the infinitely smooth works that she polished and polished until they became something celestial, yet they were all sculptures connected to the body, to life in all its messiness. Such a wonderful transformational of stone to flesh and back again.
I was particularly interested on one piece, called Fillette. At first I saw that it was a penis and balls and I thought, ‘Oh no, not dicks’ since I had seen that done to death – either laughing at penises or execrating them – and was frankly sick of it and I thought ‘when will women grow up?’ but then I looked again and it was marvellous. Monumental yet fragile; proud yet vulnerable. Then I read the accompanying text (I rarely do this but was glad I did) Bourgeois talks about how she considered “the masculine attributes to be extremely delicate; they’re objects that the woman, thus myself, must protect.” She also noted that “everything I loved had the shape of the things around me – the shape of my husband, the shape of the children [all sons]. So when I wanted to represent something I loved, I obviously represented a little penis.”( Bourgeois, Tate catalogue 2007) It’s amazing but this piece is the “other half” of all the “phallic” architectures and attitudes that we see around us. It’s the “other half. Bourgeois understood Jung’s idea of the anima and animus and her work really explores that.”
She also noted that at all the Louise Bourgeois shows, the widest gathering of the public was there. Louise Bourgeois, like Picasso, brings everybody regardless of race, age and lifestyle. Everybody is there, paying a ticket. Unlike the narrow slices of “arty” audience you see in most galleries, especially in London.
That’s because real art is like water. You need it. It’s not elitist anymore than water is elitist. It’s needed by everybody, all humans. Culture is not elitist. Elites can use it, and abuse it, but art itself is not elitist.
Louise Bourgeois could be an inspiration to a lot of women, feminist or not. But she’s an artist who is inspirational full stop – inspirational to everybody regardless of gender.
An artist is always an open potential, right up until the artist dies. So now we have been handed a sealed and complete portfolio with the face of Louise Bourgeois on the cover pointing at us and saying “Which one of you, man or woman, can match THAT?”