- Venue
- Tate Modern
- Location
Two Artists with very different concerns and approaches to art are currently presented at Tate Modern.
The art of Louise Bourgeois is highly subjective and emerges from a life–long struggle originating from her childhood in France. Making art is a necessity to her and she inscibes above one of her works ‘Art is a Guarantee of Sanity’. She draws upon her sub-concsious and seems to find there a source of the tactile that is vital to her sculpture. Perhaps it is the obsession of the child with the body of the mother. The forms in her later more mature work are generally soft and rounded, even when expressing aggression or frustration. The boundaries of her forms are the boundary between the felt and lived experience and the making of art, a transformation of feelings painful or otherwise inexpressable.
Doris Salcedo approaches sculpture from a different position, one of a more abstract and generalised concern with the world. She is aspirational in a way that Louise Bourgeois is not. She wishes sculpture to deal with the big issues of society and communal life, her focus is elsewhere than the individual self.
Louise Bourgeois delves into the dark areas of our inner being. Her deeply ambiguous attitude to the body and sexuality overspill with an anger and frustration that is uncomfortable but undeniably recognisable. The Spiders are a summation of her subject matter. They are maternal and threatening, active and passive, full of generative power and control. When we look at a Louise Bourgeois sculpture, we recognise and react to similar contradictory emotions within ourselves. We have all had a mother.
Look also at ‘Nature Study’, a sculpture of an hermaphrodite and headless dog. The dog sits upright with haunches splayed apart, his body lean and energetic, rib cage taut. You can feel it pant, eager for action. But from the dogs chest hang three sets of heavy pendulous breasts and between its four feet rises a slender penile tail and an equally slender but significant penis. This dog is ready for anything!
At times, as in the ‘cells’, her art can become too personal and specific for us to follow – we may identify some features of her symbolic landscape but we cannot really connect with it – the exercise has become more intellectual than visceral.
Sculpture should not ignore the psychological and body-related considerations Louise Bourgeois deploys so effectively. They are a major source of meaning for a work. Doris Salcedo seeks meaning by other means.
Go to Paris and in turning a corner you may come upon a sudden and shocking disruption of our modern world – some underground force has heaved up beneath the paving stones and water is gushing out . Then you see it is sculpture.
The earthquake, the crack, the look into the void, is a great idea, and in theory the Turbine Hall should be able to accommodate it. But Tate Modern could not deliver this work as a shocking or surprising sculpture. Instead it is an investigatory walk. People walk along the crack and look into it, seeing concrete with some kind of wire reinforcement. The forms are not jagged like those those of the earth split apart, but are shaped, undercut and softened in places. Beyond the title and the snaking fractured outline, there is no meaning, only a puzzle, until you read the accompanying text. Does consideration of this text represent success for Doris Salcedo’s project?
