Louise Bourgeois

I approached the work of LB with bated breath. I am a bit of a fan. It didn’t disappoint. The museum has a huge collection of her ‘cells’ on display. Each one encloses rooms/spaces at a life like scale. Each distorts or scales conventional architectural tropes or objects along formal lines while retaining features like doors, wire mesh and common building materials. Inside each cell objects articulate symbolic tensions. Some are literal in the case of a wax casting of wringing hands, and others are typical surrealist motifs like a glass sphere or bones . She claims the gift of the artist is sublimation, this ability to invest meaning in the organisation of objects. Clearly she finds the process of externalising her inner/psychic life cathartic. In a video documentary she states that the ‘intolerable’ is the location of her praxis. Im a little unsure if this making the intolerable familiar in art practice is sustainable or if the artists risks lapsing into repetitious clichés. The logic of the uncanny is duplicitous and it slides between appearance and disappearance, coherance and incoherence.

My understanding in psychotherapy is that the patient is carefully guided towards a site of embodied emotional trauma in order to explore in a safe way the experiences that unfold. What they often resist is the pinning down..as if finally clear and visible out in the open. Modernism as we know has this long history of imaging the traumatised subject from Picassos Guernica to Egon Schiele's #charcot#insanepeople. After seeing Mike Kelly’s exploration of trauma via culture, the speaker, the social, the text and the banal world of consumption, the shift towards the familial and the social is like the missing piece in the puzzle. As far as Jewellery goes I can see the body as an appropriate site for this kind of work as the body is where trauma ultimately resides and has to be confronted. The body is also the site where our subjective experience of Art lives out its duplicitous life.