Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play: Louise Bourgeois’s Sculpture, 1947–2000
This book considers the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) in light of psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott's (1896-1971) radical ideas regarding transitional objects, potential space, and play, offering a model for exploring the complex and psychologically evocative work Bourgeois produced from 1947 to 2000.
Critical concepts from British object relational theories – destruction, reparation, integration, relationality and play – drawn from the writings of Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Marion Milner, and Christopher Bollas, among others, bear upon the decades-long study of psychoanalysis Bourgeois brought to her sculptural production that was symbolic, metaphorical, and most importantly, useful.
The book demonstrates how Bourgeois's transformative sculptural objects and environments are invested in object relations, both psychical and tangible, and explores Bourgeois's contention that the observer physically engage with the intricate sculptural objects and architectural spaces she produced. Each chapter focuses on a key body of work – Femme Maison, Personages, Lairs, Janus, and Cells – examining how these imaginative and playful objects are staged as embodied encounters in space and time to invoke the mutuality, reciprocity, and ambivalence of our object relationships.
Weaving a tapestry of aesthetic, cultural, and psychological encounters, Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play addresses critical relationships among Bourgeois's work and that of other artists from Pieter Brueghel to Eva Hesse. It brings together practical, archival, and theoretical material, offering close examinations of historically situated objects and analyses of their complex affects and spatiality. Gathering critical perspectives from psychoanalysis, cultural analysis, feminist, queer, literary and affect studies, the book extends its specific art historical scope to investigate the crucial roles that art and cultural experience assume in everyday life.
Beyond those interventions, a key feature of Transformative Objects is its shift away from autobiographical narratives toward the material—and yet unstable and ambivalent—potentialities of both art and object relations in the lived world. By exploring how artworks communicate with and act upon observers and, specifically, how such affective processes transpire, the book considers how psychoanalysis can aid in unraveling entanglements between subjects and objects. Read alongside Bourgeois’s incisive readings of both Freudian and British object relational psychoanalysis, the book tells a story about how works of art—as metaphors for psychical objects—elicit a tapestry of affects and effects as subjective and unfinalized as the individuals who engage them.
Objects and Other Things: Materiality and Imagination in Contemporary American Sculpture (working title)
Objects and Other Things frames late modern and contemporary sculpture as a series of open-ended and porous encounters. By “encounter,” I mean aesthetic experiences that intermingle psychological, social, cultural, and embodied qualities and perceptions. These encounters are historically situated as well as imbued with the capacity to reflect upon time and space in ways that extend beyond our tangible realities. Imagination, then, is a way of conjuring the absent as if it were part of our palpable present, suggesting what is at once material and immaterial about our fascination with artworks. Or as artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner puts it, how much imagination is necessary to create the insides of things? How does art shift along the margins of the sensate realities of the outer world and the “imaginative realities of the inner world of feeling and idea”? Beyond formal considerations, artists mine materials as complex carriers of affect and desire, generating new forms of knowledge and recognition of the objects’ (and our own) embodied otherness.
Building upon conversations generated in my first book on Louise Bourgeois, Objects and Other Things untangles how materiality and imagination participate in our embodied encounters with aesthetic objects and things we might deem unsettling, misfitting, wondrous, meditative, even sublime.
Focusing upon feminist artistic practices centered around the visceral body from the late 1940s in America to the present day, this project considers sculptures and drawings by Ruth Asawa, Jackie Winsor, Elizabeth King, and Julia Phillips, among others. The chapters frame artmaking as an exploration with otherness, drawing on different intellectual or artistic cultures while tracing multiple affordances and themes among them. Each of these sculptors works with quotidian materials—wire, wood, brick, twine, copper, hardware—often in combination with historical mediums, including bronze, marble, gold leaf, ceramic, and steel, generating awarenesses surrounding bodily difference, mutability, and ambivalence. The works examined in the manuscript evoke spatial and temporal metaphors of embodiment, or what I term thresholds, transmutations, surrogates, and dwellings, suggesting how observers may transition from one place to another (in body and mind), conjuring the psychoanalytic premise that letting in imagination means letting in a bit of madness. The studio-based practices of Asawa, Winsor, King, and Phillips explore mundane, domestic, meditative, and in some cases maternal, forms of labor: twining, plaiting, weaving, welding, casting, stacking, and constructing elicit collectivity, reciprocity, domesticity, and play, traversing the margins of public and private, petitioning active beholders who partake in complex embodied conversations with objects, artists, and the things of the world. Simply put, such artworks invite us into meetings that are deeply perspectival, ambivalent, reparative—and generative.
In addition to studio visits and artist interviews, research will be conducted in the Ruth Asawa Papers, Stanford University Library, California; the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian; the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York; Paula Cooper Gallery; The Wellcome Collection Galleries at the Science Museum, London; the Marion Milner Archive held at The British Psychoanalytical Society Archive, London, and elsewhere.