Louise Bourgeois's Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing (review)

Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois's Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 134 pp., 25 illustrations

Bourgeois's monumental Spider stands so far outside the standard notion of sculpture that to call it sculpture is to say there's no such thing as sculpture. Bal translates Spider into a theoretical object, coalescing, in an expostulating narrative, theoretical thought with visual articulation of that thought in the various materials and objects that structure and comprise Spider—its mixed-media egg case between huge bronze legs: a femme-maison, or Frauenzimmer, the spider is female, of course, her egg case a house, a woman-house. In Bal's terms, this theoretical object deploys its visual status to articulate thought-about-art as internal to the work of art—as within a womb, house, or dream . . . the spider's egg case's shell's a chain-link fence, within it a mother's lap in the form of a chair, perfume bottles hanging on a chain, segments of marrow bone wired to the fence, brooches and medals, a grandfather's watch, a tiny locket, eggs in a wire basket, other stuff—all there to puzzle over, the chair not to be sat in, dangling objects not to be touched, only approached as behind one's eyes or within the spaces of one's mind. Come into my parlor, the spider says through an open door one dares not enter.

Bal admits that her construal of Spider as theoretical object is as much about her approach to the work as about the work itself—how to see it, to write about it—which might prompt one to question whether her essay competes with the object as if to erase it. If, on behalf of the object, an explanation of it does supplant it, thus becoming it, one confronts a tautology, such as Paul Gauguin's saying, "an explanation of the man is the work of the man," interpolated in Bal's case as "an explanation of the work of art is the work of art"—a double bind familiar to critics when passing from material description to an interpretive phase, aware that what can be described is the property of the work under scrutiny, while interpretation resides solely within the observer (as in saying I came, I saw, I conquered, the enemy erased, the victor left to mourn the loss). So, after reading Bal's essay, one might find her interpretation having foreclosed on Spider, leaving it bereft of its theoretical objecthood. In spite of that possibility befalling a seduced reader, Bal's narrative, which is neither historical nor biographical but omnipresent and transcendental, is itself a theoretical object that holds to itself so tightly as to be independent of the work—a covering narrative that can be pulled off the work, leaving its irreducible mystery intact and open for anyone capable of plumbing its depth. In short, Bourgeois's Spider is approachable but not to be subjugated, and unlike its referent, too big to be squashed.

Bal is exceptionally skilled at close reading, and the subjects she chooses to take on are commensurate in complexity to that skill. Now in her nineties, Bourgeois came through French surrealism of the 1930s into New York art of the 1940s and 1950s. To say the least about her, she is ineffable; to say the least about her work, it is beyond comprehension by any mode of art-writing that quails within boundaries, like skin-tight theories that when punctured won't bleed. To relieve the pressure of Bal's text, as relentlessly demanding as it is generous, the distressed reader might fall into giddiness and recall a clip from a Marx Brothers film with Groucho waist-hugging a woman twice his corporeality who says, "Oh! Hold me closer," to which Groucho responds, "If I held you any closer, I'd be behind you." No critic that I've read (Rosalind...