Cell VII
Louise Bourgeois
Cell VII, 1998
Metal, glass, fabric, bronze, steel, wood, bones, wax, and thread, 207 x 221 x 210.8 cm
Private collection, courtesy Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation/VEGAP, Madrid
“My reminiscences help me live in the present, and I want them to survive. I am a prisoner of my emotions. You have to tell your story, and you have to forget your story. You forget and forgive. It liberates you.” —Louise Bourgeois[1]
Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, Paris; d. 2010, New York) enjoyed an exceedingly long art career, spanning almost an entire century. In the last twenty years of her life, Bourgeois created artworks using, reusing, and converting all sort of objects, different types of architectural features, and her personal belongings. During this time, she devoted much of her energy to create a series of haunting, room-like spaces.[2] Bourgeois called these installations Cells, a term that invites associations with imprisonment and monastic contemplation, as well as with the most basic element of the human body, the biological cell of a living organism.
The first Cell she constructed in 1989 was a mixture of salvaged building materials such as old doors, windows, wire mesh, and glass, combined with made and found objects. By the mid-1990s Bourgeois began to add textiles to her Cells, including old garments, primarily her own and those of her mother, which she had saved for many years.
At the age of 87, Bourgeois produced Cell VII (1998). The piece consists of a room-like space created out of old wooden doors. One of the doors is open, inviting the viewer to see inside, where pieces of furniture and items that have a strong emotional charge for the artist are on display. The Cells are described as “her most autobiographical work.”[3] Each object that Bourgeois has collected and displayed in Cell VII references her childhood and her parents’ work: a model of the house in Choisy-le-Roi, south of Paris, where the artist spent her childhood; a spider in a corner that alludes to figure of her mother; personal items of clothing hung from bone-shaped coat hangers; and a pinkish form on the top of a miniature staircase that appears to be crossed by needles. The objects Bourgeois uses relating to sewing and mending were a central item in her Cells, representing her parents who ran a tapestry restoration workshop and gallery, where the artist assisted from an early age. In Cell VII Bourgeois communicates aspects of her life, creating a space with a lot of emotion where she is trying to confront and transmute her own history.[4]
1. Jerry Gorovoy and Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi, eds., Louise Bourgeois (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1997), back cover.
2. http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/bourgeois/exhibition.html
3. https://www.a-n.co.uk/reviews/louise-bourgeois
4. http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/bourgeois/exhibition.html
Preguntas
Show: Cell VII (1998)
Look closely. What is the first thing you notice about Cell VII? List five words you would use to describe it.
Describe the mood the artwork conveys. What aspects of Cell VII give you this impression?
Imagine that you can walk inside. How would you feel? Where would you go? If you could take one of the objects home, what would you take and why?
Imagine other ways in which Bourgeois could have displayed the objects. How would a different type of presentation have changed the meaning or the feeling of her work?
Bourgeois said that used garments contained memories of people, relationships, and places.[5] What do you think about her statement? Do you have clothes that remind you of someone or something important in your life? If you do, where do you keep them? Do you use them? On what occasions? Why do you use them in those moments?
Read Bourgeois’s quote: “My reminiscences help me live in the present, and I want them to survive. I am a prisoner of my emotions. You have to tell your story, and you have to forget your story. You forget and forgive. It liberates you.”[6] What do you think about this quote and how it relates to this piece?
5. http://arttattler.com/archivebourgeois.html
6. Gorovoy and Asbaghi, back cover.