Maggie's Blog- Louise Bourgeois: Passage Dangereux

Artist: Louise Bourgeois

Work: Passage Dangereux

Year: 1997

Material: Mixed Media

Size: 264X356X876 cm

Background of the Artist

•Began her career in sculpture as she was “not satisfied with its(painting) level of reality”

•Her work has a degree of feminism

•Common features of work: around her lifelong experience, especially idea of “home”

•Later work: derived from childhood experience of her father hysterically

About The Work 

•Long corridor with chain- link fencing

•Cage- like house:fear and loss of freedom

•With arched doors at the end of a central passage: : seems like the structure of a catherdral

•Inside place some domestic furniture and bric-a-brac, but in a strange way
For example: a glass bowl contains bones, rabbit ears- like marbles place aside of white cuffs

•Many textures and surfaces were used, like wood, metal, glass, leather, etc: different impression of home and feeling

 •Uncanny with designed in a strange way

•View different position and angles have different experiences within the architectural structure and its objects

•Strange contrasts of lines and volume within a wire mesh “skin”

 •White cuffs with the word “Bourgeois”
-represent her memory of father dressed in starched, laundered shirts

•Empty bottle with bracelets

•Child- size ch and secret compartments
memory of her childhood

While House give people a sense of "comfortable, secure place" to live in, Bourgois present in a cage- like place, look like a prison or animal cage

 •Bodily amputation throughout Bourgeois' s work
- amputated feet merged with metal rods
- -> evoke multi meanings and symbolic associations

Work about Gender

•Bourgeois followed the female movement that used wastes, pollution in representing “horror” which suggested by Julia Kristeva in 1982

•Contrast between male minimalist artists: Messy disordered and full of rubbish VS clean lines and geometric forms

Overall of the work

 •Psychological disturbance and alienation

•Uncanny

•Feminism

•Reflection of personal life

My opinions on the work:

•Cage-like home: visible uncomfortable, and invisible painful (shadow) that memories can never be forgotten

•Playful with light treatment, create confusion of both the physical and the optical boundaries of the work, encourage to respond kinaestheically

•No escape for Bourgeois in her early life

First impression of the Work

•I think of Cage House in Hong Kong

•Hard life, want to escape from the cage to have a new life

•Pressure from family

Questions:

 •Both Homebound (Mona Hatoum) and Passage Dangereux (Louise Bourgeois) present the theme of Home, which piece do you think is more uncanny?

•Is personal experience is an important element for the theme of Home?