LUNGS HARVEST ARTS FESTIVAL
Multiple locations
Daily through October 3, free
“The Great Aria Throwdown #2 — LES Edition”
Campos Community Garden, 640-644 East Twelfth St. at Ave. C
Friday, October 1, 6:30 www.lungsnyc.org
In 2011, community gardens in Loisaida, the Lower East Side, and the East Village came together and formed LUNGS, the Loisaida United Neighborhood Gardens; its mission is “to promote, protect, and preserve gardening and greening through cooperation, coordination, and communication.” The group is now hosting its tenth annual LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival, which runs through October 3 with free music and dance, knitting, activism, art exhibits, yoga, a dominos tournament, interactive workshops, classes, a treasure hunt, and more, in such locations as Green Oasis, Carmen’s Garden, LaGuardia Corner Gardens, Orchard Alley Community Garden, Creative Little Garden, La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez, 6BC Botanical Garden, and other lovely oases.
One of the highlights is “The Great Aria Throwdown #2 — LES Edition,” taking place October 1 at 6:30 in Campos Community Garden on Twelfth St. & Ave. C. Presented by dell’Arte Opera Ensemble (dAOE), the evening features sopranos Bahati Barton and Diana Charlop, mezzo-soprano Perri di Christina, countertenor Jeffrey Mandelbaum, and pianist Pablo Zinger performing works by Bellini, Donizetti, Mozart, Purcell, and others.
“Dell’Arte Opera Ensemble is a bridge for emerging opera singers to work with accomplished professionals in the field,” dAOE executive director Marianna Mott Newirth explains. “‘The Great Aria Throwdown’ is a fun and free event that gives ‘stage’ to three sopranos and an outstanding countertenor singing with widely acclaimed pianist Pablo Zinger, producing a growing garden of sound on East Twelfth St. From Bellini to Monteverdi, we’re bringing opera to the LES! Campos Garden even has a chandelier they plan to raise just as the show begins — a nod to the new season starting at the Met after a year of darkness.” Below is the full program.
Diana Charlop: “Quel guardo il cavaliere” from Don Pasquale (Bellini)
Perri di Christina: “Deh, non voler costringere” from Anna Bolena (Donizetti)
Bahati Barton: “Ruhe Sanft” from Zaide (Mozart)
Jeffrey Mandelbaum: “If Music Be the Food of Love” (Purcell, Third Version)
Diana Charlop: “Padre germani addio” from Idomeneo (Mozart)
Perri di Christina: “Voi che sapete” from Le nozze di Figaro (Mozart)
Jeffrey Mandelbaum: “Sprezzami quanto sai” from L’incoronazione di Poppea (Monteverdi)
Perri di Christina: “Faites-lui mes aveux” from Faust (Gounod)
Bahati Barton: “Think of Me” from The Phantom of the Opera (Lloyd Webber)
Diana Charlop: “Obéissons quand leur voix appelle” from Manon (Massenet)
Jeffrey Mandelbaum: “Fra tempeste” from Rodelinda (Handel)
“Wong Ping: Your Silent Neighbor” continues at the New Museum through October 3 (photo by Dario Lasagni)
WONG PING: YOUR SILENT NEIGHBOR
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 3, $12-$18 www.newmuseum.org
WONG PING: THE GREAT TANTALIZER
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through October 23, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm www.tanyabonakdargallery.com
Multimedia artist Wong Ping’s current shows at the New Museum in SoHo and Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea are filled with lovable animated pandas, colorful cartoons, a retelling of Pinocchio, and playful sculpture and installation. But you might want to think twice before bringing the kids, as Wong’s work tackles income inequality, sexual repression and expression, police corruption, dating and desire, climate change, and sociopolitical aspects of contemporary life, particularly in his native Hong Kong as its battles with Mainland China since the 1997 handover from the British grow ever-more dangerous, all told in a DIY style inspired by video games and narrated by Wong himself.
At the New Museum, An Emo Nose (2015) reimagines Pinocchio’s proboscis, resembling both a heart and a penis, as its own sentient being, reacting to the protagonist’s negative thoughts by stretching out and going off on its own, depicting humanity’s vulnerability of both mind and body. In the two-channel The Other Side (2015), projected onto a screen and a small television monitor in front of it, the narrator journeys across treacherous terrain, has soup with Granny Meng (forgetfulness goddess Meng Po), and ponders his future, a parable of emigration from Hong Kong filtered through the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. A 3-D printed text panel relates self-affirmations in tiny letters, including “I am the last drop of period blood before menopause” and “I am the last rebellious punk.”
The retrospective is centered by four videos projected onto four screens on all sides of one large room; visitors sit on comfy beanbag chairs or a round couch as they rotate to watch the short films, which total forty-three minutes. In Jungle of Desire (2015), an impotent man is powerless when his wife becomes a prostitute to satisfy her sexual desire and is exploited by a cop. In Who’s the Daddy? (2017), a man considers himself an outcast because his penis is straight, not bending to the left or right, and confuses politics and sex as things go wrong with a woman he hooked up with on a dating app. “People even deny its existence,” he opines about his member.
Wong Ping’s Fables 2 (2019) follows the trials and tribulations of a special cow and three conjoined rabbit siblings attempting to make their own way in life. And in Sorry for the Late Reply (2021), commissioned for this show, a fisherman becomes obsessed with an elderly saleswoman’s varicose veins. “If you’ve ever stepped into the supernatural world during a hike, or have gotten lost in the parking lot and couldn’t find the exit, or have stared into the eyes of a black chicken standing outside your door through the peephole late at night, then you would know how I feel,” he says.
Wong Ping is a curator researching the Great Tantalizer in show at Tanya Bonakdar
Over at Tanya Bonakdar, Wong’s “The Great Tantalizer” is a multimedia installation structured around a mockumentary about a scientist who had been determined to increase sexual desire in pandas and bring that information on their mating techniques to humans, particularly in China, given its former one-child policy and overall preference for boys. The relentless drive to tantalize may be commenting as well on the current tangping movement, or “lying flat,” in which many younger Chinese have opted out of the pressures of modern life by declining to engage in the endless competition for personal and professional success, a high-quality education, a good job, a happy marriage, a beautiful home, and lovely children.
The gallery has been reimagined as the Great Tantalizer’s abandoned laboratory, with a stack of white plastic chairs and a labcoat, an exhibition poster and bamboo pole that declare, “EAT.SLEEP.POOOOOP.DIE,” and The Tender Rider, a cute old kiddie vehicle with a panda head that now serves as a projector, beaming highly sexualized images onto the walls in a back room. It’s all organized around a screen showing a Zoom-like panel discussion featuring Wong in a panda outfit, hosting the virtual talk with the GT’s former laboratory staff, one-night stand, and main competitor, whose identities are disguised. Visitors can sit on rolls of bound bamboo sticks as Wong explores who the GT was and what his legacy is.
The thirty-seven-year-old Wong is quickly building up an impressive legacy of his own with these presentations at the New Museum and Tanya Bonakdar, expanding his breadth with his distinctive approach to exposing society’s ills.
GREGG BORDOWITZ: I WANNA BE WELL
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens
Virtual performance lectures September 17-19, free with advance RSVP
Exhibition continues Thursday – Monday through October 11, $5-$10 (free for NYC residents) www.moma.org www.greggbordowitz.com
At the heart of the MoMA PS1 exhibition “Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well” are two disparate images. On your way into the building itself and in the gallery, you will see a large banner declaring, “The AIDS Crisis Is Still Beginning.” Meanwhile, at the top of Bordowitz’s 2021 mixed-media sculpture Pestsäule (after Erwin Thorn), inspired by a seventeenth-century plague monument in Vienna as well as the murder of George Floyd, the AIDS epidemic, and the Covid-19 pandemic, is a blank protest sign, raised up by a man in a medical mask surrounded by a maelstrom of bodies, a murderous cherub, and sandbags on the floor, like a warped scene from Les Miz. “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” Mildred (Peggy Maley) asks Johnny (Marlon Brando) in the 1954 film The Wild One. “Whadda you got?” Johnny replies.
Born in Brooklyn in 1964 and raised in Queens — home base for the Ramones, whose 1977 song “I Wanna Be Well” from the Rocket to Russia album gives the exhibit its name — Bordowitz, who has been living with HIV/AIDS for more than three decades, was an early member of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which was founded in 1987. He has been documenting his own life and the global AIDS crisis through film and video, poetry, sculpture, lectures, and poetry, much of which is on view at MoMA PS1 through October 11. His 2014 twenty-four-part poem Debris Fields lines the walls of the galleries, amid such works as self-portraits in mirror, Tom McKitterick’s black-and-white photographs of Bordowitz and others at AIDS protests in the late 1980s, the corner wall drawing and sculpture installation Kaisergruft (centered by the word Sympathy), and Drive, a repurposed vintage derby car stickered with Big Pharma logos.
The show also features several of Bordowitz’s films, including the 1993 autobiographical documentary Fast Trip, Long Drop, which deals with his contracting HIV, coming out to his parents, a friend getting breast cancer, and the tragic deaths of his grandparents; the 2001 documentary Habit, about the AIDS epidemic in South Africa; the five-minute The Fast That I Want video he made last year with Morgan Bassichis for his family’s virtual Yom Kippur; and the vastly entertaining Only Idiots Smile, a 2017 lecture commissioned for the New Museum presentation “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” and that, at only twenty-two minutes, is far too short as Bordowitz discusses his relationship with his father, Judaism, Eastern European men kissing on the lips, and homophobia.
You can see much more of Bordowitz this week when MoMA hosts several special events held in conjunction with “I Wanna Be Well.” On September 13 (and available on demand through September 27, for members only), “Modern Mondays: An Evening with Gregg Bordowitz and Jean Carlomusto” consists of a live discussion between the longtime friends, artists, collaborators, and activists, along with videos they made in the late 1980s for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City. From September 14 to 28, MoMA Film will stream Bordowitz’s 1996 reimagination of Nicolai Erdman’s 1932 long-banned play The Suicide, also for members only.
From September 17 to 19, Benyamin Zev’s Succos Spectacular! comprises a trio of livestreamed performances, free with advance RSVP, specifically taking place after Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), the ten Days of Awe (meditation and reflection), and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) and before Sukkot (the Harvest Festival and the Feast of Tabernacles). The three shows — “The Rock Star” on Friday at 7:00, “The Rabbi” on Saturday at 7:00, and “The Comedian” on Sunday at 4:00 — feature Bordowitz as his alter ego, Benyamin Zev (his Hebrew name), a Jewish entertainer, stand-up comic, and tummler, hanging out in a Sukkah, joined by special guests and the klezmer ensemble Isle of Klezbos. “Any laughter is purely accidental,” Bordowitz says on the MoMA website. “My performances disturb, upset, and resist the pressures to conform and align genders and ethnicities within a fascist phantasy of American nationalism.” And finally, on October 2 at 5:00, in person and online, Bordowitz will launch his new book from Triple Canopy, Some Styles of Masculinity, at the Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore, where he will speak with poet, professor, and cultural theorist Fred Moten.
Kris Lemsalu Malone and Kyp Malone Lemsalu will perform on the High Line this week (photo by Eric Martin)
Who:Kris Lemsalu,Kyp Malone, others What: Live performance in seven parts Where:The High Line, between Fourteenth & Thirtieth Sts. When: September 13-15, free, 6:30 Why: For the 2017 Performa Biennial, Estonian multidisciplinary artist Kris Lemsalu and New York–based musician and artist Kyp Malone (TV on the Radio, Rain Machine) collaborated on Going, Going, which took place on a kinetic bed. In February 2020, they collaborated on the exhibition “Love Song Sing-Along” at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The two are teaming up again for A Snail’s Tale, a seven-part site-specific performance installation that runs the length of the High Line, from Fourteenth St. to the Thirtieth St. Spur.
Admission is free and no advance RSVP is necessary; the audience will walk across the gorgeous park, making seven stops, each offering a chapter in the story, featuring musicians Lara Allen, Kate Farstad, Forrest Gillespie, Andi Maghenheimer, and Katy Pinke as well as Lemsalu and Malone, in celestial costumes designed by Malone, and joined by a mobile snail shell fabricated by Tarvo Porroson. “A Snail’s Tale is a never-before-heard fairy tale,” High Line Art associate curator Melanie Kress said in a statement. “Kris Lemsalu and Kyp Malone’s phantasmagorical performance is an invitation to slow down and connect to the natural world during this moment of global instability and transition.” Along the way, you will also encounter the current High Line exhibition “The Musical Brain,” consisting of pieces by Rebecca Belmore and Osvaldo Yero, Vivian Caccuri, Raúl de Nieves, Guillermo Galindo, David Horvitz, Mai-Thu Perret, Naama Tsabar, and Antonio Vega Macotela, in addition to commissions by Ibrahim Mahama, Hannah Levy, and Sam Durant.
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Quarantine Body will conclude performance series on October 24 (photo by Bones)
5 INDICES ON A TORTURED BODY
Bronx Museum
1040 Grand Concourse
September 8 – October 24, free with advance RSVP
718-681-6000 www.bronxmuseum.org
Since July, the Bronx Museum of the Arts has been hosting “5 Indices on a Tortured Body,” a series of five live performances held in conjunction with the excellent exhibition “Wardell Milan: Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good to You.” The small but powerful show by Harlem-based artist Wardell Milan, continuing through October 24, is part of the institution’s special fiftieth anniversary programming, focusing on social justice. “Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good to You” consists of collages, photographs, and works on paper that address white supremacy and ask the question “What do terrorists do when they’re not terrorizing?” One end of the exhibit contains a ritual room inspired by the Rothko Chapel in Houston; for “5 Indices on a Tortured Body,” Milan is collaborating with Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Zachary Tye Richardson and sculptor and designer Billy Ray Morgan to present the live events, which explore the disenfranchised and marginalized in search of a place of refuge. “The Chapel of Five Indices serves as a ‘Safe Space’ for these tortured bodies — interlinked through histories of violence, to be affirmed and celebrated,” Milan explains in a museum brochure. “Within this chapel, these irrepressible bodies cannot be flattened but must be reckoned with.” Below is the remaining schedule (“The Black Male Body” had its last performance September 4, with Richardson and Milan, written by Casey Gerald); admission is free with advance RSVP.
Wednesday, September 8 5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Female Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, Catherine Fisher, and Trinity Dawn Bobo, written by Fisher, 6:00
Saturday, September 25 5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Trans Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, B. Hawk Snipes, and Mae Eskenazi, written by Snipes and Richardson, 2:00
Wednesday, October 13 5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Migrant Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, DJ Chappel, and Brittany Bringuez, written by Jabu Ndlovu, 6:00
Sunday, October 24 5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Quarantine Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, written by Noah Wertheimer, 2:00
“Born in Flames: Feminist Futures,” features dazzling work by Chitra Ganesh, Saya Woolfalk, Huma Bhabha, and others (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Also on view at the Bronx Museum, through September 26, is the phenomenal “Born in Flames: Feminist Futures,” inspired by Lizzie Borden’s seminal 1983 underground classic film, Born in Flames, which is shown on a loop along with recent works by Caitlin Cherry, Chitra Ganesh, Clarissa Tossin, Firelei Baez, Huma Bhabha, Maria Berrio, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Rose B. Simpson, Saya Woolfalk, Sin Wai Kin (fka Victoria Sin), Shoshanna Weinberger, Tourmaline, and Wangechi Mutu.
Unauthorized “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?” exhibit is selling out fast (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
BANKSY: GENIUS OR VANDAL?
526 Sixth Ave. at West Fourteenth St.
Wednesday – Monday through November 28, children $19.90, adults $29.50 ($5 additional for VIP) banksyexpo.com online slideshow
“There’s no such thing as good publicity,” Banksy wrote on a wall in a lot on West Broadway and McDougal in October 2008, accompanied by an image of a giant rat whitewashing over an ad for a Fox television show. The mysterious British artist and activist was in New York City for the opening of his free, immersive exhibition “The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill,” consisting of animatronic animals that were not available as either pets or meat.
There has not been a lot of good publicity for “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?,” an unauthorized exhibition of screenprints, photographs, and only a handful of original works by Banksy, one of three such traveling shows. (The others are “The Art of Banksy: ‘Without Limits’” and “The Art of Banksy: Unauthorized Private Collection.”) When told about the Moscow edition of one of the exhibits, he posted online, “What the hell is that? I wish I could find it funny. What’s the opposite of LOL? You know it’s got nothing to do with me, right? I don’t charge people to see my art unless there’s a fairground wheel.” When asked what he was going to do about it, he slyly replied, “Hmm — not sure I’m the best person to complain about people putting up pictures without permission.” Meanwhile, the Seoul edition of “Without Limits” offered visitors refunds once it became known that most of the works in the show were reproductions.
Among the replicas at the New York show is a reproduction of Banksy’s studio, based on the 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. Since we still don’t know who Banksy is, the exhibition has to go to extreme lengths to come up with some form of biography.
The fairground wheel the Bristol-born Banksy was referring to was one of the attractions in his massive 2015 “Dismaland Bemusement Park,” a dark reimagination of Disneyland on the Somerset seaside for which he charged a mere three pounds for entry. “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?” includes a trailer for the park and a series of photographs. (Many of the items on view have been lent by Steve Lazarides, who worked with Banksy for more than a decade.) Of course, it’s not the same as being there, which is the essential problem when staging a show of site-specific street art in a gallery, in this case a large two-floor space on the corner of West Fourteenth St. and Sixth Ave. — and charging $19.90 for children and $29.50 for adults. “Genius or Vandal?” falls somewhere in between “Beyond the Streets,” which comprised works by graffiti artists hung on walls and standing on plinths, and the two immersive van Gogh experiences, which turned Vincent’s life and paintings into an Instagram-friendly fiasco.
Divided into thematic sections, “Genius or Vandal?” explores some of Banksy’s most famous pieces, which take on consumerism, police brutality, government surveillance, the health-care system, immigration, the royals, art history, and the art market. Among the images on display are Banksquiat, a rebuke of a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibit about which Banksy wrote, “Major new Basquiat show opens at the Barbican — a place that is normally very keen to clean any graffiti from its walls”; Golf Sale, an image of a man holding up a “Golf Sale” sign in front of three tanks, referencing the individual famously refusing to move as tanks made their way through Tiananmen Square; Napalm, which brings together Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald holding hands with “Napalm Girl” Phan Thi Kim Phuc in the center; several of Banksy’s rats, declaring, “Get Out While You Can,” “If Graffiti Changed Anything It Would Be Illegal,” and “Welcome to Hell!”; and Pulp Fiction, in which the John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson characters from the Quentin Tarantino film hold bananas instead of guns.
I have to admit that even with all my misgivings with the exhibit, I enjoyed seeing such originals as Welcome, a welcome mat made out of material from life jackets; Smiley Copper, a panel showing a heavily armed police officer with a yellow smiley face; and Grappling Hook, Banksy’s unique version of the crucifixion.
Exhibit features the words and images of mysterious British street artist and activist Banksy (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
There is also video of Girl with a Balloon shredding itself after being auctioned off for more than one million dollars in 2018 (which is widely available online); the resulting work, retitled Love Is in the Bin, is expected to be sold for more than five million at an October auction. For an additional five bucks, you can take a ten-minute virtual reality tour through suburban British streets, where numerous Banksy works suddenly appear as you fight off nausea. In an enclosed room, dozens of images are projected onto four walls, immersing you in Banksy’s oeuvre. And you can record yourself on live CCTV; Banksy might have been pointing out the fascist nature of video surveillance, asking, “What are you looking at?,” but now you can add footage of yourself directly to social media.
The mostly inane wall text and audioguide do the exhibition no favors. In discussing the 2011 Los Angeles wall piece Fire Starter, in which Charlie Brown is an arsonist, cigarette dangling from his mouth, the text defines the round-faced boy as “the protagonist of the animated film A Boy Named Charlie Brown.” Delving into Banksy’s fascination with primates, as in Monkey Parliament,Monkey Queen, and Laugh Now (in which a monkey wears overalls that proclaim, “Laugh now but one day we’ll be in charge”), the text notes that “the imagery is also well documented in cinematography. . . . [An] iconic film is Planet of the Apes by Tim Burton. This film tells us about a world in which monkeys have evolved so much so that they have enslaved humans.” And in discussing No Ball Games, in which two children are playing with a red sign that says “No Ball Games,” the text criticizes a previous unauthorized exhibition by pointing out, “Banksy had nothing to do with this company, nor with the exhibition that was held. Those are the ones who should be considered real vandals!”
Police brutality is one of several Banksy themes explored in exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
In many ways, all you need to know about the exhibition — which is unlikely to attract anyone who believes Banksy is in fact a vandal, making the title somewhat moot — is at the beginning and end. The show opens with a replica of Pasquino, a fifteenth-century Roman “talking statue” that was a precursor to political street art; it bears no relationship to Banksy or his work. And, in an ironic twist, you cannot exit through the gift shop, because there is none. Since “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?” is unauthorized, the creators don’t have any legal rights to the images they could otherwise plaster on hats, T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc., although you do get a poster with VIP admission.
Nonetheless, the narration does seem to be obsessed with Banksy’s “GrossDomesticProduct” temporary installation and online store, where you can purchase reproductions of some of the items in the New York show but includes the following warning: “The artist would like to make it clear that he continues to encourage the copying, borrowing, and uncredited use of his imagery for amusement, activism, and education purposes. Feel free to make merch for your own personal entertainment and nonprofit activism for good causes. However, selling reproductions, creating your own line of merchandise, and fraudulently misrepresenting knock-off Banksy products as ‘official’ is illegal, obviously a bit wrong, and may result in legal action. In the event of prosecution all funds will be donated to charity.”
LOUISE BOURGEOIS, FREUD’S DAUGHTER
The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday – Monday through September 12, $12-$18 (free on Saturdays)
212-423-3200 thejewishmuseum.org
To paraphrase something Dr. Sigmund Freud most likely never said, sometimes a white marble penis is just a white marble penis. In the exhibition “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter,” continuing at the Jewish Museum through September 12, curator Philip Larratt-Smith attempts to explore the French-American artist’s work through a psychoanalytic lens based on her thirty-three years of analysis with Freud disciple Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, beginning in 1952, shortly after the death of her father. The exhibit reverses the standard setup; most of the fifty pieces by Bourgeois are in vitrines, while excerpts from her extensive notes — from personal thoughts to dream diaries — are framed and hanging on the walls. Above the facsimiles and original sheets are dual quotes from Bourgeois and Freud.
“Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings profoundly recalibrate our understanding of her artistic trajectory and motivational impulses,” Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois’s literary archivist, said in a statement. “They do not explain or demystify her art but rather represent a freestanding corpus of writing that display her unusual literary gifts and underline her enduring engagement with analysis. They highlight the centrality of her Oedipal deadlock as the traumatic kernel of her psychic organization. And they complicate the narrative of early childhood trauma which the artist herself fostered, encouraging instead a more nuanced appreciation of this relationship which she often spoke about.”
Bourgeois’s writings are extraordinary. “The fear of success is a misconception of the fear of responsibility. Perhaps fear of men. Refusal to accept to grow up / Refusal to accept reality / Refusal to accept what I am / Refusal to accept my lot / Refusal to look at oneself to measure, judge / Refusal to grow up. Refusal to accept being a woman. I accept on my own terms,” one begins. “Guilt is the Product of envy,” she writes in another. “There is essentially no difference between the Penis envy and the Oedipus complex . . . it is not him that I love it is what he has — it is not him that I love it is his money — The only thing that gives me hope is that millions of people women have suffered from this mystery.” And in a screed against her father and the family’s British au pair, Sadie Gordon Richmond, who became her father’s mistress (and was only six years older than Louise), Bourgeois declares, “I can prove that he loves me / that he loves me more than anybody else / that his wife is unbearable / that he doesn’t love her / that I deserve to be loved / that I deserve him more than Sadie does / that Sadie loves me / that Sadie loves him / that Sadie doesn’t want him any longer / so he is free / so there is hope.” You can listen to actress Rachel Weisz reading eighteen of Bourgeois’s selected writings here.
The works on view are equally extraordinary. Couple III entwines two people in fabric and leather, one with a steel prosthetic arm. (“The prosthesis recalls a theme that was important to Louise. Louise saw herself as a survivor but also as radically incomplete,” Larratt-Smith says on the audioguide.) Hysterical is a small sculpture of a nude woman with three heads looking off in different directions. The tomblike Venthouse (Cupping Jar) features two slabs of dark marble, with glass cupping jars on the top one, lit with lights from within, a manifestation of the procedure Louise would perform on her mother to help ease her back pain. (Bourgeois’s mother, Joséphine, died in 1932 when Louise was twenty.) The Destruction of the Father is a large tableaux in a wall, bathed in hellish bloodred lighting, that is essentially the aftermath of a cannibalistic feast, made in 1974, a year after the death of Bourgeois’s husband, Robert Goldwater, at the age of sixty-five. The hanging sculpture Janus Fleuri is a bronze melding of male and female genitalia.
The centerpiece of the show is Passage Dangereux, the largest of Bourgeois’s Cells, a room-size installation that explores memory and desire, with dozens of elements representing sex and death incorporating all five senses, a journey into deep-seated trauma locked behind the bars of a physical and psychological prison. And finally, there’s Sleep II, a 1967 white marble sculpture that strongly resembles the top of an enormous penis, above which hangs Fillette (Sweeter Version), a biomorphic latex-over-plaster depiction of genitalia about which Bourgeois said, “From a sexual point of view I consider the masculine attributes to be extremely delicate. They’re objects that the woman, myself, must protect.” She was famously photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe carrying the sculpture in her right arm, like a treasured pet.
“Life is so funny. Life is so ridiculous,” Bourgeois once said. Throughout her life and career, she revealed a dry sense of humor and had fun with how she was categorized as an artist and a person. “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter” delves into the impact decades of psychoanalysis had on her and her art, particularly exposing her writings that emerged from deep inside her soul. But don’t get too caught up in trying to find answers for all her words and images. “Her writings reveal the extent to which Freudian concepts and practices — whether directly or indirectly, whether through his own writings, those of his followers, or Bourgeois’s longstanding analysis — informed and enriched her art making,” Larratt-Smith argues. “To call Bourgeois ‘Freud’s daughter’ is thus to invoke filiation and resistance, likeness and dissent, and to highlight the central importance of psychoanalysis in the making of her mysterious and idiosyncratic oeuvre.” And sometimes a white marble penis is just a white marble penis.
