Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999, steel and marble, 9.2 x 8.91 x 10.23 m.

Louise Bourgeois. Maman: From the Outside In

Trisha McCrae

This article situates Maman (1999, Steel and Marble 9.2 x 8.91 x 10.23 m) (Fig 1) by Louise Bourgeois, in the context of an object-based installation-space. My argument is that Maman, both in its making and thinking, shifts terrain between being a theoretical installation, a work that promotes theory about installation-space; and Bourgeois’s personal transitional space, a space that helps Bourgeois come to terms with the complex relationship she has with her mother. Generally speaking, attempts to position Bourgeois’s work in art-historical order or in the context of art movements, such as Formalism, Expressionism or Surrealism, has proved notoriously difficult, or even ‘irrelevant’, according to Lucy Lippard (Lippard 1975 p.27). I agree with Adrian Rifkin and suggest her work embodies and points towards what could be called ‘modernism’s excess’ (Rifkin 1996 p.31). This means the narratives that lie outside canonical thinking and those spaces shaped outside conventional teleologies that ‘slip between’ the Modernist/Postmodernist discourse (Deepwell 1996 p.42). However, where most writers do converge is in the belief that her work relates in some way to the body, (Robinson 1996 p.21) either spatially, metaphorically or symbolically. Therefore, situated within a psychoanalytical framework, this paper argues that in Maman’s case, the body is both the viewer’s, in relation to the installation-space, and the architectural body of a gigantic spider acting as Bourgeois’s transitional space. Maman as an installation-space is doing... Read more