Louise Bourgeois, 2009

Ever Louise
Hans Ulrich Obrist

In an interview I had with Louise Bourgeois in 1995, she talked about peripheral figures. For her, peripheral figures were those people that exist only in the periphery of our lives, but somehow might have an impact on us. We might have only had a brief encounter with these figures, then “they have sunk into oblivion, [and] then, [they] quite suddenly re-emerge.” She compares these figures to “a person waiting her turn or her day, that is awaiting germination,” meaning, that there is a latent potential that may be realized or not. “Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t,” as Louise Bourgeois summed it up in our interview. In Alex Van Gelder’s photographs of Bourgeois, she is not in the periphery at all, she is right in the middle, the camera is focused on her, her hands, her movements, and expressions.

A portrait, as in pre-photography times, is a still life of a person surrounded by attributes that characterize the portrayed. The series of portraits Alex Van Gelder made of Bourgeois in the last year of her life captures a multitude of characteristic moments in the multiple images, in different postures and posing with different objects. No picture is like another, each picture shows a different expression, mood, and detail, but each one is true to the artist.

Louise seems frightening and funny, wearing a mask and holding a knife, with pigeons flapping about her head, lost in thought—not considering herself too good to accept the unusual situations she has been put in. These diverse images correlate with my experience with Louise in our encounters in the early 1990s. Their course was unpredictable, the questions I asked often led us into a whole different conversation or broke it off, and I always took away with me something totally unexpected.

In one early conversation, she was testing a xylophone that had been made especially for her. So the sound of the notes being struck became the soundtrack of our interview and her singing of “Au clair de la lune” and rehearsing it to the instrument turned our conversation into a musical performance. Therefore, in this series of Alex Van Gelder, she is not portrayed at all as the peripheral figure that may come to realize her potential; the portraits show her to be so strong in all her fullness, which we already know from decades of looking at her artwork.

This leads me to Robert Mapplethorpe, who took the well-known portrait of Louise in 1982. In that image she is holding her work Fillette (1968). Interestingly, this was not due to an instruction from the photographer; but rather she took the phallic sculpture with her of her own accord, along with a furry coat, “as a precaution against a catastrophe.” Her art is like a protective shield in a situation in which she might fail. Fillette was just the right attribute for the Mapplethorpe portrait since, as she said in an interview, “I don’t mind if you don’t like me, but I would like you to like my work. I am my work. I am not what I am as a person.” In Van Gelder’s series there is an image in which Louise holds one of her late textile heads. Louise is imitating the facial expression of her textile sculpture, which makes it even more clear that Louise thinks of her work as being more herself than her physical presence. Van Gelder’s late series of portraits is thus an homage to both Louise and her work.