Jodie Hardy

In Memory of Louis Bourgeois

In a seminal interview with Artforum Magazine in 1982 Louise Bourgeois shared in detail a childhood trauma which motivated her work. After her mother’s recovery from the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 left Joséphine Bourgeois with no interest in sharing conjugal relations with her husband. The nanny who was hired to instruct Louise served double-duty as her father’s mistress. This “betrayal” resulted in Louise’s art making becoming art therapy.   When asked why she always “worked with memories and the stories” of her life, she stated,

I want to get rid of them. And in order to forget all these histories, you have to forgive. If you are resentful, you keep the thing alive. So the way to go on is to get rid of it, in order to forgive in order to forget.

The most recent reconstructions of this sorted past include garments. These garments are culled from her private collection. All of the articles of clothing which have been utilized by Bourgeois were her own, her mother’s, or clothing given to her by family and friends. 
In The Guilty Girl is Fragile the artist has executed a lithograph on a white nylon slip. This flimsy undergarment, which serves as the protective layer between the body and the outer garment, speaks of intimacy and adornment. Full length slips embellished such as this with lace hem and smocked bodice have associations of both woman and child. It is an undergarment of female puberty and the image printed upon the skirt of the slip re-enforces the ambiguity of adolescence. Within a large rectangle filling the front of the skirt is an inverted floating red triangle plucking on a black line as if pulling back a crossbow. The Red triangle is given a face: the eyes are clownishly cross-eyed; the nose is reduced to two simple dots; the mouth is one that can be read as either a frown or sensuous lips. This figure floats in a halo of white surrounded by encroaching blue darkness. The primitive lines and primary colors of this figure suggest a youngster’s crayon drawing, but this is no child’s play. Bourgeois explains:

[The] look of my figures is abstract, and to the spectator they may not appear to be figures at all. They are the expression, in abstract terms, of emotions and states of awareness.

Standing before this slip, possibly worn by Bourgeois herself, one can only wonder if she has completely liberated herself from the past by repeatedly reconstructing it.

2005 essay on "The Guilty Girl is Fragile," exhibited at Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, Indiana.

Finding Comfort in Clowns

For several years Louisville, Kentucky was a favorite antique hunting ground for me and my “women folk.” My Mother, Grandmother, and two Aunts would help me find items for the little decorator shop I owned at the time. We spent all day wearing ourselves out, taking individual breaks as needed wherever seating was provided. While taking my turn with other waiting husbands - we knew better than to bring ours - I picked up a magazine with an image of Jim Carrey on the cover. It was a “head shot” of the man who became famous as Ace Ventura. Although presented as such, this was no ordinary picture of a clown. Carrey was captured looking directly into the lens, photographed against a grey backdrop, his face and lips covered in white makeup, his hair powdered haphazardly to match. In this faux black and white photograph we are confronted by an image accented by the brilliant blue of his eyes; a hue only human eyes posses. Yet this was not the most striking aspect of the portrait. Instead, I was riveted by the complexity of emotions Carrey conveyed with a tilt of his head, and a look in his eye. Was that melancholy there? What else was there, also begging release? He is either a genius imitator, or he was sincerely revealing a facet of his existence we do not see in the base comedies for which he is celebrated. His portrait has joined others that linger in my memory.
Soon after this encounter in Louisville, I visited the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  While wandering into the Early Twentieth Century Painting Gallery I came upon the same remarkable expression in a painted portrait. Although the photograph of Carrey was stirring, this was not a portrait of one man’s unacknowledged suffering; it was an acknowledgement of the same in us all. Jim Carrey alluded to it, George Rouault illustrated it. In a few thick stokes of paint Rouault’s portrait of a clown succeeded in causing my first experience of “aesthetic arrest;” a concept Joseph Campbell defines as a moment that suspends all awareness but of art itself; an interlude which transcends the spoken word.
This painting is just one from Rouault’s Miserere series inspired by a seminal experience, where, at the side of the road he saw a clown repairing his costume. In 1905 he wrote, “a star had clutched my heart, and from that I was able to derive an entire system of poetics.” His system included the juxtaposition of a character’s persona with the viewer’s personal associations. Rouault’s ability to communicate the human condition in a single expression was also applied to his portraits of Kings and Christ. He claimed “my clowns are really only dispossessed kings; their laugh is familiar to me; it reaches the realm of a million stifled sobs.”
The rugged application of Rouault’s heavy impasto paint implies the texture of mended clothing. His use of a predominantly monochromatic palette of black, white and grey, accented by barely discernable muted blues, pinks and browns, replicates faded fabric. In this portrait the picture plane is horizontally divided in half, alluding to the horizon in the background. Or maybe this horizontal line is meant to be part of a window sash. This ambiguity allows for the Clown to be simultaneously in front of the glass, and on the other side of the glass; both of this world and otherworldly. The clown, who is dressed in faded pink, is painted with an aura of blue around his white peaked cap; it encircles his head like a halo. Regardless of Rouault’s intentions, this clown looked at me as if he too had just recently lost a loved one. I found comfort in our silent commiseration.  
Perhaps it is the commonality we all share that reaches out in these faces created by Rouault. We see that part of ourselves, so privately captured, so universally human, so succinctly revealed in momentary eye contact with a frozen image; be it a depiction of a clown by the roadside in rural France, or one covered in powder from Hollywood.



“What I want to see in the man facing me is his soul.”
                   
        -George Rouault