Louise Bourgeois and the logic of the part-object, 1947-1982.
Item
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Title
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Louise Bourgeois and the logic of the part-object, 1947-1982.
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Identifier
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AAI9807976
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identifier
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9807976
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Creator
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Nixon, Mignon Elizabeth.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Carol Armstrong
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Women's Studies | History, United States
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Abstract
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This critical study of the work of Louise Bourgeois encompasses the period from the late 1940s, when Bourgeois turned from painting to sculpture, through the early 1980s, the moment in which her work became known to a larger audience via her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In articulating the interrelations between Bourgeois's oeuvre and a series of historical frames--the history of modern sculpture, the American reception of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and the American feminist art movement--this study attempts both to develop a fuller account of Bourgeois's production than has previously been assayed, and to consider how these histories might themselves be revised under the pressure of a more detailed assessment of Bourgeois's participation in them. In particular, it is argued that Bourgeois reworks the part-object logic of the body (as distinguished from the partial figure, and as developed in the work of Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, and Marcel Duchamp, among others) in relation to feminism and to post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories of gender.;The principal theoretical model of this analysis is the object-relations theory of Melanie Klein. The radical discontinuity of Bourgeois's project, it is suggested, operates at the limit of sculptural form, much as Kleinian theory, concentrated on the infantile drives and on immediate and fragmented bodily experience, posits a subject at the limit of psychoanalysis. It is argued that a Kleinian-based reading can account for these key features of Bourgeois's production: the extreme heterogeneity of the oeuvre; its destabilization of form and gender; and the intensity of affect it displays. This Kleinian-based analysis is further informed by the artist's own engagement with object-relations theory.;The principal contention of this study thus is that the collapse of form enacted in Bourgeois's work restages a Surrealist operation, reworking the counter-modernist logic of the part-object in specifically feminist and post-Freudian terms.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
