Panel: ‘My own voice wakes me up’ Léa Vuong, Philip Larratt-Smith and Justin Paton on Louise Bourgeois

Justin Paton: Good morning, everyone. It’s, oh, good afternoon, gosh. It’s wonderful to see you here. I’m Justin Paton. I’m head curator of international art and I’m also the curator, along with my colleague, Emily Sullivan, of Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day? 

It’s a real joy to welcome you here to the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Gadigal Country and after Aunty Rhonda’s [Dixon-Grovenor] wonderful smoking ceremony under Maman on this morning to acknowledge Elders past and present and also emerging generations and their lands and waters that we are so proximate to here. 

Welcome to the first session of our two-day program of talks in connection with this wonderful exhibition. The show opened yesterday. We’re really buzzing. If you were here last night or if you’ve already seen the show, I hope you know why we are buzzing and if you haven’t seen it yet, you will soon know why. 

And as with any great artist, you know, I really have that feeling that with some exhibitions, you plan them and you get elevations and you make your selection and you see the show and the show is what you thought it would be. But despite having, you know, really lived in Louise’s kingdom for many months now and been installing with Philip and our installation team for five weeks or so, I really feel like I’m discovering Louise along with the rest of you.  

And, you know, the greater the artist and the more you know, the deeper you go, the larger they get. In a way, the clearer you are about them, the more mysterious they become. It’s a kind of paradox.  So today’s talks are a chance to go deeper with those who knew Louise and who know her work well. And it felt appropriate to begin with a talk about words and their power in Louise’s art, which we have given a title drawn from one of Louise’s own night writings, My Own Voice Wakes Me Up. It’s the title of the first room in the exhibition and I think it evokes very beautifully that sort of liminal space or edge or borderland between waking and dreaming, between conscious and unconscious, which is where Louise built her kingdom. And we have with us for this talk two people who have dwelled very deeply in Louise’s kingdom.  

Beside me, Dr Léa Vuong. Welcome, Léa. Léa is a senior lecturer and current chair of French and Francophone studies at the University of Sydney. She co-edited a recent issue of Word & Image on Louise Bourgeois’s archives and Léa’s book Louise Bourgeois: The artist as writer will be published in 2025. 

And she recently presented a wonderful lecture in the Art Gallery Society’s Learning Curve series, which really opened, sort of opened up a new vista for me on Louise’s practice and talked about her in connection with a kind of memory-laden landscape and we might circle back to that.  

Beside Léa we welcome Philip Larratt-Smith. Welcome, Philip. Philip is curator at The Easton Foundation which was established by Bourgeois in the 1980s and it’s now dedicated to preserving the artist’s legacy. Now, Philip has curated and written extensively on Bourgeois, including as editor of a key item on the Bourgeois bookshelf. You can go and add it to your own at our beautiful exhibition shop, a two-volume publication called The Return of the Repressed, which brings together many of Louise’s psychoanalytic writings and we’ll come back to those too.  

So this is a moment for me to also acknowledge the truly awesome generosity and trust of The Easton Foundation and its president Jerry Gorovoy and to offer heartfelt thanks to Philip, without whose guidance through the intricacies and the complexities and the tensions of Louise’s art and without his commitment to making the show as complex and reverberant as possible, our exhibition would not be what it is. We’re proud to share this moment with you, Philip. Thank you so much.  

So, enough from me! I want to start with two images and the first is the one you see on the screen. And this is Louise in her parlour. And I know quite a few people in the room have had a chance to go to this wonderful house and step into a space that is a little like a Louise Bourgeois Cell in some ways, a wonderfully, characterful and dilapidated space. 

And I thought this was an interesting image to begin with, because looking, I realised when the image was blown up, you can see what Louise is up to on the table, but it was an image in which I could never quite tell whether she was drawing or writing on the table. And then alongside this image I’m going to share with you a diary page and if you look at that diary page, you will see that on it is the phrase that gives this exhibition its title, ‘has the day invaded the night or has the night invaded the day?’ And it mingles with some notes about, you know, a curator visiting, as well as that wonderful little drawing of a twisty form and the phrase comes back. And coming back, as you will see when you enter the show, is a big theme in Louise’s work. So a question for you Philip, and that’s really, could you talk to us about how you see those two activities, the activity of writing and the activity of art-making more conventionally conceived, whether it’s image-making or sculpture-making, how those two things relate in Louise’s work.  

Philip Larratt-Smith: Thank you, Justin, and thank you all for coming today. I’m very happy to be here. I think the line between drawing and writing for Louise is very fine and sometimes disappears altogether. There are a number of drawings Louise has made where she would write on the back of them. I think she switches between the two sometimes, the way that she would switch between French and English.  

French is her mother tongue, English the language that she learned as a young girl and spoke for most of her adult life living in New York City. And Louise, in her writings, her psychoanalytic writings, but her diaries as well, would switch fluidly between the two languages, sometimes within a single sentence, sometimes even transmogrifying English verb stems with French endings and so forth.  

So I think it was a very unconscious process. And drawing was, I think, similarly unconscious for Louise. You know, it gave an immediacy of release that she didn’t always achieve through the sculpture, which was more laborious. There was more resistance in the material. And often, you know, I think, accomplished what Freud described as the central goal of psychoanalysis, which is to drag the, you know, to make the unconscious conscious. I think it was a making conscious of a lot of the, you know, the underlying traumas and impulses and drives in Louise’s inner psychic landscape. So in the picture from the salon you see Louise is sitting at that, a butcher block table which over the years became soaked with red gouache from the gouaches that she had made.  

We have seven wonderful gouaches that you can see in the Tank, of immersive scenes of a baby feeding on a mother’s breast. And I think, you know, Louise would, you know, when she was not working, would sometimes begin to write as a way of alleviating I mean, she sometimes had recourse to the verbal realm because it was the best way for her to express what she was experiencing.  

But Louise wrote voluminously throughout her life. She kept diaries from an early age. The earliest diary we have at The Easton Foundation is from 1923, when she was a girl of 11 years old. And what’s startling is how consistent that voice is with the mature Louise of, you know 95 years old. And the diaries run up until 2005 and Louise also made a number of psychoanalytic writings which are distinct from the diaries in that Louise wrote them mostly on loose sheets rather than in a bound book, in a bound diary. And they were made in direct response to her immersion in psychoanalysis. But I think we’ll get into that in more detail soon. 

Justin Paton: Yeah, we will. Thanks, Phil. And Léa, the subtitle of your book is ‘The artist as writer’ and we’re familiar with this idea of – and of course it’s mortifying for curators when artists turn out to be far better writers than any curator could hope to be – but, you know, you think of Van Gogh’s amazing letters, I mean, a painter like Philip Guston wrote like an angel … How do you see Louise’s writings in relation to her body of work, because in those cases the writing is seen as something discreet, it’s a parallel stream, a commentary upon … is that the case with Louise, or do you see Louise’s writings as art? Please tell us.  

Léa Vuong: Well, what’s interesting and quite unique, I think, about Louise Bourgeois’s writings is the way that it both exists kind of parallel or marginally to her artworks and, you know, she has writings where, which have been published or which are private where she sort of, that kind of explain the process of her art-making or can be used as documentations for her art-making.  

But she also, you know, as the exhibition shows, integrates writing within her artwork and she also writes text, you know, for instance He Disappeared into Complete Silence, the tales that accompany this artwork are written by Louise Bourgeois. I guess in my research and in the work that I do with Bourgeois, I’m a literary scholar, so I do look at Louise Bourgeois from that perspective. 

And there are several things that I think make Louise Bourgeois a writer. Well, firstly, the fact that she writes, and she writes so much and so extensively, that she writes in different forms but also that she doesn’t write … she doesn’t use words transparently, that she’s kind of constantly aware of the struggle that it means to be, to use a word and of the kind of limitations of verbal language and it’s something that she plays with, that she struggles with. And in a sense, even though that might seem paradoxical, this is what, for me, makes her a writer. It’s that sort of constant interplay with language, rather than just using language as a mode of communication.  

It’s making something out of the language and also something that makes her a writer, on top of the fact that she writes so much is that she was a reader and that she read, and that books, both in their very physical aspect, books as objects, but also books as things that, where you read words, were so important to her. And so that’s also what makes her a writer and the kind of intertextural connections with other writers that are present in her writings.  

Justin Paton: I mean you talk about her using language in an almost sculptural way and without being able to place the quotes exactly you know, am I right in saying that Louise, she often spoke of words as wounding, as sharp, she seemed to have this intense sense of the physicality of language, it’s wounding potential, it’s power. I mean, does that ring true to you, Phil?  

Philip Larratt-Smith: It does, yeah. I think Louise would say ‘ridicule kills’. And she felt that, you know, words were double-edged. They could, you know, they could hurt you, they could help you. And I think it’s, I mean, to hold on what Léa was saying, if you were to go upstairs in Louise’s house, from the salon image we saw, you’d see an extensive library. And the titles would range from things like, you know, French literature. Louise had a classical French education and was very, very, very well read. A lot of psychoanalytic literature – which doesn’t come as a surprise – books about women’s rights, books about the feminist movement, self-help books, cookbooks. I mean, Louise read extremely widely and eclectically. And she would use that knowledge as you know, in a pragmatic way. I mean, Louise was not interested in, there’s nothing show off-y about Louise’s writing.  

When she brings in a reference, it’s really because this is the best way for her to express something, but you know, she had particular favourites in her reading, you know, she liked fables where animals were, you know, given the attributes of humans, as in the fables of [Jean de] La Fontaine, and you know, there are a number of different titles that, you know, in French literature, she liked Molière, she liked, you know, the great classic dramatists, but again, it was something that, I think as Michael [Brand] said last night when he introduced the show, art is for Louise, art was about life. It was not about art. And, you know, this was material that was interesting only insofar as it could help her to address the problems of the day, to help her to get through the day. And so it always had that pragmatic function for her, whether it was something more polished, like a parable and He Disappeared into Complete Silence, you could see it’s more sculptural in a way, since it’s paralleled with those early etchings or you know, even a more finished and complete artist statement from later on from an interview.  

Justin Paton: I think your invocation of that upstairs space, and the kind of language that is pocketed around Louise’s home, and I recall visiting with our Foundation group [Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation] in 2015 and Jerry actually just sort of, you know, pulling a diary off a shelf and opening it up, you know, there it was, you know, as if Louise had written it that morning. 

But there was a rather remarkable moment in that kind of uncovering of literary knowledge within the house in the 2000s. And this is I think an image of one of the one ... am I right Philip, of the trunks of psychoanalytic writings. So can you tell us a little bit about this discovery? 

Philip Larratt-Smith: There was the first larger cache of psychoanalytic writings that was discovered, that came to light in 2004. It was tucked up high in the salon space that we saw first. And her long-time assistant Jerry Gorovoy came across them. These were writings that she had kept when she was in psychoanalysis, never intended for publication. They consist mostly of dream recordings, process notes, which are notes that the analysand makes during the analytic session to record his or her reaction to the analysis, notes about sculptures, she would look back retroactively at works that she had made and interpreted them in light of what she had, you know, found out about herself in the analysis, a whole range and it was really revelatory for us because Louise made a first body of sculpture called the Personages – which you’ll see in the second gallery upstairs – from 1946 to 1954, more or less and she reemerged with a new body of sculpture, which you’ll see in the third gallery, which consisted mostly of poured forms and soft materials like latex and plaster, completely distinct from the Personages. 

And then there was this kind of grey area in between that was uncharted. And thanks to this, we knew that Louise had been in psychoanalysis, but we didn’t know exactly how often she went, what it consisted in, and maybe most importantly, what her reactions to that were, how it fit into the story of her art-making. And I think it’s safe to say that, you know, during this period, Louise didn’t complete any works from 1955 to 1960. She may have been working a little bit in the studio, but nothing completed. And the psychoanalytic writings in a sense took the place of the creative process for her. And I think that’s why they have such an intensity, sometimes a sculptural weight, where it’s as if all of her plastic talents have been applied to, you know, using language to try to dig deeper into herself. 

And I think that the encounter with psychoanalysis was profound for Louise, for all her discontents with it, she began by loving her analyst, then hating her analyst, then wanting to get away from her analyst, and then wanting to see him again. And it was, it was, like a lot of things in Louise’s art, it was a very ambivalent relationship that she had to the process, but it profoundly marked her. And I think, you know, in many ways she saw through psychoanalysis what art-making had been for her in embryo and what it could be for her going forward, a way of, as she said, ‘art is a guaranty of sanity.’ Art is a way of shoring up your sanity and of, you know, on a pragmatic level, whatever works, it’s a way of getting through the day. 

And the second cache, just to finish with the story of the discovery of the writings, it came to light in 2010. I was working at that time as Louise’s literary archivist and I approached her with the idea of publishing them, you know, and of course I would never have done it without her permission. But Louise was very, I mean, at that point was very free and she felt there was nothing wrong with, with making them public. They are extremely intimate; she talks about her family relationships in, you know, very intimate detail. She depicts her dream recordings and, you know, she analyses them in light of her sculpture but that was really a, I think a real revelation for all of us who are scholars of Bourgeois’s work.  

Justin Paton: So I brought up on screen one such writing from the 1950s and this is a kind of dream recording which relates to her husband, Robert. And this is one of the writings which Jenny Holzer, the American artist, in a wonderful addition to our Tank project, has selected, animated, orchestrated, and projected like these kind of emanations from the unconscious on the walls of the Tank. 

And, you know, looking at these images, which of course Jenny, Léa, has set these, you know, it’s added new enjambement, you know, new line breaks which does draw out an affinity with poetry. For you as a literary scholar, and not that we have to find a category to put these things in, maybe their uncategorisability is what makes them interesting, but where do you place them in the landscape of literary production? I mean are they prose, are they poetry, are they archival only?  

Léa Vuong: So I just wanted to come back as well to that period, which is, you know, when it comes to the relationship between Louise Bourgeois and writing is central and as you know, Philip has mentioned, it was also a period of kind of pause in her sculptural practice. And that period also corresponds to a period of three years at the end of the 1950s where she opened a bookstore, Erasmus Books and Prints. And where she kind of, there weren’t – from what I understand, reading the archives and her note from that time – there weren’t many customers and I think also Louise Bourgeois perhaps liked that and just kind of shooed them away but she, but again just to come, coming back to that idea that the relationship, the practice of writing is also a relationship with books and a physical one in the case of Erasmus Books and Prints where she would write in, like amongst the books that she collected for and that were present in the shop. 

But to come back to your questions about the status of her writings, I think as you say, there’s no sort of one category within which we can put them. It’s interesting to see how her, the kind of ambiguous border or blurry border between her private and now archival writings and the writings that are present in the artworks or now published. And it’s interesting to see how, you know, a text, for instance, like the puritan, a work like the puritan which was published in 1990 was actually a text from 1947 and you find all these kind of you know preceding texts to the texts that are then used but  looking at her writings and kind of I’m trying to find ways to discuss them in comparison with other writers.  

There is something to be said about prose poetry and you know, the writings of the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who wrote prose poems and who kind of modernised or, you know, invented modernity but also kind of modernised poetry. There’s a resemblance there as well in the way that Louise Bourgeois always comes back to this kind of intermingling of senses in her more poetic writings, it’s something that is present in Baudelaire and, you know, she admired his work and that’s a way of finding affinities with other writers.  

Philip Larratt-Smith: And one thing I would add about both of these dreams have a very charged, psychosexual encounter. I mean, this one about the dogs on the bed. Oh, have we changed forward? Oh no, okay, good. No, that’s really almost like the child witnessing the primal scene in psychoanalytic literature, coming in upon the parents having sex and not being able to comprehend it because, you know, the child doesn’t have the knowledge of what this act represents and mistaking it for a murder. And in both dreams, either Louise or her husband retreat into writing as a way of imposing some kind of order on the chaos of the emotions that are triggered by this event. 

And I think that’s also quite revealing about what writing meant for Louise. That writing was an ordering process, a way of setting her thoughts in order. When she didn’t understand something, it was a withdrawal into the self as well.  

Justin Paton: And I’m bringing up on screen now, sorry, we should have positioned these chairs slightly further forward, but this is another text, just a typeset version of a text which scrolls up the wall in the Tank, which begins, ‘The beast and me’, and it’s a text which is characterised by some sort of wonderfully meaty imagery, there’s vernacular language, there’s classical references. And it was, you know, as Philip was sharing these texts, I was totally struck by the kind of, like a pre-echo, in a way, of things that are happening in literature in the 1960s. I think particularly of poets such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, you know, the confessional writers, I think of Sylvia Plath’s poem Daddy, or phrases like, you know, ‘there is no mercy in the glitter of cleavers’. How do you see Louise in relation to, to writers such as that, Philip? And indeed, I’m interested to know whether she has ever been, you know, connected with or contextualised alongside them as a writer.  

Philip Larratt-Smith: It’s interesting you mention that, because we had a scholar come in the last couple of years to do research into the connections between Louise’s writings and probably not of her art and Sylvia Plath. So I think there is, I mean, obviously Plath wouldn’t have known of Louise’s writings and probably not of her art, and I’m not sure that, I think Louise had a copy of Ariel on her bookshelf, but it’s you know, there was clearly something that they were both going through in this kind of, you know, coming up against the confines of domestic femininity at the time and having this very hard line, hard-bitten view of reality that, this is, I mean, to build on what Léa said, I think this, all the senses are sort of brought into play in Louise’s writings. 

In the previous dream, you say, ‘when he talks, it smells of semen’, here you have this iconography of raw meat. These are things that Louise actually liked to eat, but through her analysis became to identify with her father. So that when she was eating them, she was acting out this kind of, you know, paternal identification, and the classical reference at the end, Medea, to break one’s own sculptures. 

I know from … Louise could destroy works. We have a video in the basement where we see Louise pushing over Nature study, and it gives her great pleasure to do this. Her destructive impulses couldn’t always be contained and this, she’s obviously relating this mythologically to the figure of Medea. Medea threatens to kill her own, kill the children as revenge on Jason for abandoning her for another woman. So it speaks to Louise’s jealousy and it speaks to this idea of kind of taking revenge on someone else by harming yourself, so it’s a very loaded writing.  

Justin Paton: So let’s look at what happens as some of these words begin to attach themselves to images and to artworks, or be folded into them. And Léa, you’ve invoked this wonderful early illustrated book, He Disappeared into Complete Silence from 1947. We already see how wonderful Louise’s titles are, whether they’re long and elusive, such as this one or blunt and ferocious, such as Shredder, one of my favourite titles in the exhibition. But Léa, tell us a little bit about this book, which is sort of, it almost makes me think of, if a storybook were, if a children’s book were written for adults, this is what it might be like.  

Léa Vuong: Yeah, I mean, He Disappeared into Complete Silence is a really important artwork and for Louise Bourgeois’s oeuvre, it’s often seen as her kind of transition into sculpture, and which kind of exists in drawing forms here, but also in textual forms and it’s interesting to me, reading the text especially, because the language and the style that she uses is so particular.  

It’s very neutral, very simple, as you say, you know, like a children’s book, it uses very simple words. There’s also a kind of, kind of Franglish melody to the writing I find, with the repetition of, you know, if a French person speaks English, they will say ‘the’ a lot, because we use definite articles a lot in French, and so there is a kind of, that kind of Franglish worked into the writing, and you know, one of Louise Bourgeois archival writings, I don’t have the date in mind now, but she writes about her right to defend her Franglish and to write in that way, there’s also, I mean, you were talking about kind of references and influences when she writes He Disappeared into Complete Silence, it’s also around the same time that the French writer Albert Camus, who wrote The Stranger, which came to New York, gave a few talks to the kind of Francophone community and his publication in English of The Stranger had just come out. And there’s, you know, that particular text is known for having this kind of neutral, detached style. It might be a possible kind of influence or reference in the text.  

Justin Paton: And I mean, I love ‘the right to defend Franglish’. You know, that’s certainly a phrase that should be on a t-shirt in our shop. But there is a wonderful 1975 interview with Louise. It’s a black and white interview and she’s expressing her total distaste for the male surrealists and she said ... There’s a word she uses which I don’t think has an equivalent in English and French, but it is the perfect word. She said, ‘I disliked their pontificality’, you know, which is such a great name, a way of describing the surrealists. 

But Léa, you have, you know, looking at this piece, one of the striking things about it, and you’ll see this as you read it in the exhibition, is the sense of a disjunct between the text and the images. It’s not as though the illustrations really illustrate what you are seeing. And that makes me think too of the that kind of charged and sometimes oblique relationship between the title of Louise’s artworks and the artworks themselves. And you’ve selected a – and again apologies, it’s hard for us to lean forward and see it – a writing in which Louise reflects on the role of titles. So what is it about this that fascinates you?  

Léa Vuong: I thought this example is interesting because it also shows the kind of, the visuality of her handwriting and the way that, you know, the text kind of flows and then breaks. So it’s a good example of that. It’s also a good example of how she would, Philip was mentioning how she switches from French to English to that Franglish that she sometimes uses as well. And I like it because it also, if you read what she writes there, it also contains this kind of, you know, ambiguity, kind of in between state that makes her writing so interesting and you know, she says simultaneously that, you know, she writes her titles in French and that it’s important to her, but then she later on says or writes, ‘But it actually doesn’t matter because you know, the titles don’t matter.’ 

So there’s the kind of that ambivalence between valuing words, but also kind of rejecting them or kind of responding to their limitations is really interesting. And I think it also kind of highlights or illustrates the, that dual relationship and that dual love for both the country that she worked in and lived in and the city that she worked in and lived in, but also her attachment to French culture that remained throughout her life and is visible.   

Justin Paton: You know, hearing Louise say that titles may not matter, but they sort of might matter as well, makes me think about the power of her writing and how, really how, what a force it exerts upon you when you are trying to understand Louise. And in fact, some of our volunteer guides, it may be, and this person may be in the room with us, said to me the other day, ‘Oh my God, if I find another fascinating interview with Louise on YouTube, I’m going to scream!’, you know, because she was such a fascinating speaker. 

She had such a great way with language. When you are down in the Tank, you will hear her voice, its cadences. They are lulling and fascinating so you sense how language was a kind of magnetic force used by this small but intense and powerful and hypersensitive and hyperintelligent person.  

But I’m really interested in how both of you feel about this body of work which is so densely bound with narrative, you know, and to what extent Louise has steered the conversation through the power of her commentary upon it or to what extent we need to kind of prise the work free of it. Phil. 

Philip Larratt-Smith: Well, I think Louise was a master storyteller and she often compared herself to Scheherazade. You know, she felt that she, upon pain of death, she had to retell the story of her life over and over again every ... It was an existentialist thing, and another one of the writings that Jenny has projected in the basement, she alludes to the myth of Sisyphus, a figure that rolls the ball to the top of the hill and then is helpless when it rolls back down. She felt that this was essentially the plight of the artist, and to your point about the surrealists, she never liked being associated with the surrealists because she felt that their you know, their exploration of psychoanalysis in particular, but just that the unconscious in general was mostly literary and narrative. It was depicting something rather than incarnating it. And she felt that what she was doing in her work was to incarnate a form from the unconscious in a very direct and immediate, raw, and visceral way.  

She much preferred the existentialist. She preferred Albert Camus. She loved the story of the man who beats his dog because he loves it so much. I mean, she was very attached to these kind of very uncomfortable truths about our emotional world. And, no, I think that it’s, I mean this is part of Louise’s strength as a writer too. It’s really a parallel body of work, and I, I think, you know, I’d like to underline the fact that the writings never really explain Louise’s work, they just shed these glancing views on it but you could also gain something by looking at the work and then going back and reading the writing. I mean, they really are kind of feeding off of each other, you know. And, you know, there are artists who write brilliant expositions of what they’re doing. I think of Mike Kelly or you know, Jeff Wall, people who are formidably intelligent, but they’re writing in a more academic register. Louise is really much more of a kind of, I mean, I hesitate to say writer’s writer, but it is very much, you know, everything [but] the kitchen sink in order to express herself.  

Justin Paton: And for you Léa, you know, you’re deep in manuscripts, I believe, for your book. As someone studying Louise’s writing, have you had to sort of disenchant yourself from the power of Louise’s voice, from the kind of persuasive charismatic force of her statements?  

Léa Vuong: Yeah, I think, you know, just as Louise Bourgeois, you can see it in her writing that she was deeply aware of, you know, the limitations of verbal language. She was also deeply aware of its kind of persuasive and seductive power and, you know, there’s something to be said about the act of reading that, you know, even if you go, if you’re in a very busy exhibition, and there are many people around you, if you’re reading something, if you’re reading a sentence, that sentence is for you, it’s in your head, and it’s, it’s a kind of one-on-one relationship.  

So that I think, to kind of unlock that power of writing, and that seductiveness of writing, and to understand and to place it within a visual context is a, you know, it’s kind of using that, that power of language. But to come back to this idea of the narrative and the myth that she created and somewhat imposed through writing, if you think of the Child Abuse text [Child Abuse: A Project by Louise Bourgeois] that was published in conjunction with the 1992 MoMA exhibition, there’s a sense that, you know, with Bourgeois kind of states, you know, everything that I do is about my early life, and this is kind of the framework within which to read the work.  

So there is a sense of, you know, if you’re studying the writings, to have a kind of distance with that and to see how it’s produced and to kind of not take it apart but kind of understand the way that it’s constructed, but even though her myth is so autobiographical, so intimate, so personal, it is kind of also shaped and weaved in with universal myth that we’re all kind of, you know, made with as well. You mentioned Medea and, you know, there’s all these classical references but kind of universal ones. So that, I think, participates again in that kind of seductive aspect of her work.   

Justin Paton: And Philip, how about in Louise’s own daily interactions? Because, you know, you shared the wonderful detail the other day that when an interviewer would visit Louise and the interviewer came, you know, with a recording device and asked questions, Louise would also run a recording device to keep track of the conversation and sometimes insist that the interviewer literally roll the tape back and remove a question that she did not like. So she’s someone who’s acutely aware of the kind of, you know, how charged that verbal exchange can be with someone.  

A long-winded sort of question, but you know, how is she deploying language day to day as she works out the business of being a famous artist who’s also trying to have that, to enter the space of the spell and have time of her own?  

Philip Larratt-Smith: I mean, I think, you know, Louise felt that she had the right to, you know, it was her turf. These were her symbols. She said, ‘I need my memories, they are my documents.’ And so, in a way, she felt that, you know, she has the right to tell the story of her life. And she was concerned often with the journalists, like, ‘No, you take the question out.’ You know, ‘I don’t want to have … ' Even, like, not to answer the question is a way of answering the question. So, it’s unfair to leave it in. But, you know, Louise was also ... she spoke very freely. And in a lot of ways, I think a lot of the work is like a spiral, where she keeps spiralling back to the same concerns, the same themes, the same preoccupations. You see that also in the writing, and I think, again, I mean, you know, in the 1994–95, Louise had terrible insomnia throughout her life, and it would ebb and flow, but sometimes it was ferocious, particularly towards the end of her life. 

But in the 1990s, there was a very bad bout in 1994–95 and Louise produced what are now known as the Insomnia Drawings. And these are writings that Louise would make in the middle of the night, and they really are these double writings and drawings at the same time. It’s a fascinating body of work. And I think that again, you know, the shuttling – I mean, this is really a subject for someone’s doctoral dissertation – but what does it mean for Louise to switch from writing and drawing? You know, what is the unconscious shift that’s taking place? Is she shifting between conscious and unconscious, between the maternal and paternal? 

Like, you know, there’s a lot to dig into. But I think also Louise felt, you know, we have films of Louise in this show. The one in the ‘day’ section is Louise very much in control. And the one of the film in the basement of Louise retelling the tangerine episode shows Louise losing control, losing control of her emotions and starting to cry because of the, you know, the trauma that returns to her through the retelling of the story. And so, you know, I think that’s another, there’s a kind of double-edged thing where Louise was I mean, all of the work, in a sense, is like a restaging of past trauma and a way of, you know, an attempt to exorcise it. 

But she also wants to hold on to it because there’s something in it that makes her who she is. And even the people that she attacks, like, let’s take the father. I mean, she loved her father to death and she did not, you know, making a work like The Destruction of the Father, which I think we’ll discuss in a minute, was a way of holding on to him at the same time that she was trying to get rid of him.  

Justin Paton: And you’ll see how that 45 minutes are definitely not going to do justice to this subject. But here is the work that Philip describes,The Destruction of the Father, and loving your father to death is a great way of describing this work, and Léa, I wonder if from your perspective as someone who writes about the writing, can you, you know, introduce our audience to this work, which is, you know, we’ve included because it really takes us to the other extreme. I mean, it seems to be a work in which language, you know, the trappings of social protocols and niceties has just been burned through and we’re in some other space, a space beyond or beside language.  

Léa Vuong: It’s a really interesting work in relation to language, because as you say, it’s about the destruction of language, or the destruction of the power of language. I think she, the kind of story around this work in particular, I think she uses that same word, ‘pontifier’ so sort of the memory of, you know, the father kind of sitting and you know, talking and having to be listened to and the ideas that we, through this work it’s the destruction of that kind of authority, verbal authority of the father. So yes, a work that kind of destroys language, but I would also argue that it’s also a work that kind of harks back again to these myths that we’re all aware of. It’s a work that always made me think of, you know, the famous Goya painting, being kind of Saturn devouring his son, so it’s kind of like an inside out version of that. We’re kind of seeing within, you know, the inside of Saturn’s mouth, but it’s also about, not about a father eating his own son, but about the cannibal act against a father. The fact that these references exist, it is a kind of narrative, because you kind of, it’s based on this family anecdote but also on this larger narrative that we all, you know, live with and that we all use to kind of understand and position ourselves in the world.  

Philip Larratt-Smith: And it’s interesting that this work had one title and then Louise changed it later on. It was originally called The Evening Meal, a very deadpan title of, you know, father comes home, father is pompous, children kill him and eat him. And, you know, then it becomes The Destruction of the Father which is pitched at a much more, I think more in sync with the feminist tendencies at the time, but also I think it is this idea of and Louise would later say ‘the destruction of the father, the reconstruction of the father.’ So, you know, to eat someone is to incorporate them. It’s in a sense to identify with them and it’s to make them part of you. It’s to live, make them live forever. So it’s always a double movement.  

Justin Paton: And can you talk a little more about those moments where Louise is reaching for something that seems unsayable, unnameable, you know, this idea of the formless. Because the more time I spend in the Tank, the more things that I thought I knew what they were, I thought I knew what they looked like are suggesting other things to me. So there’s a .. much as Louise was a master and a controller of language, is there a sense in which sculpture was also a way of going to another place, which was sort of ex-linguistic, if I’m going to be pretentious about it?  

Philip Larratt-Smith: Yeah, I think in a way there, sometimes a narrative is indicated at the same time that it’s blocked and so there’s an indication of what something is about but then it still remains opaque to us what the contents of that might be. Like if you take a piece like Fillette, which is a hanging latex work, it’s called Fillette because Fillette is French for little girl, but it looks like nothing so much as a hanging phallus. And yet, the longer you look at it, the less like a phallus it appears. The more you see other features begin to emerge and you see the foreskin is actually like a collar and that was the reference that Louise introduced into it. And so, I think there is this sense in which, you know, Louise was very clever and very playful in the way that she used language.  

You know, she could point you in one direction, but also she could use language to mislead you at the same time, or to kind of trick you. So, that’s, I mean, just coming back in general to your question, I think, you know, if you take something like the Sadie episode, which was told in Child Abuse, that Léa referred to, this was one among many childhood traumas that Louise had and there’s no question that it was a very traumatic incident for her. But when Louise told that story at the time of her MoMA retrospective in 1982, which was really this watershed moment in the recognition of her significance as an artist, that kind of dominated, it took over and dominated the narrative. And it, you know, has become this kind of catch all, this heuristic to explain what the work is about as if any artist’s work can just be reduced to like a rosebud moment. And, you know, this is for b etter and for worse. It speaks to the power of Louise’s storytelling and, you know, just how seductive it can be.  

But to use the title of the slideshow that the Art Forum article is based on, it was also partial recall. It’s not the complete truth. It is a truth that it is absolutely true in that moment. But there are complexities that come up through, you know, from the study of the psychoanalytic writings that complicate the stories that Louise often tells us.  

Justin Paton: Yeah, and I think that note about the misdirection and also the wit, I mean, the wicked wit, and we’re sitting here being quite serious, Louise had a totally mischievous sense of humour and a wonderfully sharp tongue, you saw the image earlier on, you know, ‘I have been to hell and back, and let me tell you, it was wonderful’, which would be one way to go out, but even in that work The Destruction of the Father I think there is, alongside the seriousness and the horror and the macabre qualities of that piece, there is a sense of absurdism and a gleeful relish.  

And Louise did say that she felt like a different person after making it, you know, as though she had been refreshed or revivified. But perhaps as a final moment, an image to leave you with, if I can get this to advance. Where are we? Can you guys at the back just jump ... probably two slides forward? We might have frozen. 

At any rate, let me paraphrase what you’re going to see. It’s another writing from the 1950s and it’s one in which a handwritten sheet, you know, it looks like Louise has written it in haste. And it’s a litany of failures that concludes with a triumph and it’s a list which says, ‘I have failed as a wife, I have failed as a hostess’ and rolls out the number of ways in which Louise did not fulfil the roles that were being expected of her, and the final line is, ‘I have not failed as a truth seeker’, and I’m sure that those of you who find your way into the show and really unfold everything that’s in there will find yourself agreeing. So, I would ask you to please join with me in thanking our two fantastic panellists. 

(applause)