In her most recent novel, Parade, Rachel Cusk defines Louise Bourgeois’s sculptures as “the special insanity of the female body… Everything that is denied and suppressed in femininity, everything that remains darkly continuous behind its volcanic cycles of change and yet is unknown.” Bourgeois herself, on the other hand, famously stated, “I don’t know what art made by a woman is.”
As a boy, I’d been agitated at the mere whisper of sleep. That I must submit each sunset to paralytic captivity seemed unconscionable. And I would remain bolt-supine, eyes bulging from their sockets, in denial of the procedure until it overwhelmed me and I involuntarily gave in.
My dreams revealed another world. A quiet, Bourgeoisian plane, where skin developed pits and shiny, fungal growths. Where cloudy, blind arachnids scuttled without sound and contortions out of space writhed through my unsolid self, combining into endless variations of me, inky and pulped.
In the eighties, Bourgeois described her Cells installation series as “different types of pain; physical, emotional and psychological, mental and intellectual… Each Cell deals with a fear. Fear is pain… Each Cell deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at.”
Perhaps, by Cusk’s interpretation, my jejune reveries revealed a latent desire to inhabit the body of a woman. Or rather, I could feel the divine feminine flowing inherently over me and didn’t want that to be seen. Dialectically speaking, I probably wanted both. And neither. Bourgeois might have put things more simply: I, one with a collective (un)consciousness, was only terribly afraid.
-David Fishkind