Bourgeois is one of those artists I look to every once in a while as a way to just look without looking to hard. Not to say I can't or won't look critically, but, for me, her work is something to just exist with. To just let tell you a story and to just let flow. With this said, I've been to her retrospective at the Guggenheim twice so far. The first I wandered with sketchbook in hand; the second, I strolled about with the audio guide and just pressed random buttons out of order and tried to make sense of it all.
At some point, Rob Storr says something that struck me. "...architecture of memory..." I can't remember the true context of his little blurb but, I was looking at one of the Femme Maison pieces.For years I've been trying to tackle why I consider the body to be architectural space. It's structure, yes. It contains things, yes. Does it have to do with flow and control? Maybe. How about some semi-romantic nonsense regarding bodies as temples? Probably. But until I heard those words while looking at a house/body draped with cloth, I didn't get it. But I have it now: the body is what houses memory.
Now, considering the relationship of construction and architecture, I would say I am building my space by constructing my identity. And with this, I want to emphasize "I am building" to nod at the performative value of identity and memory. Memory is the key to identity in that I am constantly learning "what is" and "what is not" in order to identify myself as the "is" or "is not" (or more grammatically correct, the "am" and "am not"?). With this constant defining of self and other, memory comes to play with knowing what has been defined, what is being defined and what is redefined. The constant construction of relationships between myself and the other, I must continually remember and actively navigate what is self and what is other.
I must continually build and rebuild my memory's space, my memory's house as my self.
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2 comments:
really nice first post!
one thing that springs to mind is how the idea of body-as-a-house seems to be mined mostly by female artists (at least, that I can think of at this moment). and then, of course, i'm thinking of the traditional role of women as keeper of the house... maybe a projection of some sort of anxiety related to the body... hm...
a constant feature of my own self-understanding and thus by extension my understanding of people in general is the choice between passively letting the architecture of your identity be dented and shaped by all the myriad input around you or to assert purpose and intention and thereby actively cultivate your being. the latter requires a great deal of self-awareness that i tend to feel most people lack. the result is that these people want things and don't understand why they want them, fear things and don't understand why they fear them, etc. when they look at their immensely complex internal architecture, it is difficult for them to recognize their features, and they may come to substitute a simplified, apologetic or aggrandized self-understanding instead. one speaks of "getting one's house in order", so the metaphor of identity as architectural space is natural enough and i think overall it can be illustrative in ways that other identity/memory metaphors are not. maybe?
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