“Louise Bourgeois x Jenny Holzer” at Kunstmuseum Basel
On this exhibition, Louise Bourgeois’s work is offered by way of Jenny Holzer’s curatorial imaginative and prescient—with an help from Kunstmuseum Basel’s Anita Haldeman—thus drawing parallels between the 2 artists’ use of the written phrase as an artwork kind unto itself. Throughout a press convention, Holzer recalled being marked by Bourgeois’s sculpture Femme Maison, 1982, and assembly the formidable Frenchwoman in particular person within the Nineteen Eighties (“she was not enjoying”). The exhibition’s subtitle—“The Violence of Handwriting Throughout a Web page”—accentuates the forceful cost of self-expression, even when masquerading behind wry humor. Opposite to Holzer—lengthy synonymous with all-caps slogans that telescope societal failings—Bourgeois obsessively mined her inside, confronting want, fury, and trauma although stream-of-consciousness reflections scrawled onto loose-leaf paper and journals, in tandem with psychoanalysis. Her writings took on stark new immediacy when she extracted sure phrases, giving them satisfaction of place on light mail sacks (“I neeD my mEmoRies. THEY ARe my DOCUMENTS”), marble (“THE HOUR IS DEVOTED TO REVENGE”) or lined music paper (“I’m on the opposite facet of despair/and this occurs to me 4 instances a day”). There’s a clear overlap, nonetheless, between Holzer and Bourgeois’s dealing with of textual content: Every deployed it, tactically, to channel seething discontent, albeit towards completely different targets.
Past the 9 galleries devoted to Bourgeois’ work, one can hear a recording of the artist singing “Sur le Pont d’Avignon” within the elevator, whereas the passageway linking the museum’s two separate buildings options the rarely-seen and fairly unnerving Twosome, 1991, a hefty mechanical tank automotive, incandescent with lurid crimson mild, heaving back-and-forth on a monitor. As an add-on, Holzer developed an augmented-reality app, remodeling Bourgeois’s 1974 set up Destruction of the Father right into a digital “expertise,” which frankly looks like one thing Bourgeois would have loathed. Extra fittingly, Holzer positioned a couple of selection Bourgeois works throughout the Swiss museum’s everlasting assortment. A duplicate of the phallic drawing Fillette, 1998, hung subsequent to a codpiece-centric sixteenth-century portrait by Tobias Stimmer, is very memorable.
— Sarah Moroz
