Project 3:

Site, Place, and Installation

Louise Bourgeois

&
Maya Lin

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois is an artist who creates art, which truly expresses her emotions, specifically those of fear, torture, the mind and darkness.

She was born in Paris, France in 1911 and it was her mother who first introduced her to the world of art. Her early life was shaped by politics, socialism, anti- clericalism and death. Having family members injured in the World War I era led her to be dragged to different hospitals and she was thus exposed to the horror of the wounded at a very young age.

When she began to work as a member of staff at the Louvre, after the war, she saw many staff members who had been injured in the war, and is still haunted by seeing so many This becomes a theme in many of her works, and she is extremely fascinated with the body and this the limbless body and the presence of bodiless limbs.
Some of the artists that had a great influence on her included André Breton and Fernand Léger. Léger in particular taught her how to channel complex human emotions with minimal use of line. He also saw her increased interest in three-dimensional work, and encouraged her to indulge in sculpture making.

Louise Bourgeois herself said, “"I could not be a painter. The two dimensions do not satisfy me. I have to have the reality given by the third dimension."

When World War II struck, Bourgeois was once again affected by war through her family members. Her brother suffered shell shock after enlisting in the French army and was constantly in and out of institutions.

"My relation to the war appears in the work by the use of black, the black of the war, which was the black of mourning.... What the war meant to me was that suddenly, and this was documented by dozens of drawings, I saw everything in black, black coffins, black legs, black people. It was the deep mourning of the war, it is as simple as that."

Bourgeois’ art began to develop some of that fear and death which were feeding off of the war. She created a series of works later on, which reflected her feelings at the time. Her works included Femme Maison, which depict female bodies fused with architectural structures while being trapped inside and at the same time, breaking fee. These pieces reflect her role as a woman during the masculine battles of the years she grew up in.
In 1947, she created large sculptures made of wood and metal called Personages. These were tall structures, which tapered down onto a small narrow point and seem to lean on one another. These, described by Bourgeois herself, were said to represent her family leaning on one another during the war. These could also, however, stand for the Holocaust victims of the war coming out of the camps, or people leaning on one another to endure the war.

Select works of Bourgeois also reflect the civil rights movement, such as Noir Veine (1968) and Colonnata (1968), which feature predominant black features and dark figures moving towards a common enemy.

She had continued to create art. One of her more recent works is Couple IV (1997) and shows a headless couple making love, however, there is an emotional distance between these embracing figures. Bourgeois based this sculpture on an experience she had when she was much younger, while walking in on her parents having sex and feeling confusion and naivety

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Louise Bourgeois is a sculptor who has the power to sculpt the psychological space, and create an emotion within a space that all present can feel and experience. She creates a new space within an environment for the viewer to enter. For example, Precious liquids (1992) is an installation piece in which the viewer is allowed to enter. It is modeled after a cedar water tank found on the roofs of New York City used for collecting “Precious Liquids.” In Bourgeois’s eyes, these liquids are blood, milk, sperm, and tears, which she incorporates into the piece. The insides are completely empty of humans, yet there are elements of human traces inside, such as garments and furniture, while water pools into the bed in the center. The adult coat and the child garment inside represent the same theme of a father and child which is seen in other works of hers.

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Maya Lin

 

Maya Lin showed talent from a young age, where she was proficient in math and art skills. She attended Yale University and had to decide whether to continue in architecture or sculpture, but not both. She settled on architecture, while quietly taking sculpture classes on the side.

It was in December of 1980 when Maya Lin was given a chance to shine. She won the nationwide contest of designing the Vietnam memorial as an undergraduate student at Yale. Her concept of the memorial was to have a black memorial in the middle of the hill where the memorial would be placed. She had the idea that it was a wound in the hill and that it represented the wound of the loss of all the soldiers that had given up their lives for the war. Her use of the space given was what made her design so successful.
She continued to go on to graduate school at Harvard University, and her design for the Vietnam Memorial became a symbol of history. She continued to design memorials in public spaces, and her next project was a Martin Luther King Memorial.

 

Some of her works are more organic in nature, and involve working in tandem with nature. For example, her work Groundswell at Ohio State University required mass amounts of crushed green glass, in which she used recycled materials. She has been known to sue stone, water, glass, earth, and other recycled materials in her artwork.

Her work The Wave Field is an excellent example of her partnership with nature. In this piece, she has sculpted the earth to create mounds, which, together, create a field representing wavelengths. The inspiration behind this design is the water wave, which creates the waves in the ocean, which Maya Lin recreates with grass. She worked with the space given, and took careful consideration as to what the building nearby was studying, so the field could represent the inside of the building as well.

 

In Somewhere between a line and a walk, she bases her shapes off of the burial mounds of the Hopewell and Adina tribes which used to inhabit Ohio. In conjunction with this idea, Maya Lin took the idea of a basic line drawing and gave it more dimensions as she “drew on the earth.”