In the 1970s Louise Bourgeois became increasingly engaged with a new generation of artists working with installation and performance art. Confrontation (1978) represents an important foray into both disciplines. This video documents the installation of
Confrontation in the Guggenheim Museum and includes archival footage of the first showing of the work at the Hamilton Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1978.
The original installation and performance took the form of a fashion show with a pumping soundtrack in which the models, who were friends of the artist including various art-world luminaries, wore outlandish latex costumes embellished with breastlike protuberances. Onlookers sat or leaned against looming wedge-shaped boxes, which surrounded a rich tableau of latex objects laid out on stretchers.
Confrontation was an early manifestation of the encasing cell structure that would be fundamental to Bourgeois's later installations of the 1990s. The work's confessional tone addresses issues of vulnerability, exposure, and the need for people to confront themselves, issues which, according to Guggenheim Museum Chief Curator Nancy Spector, have always been at the forefront of Bourgeois’s art.
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She studied art at various schools there, including the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she emigrated to the United States and continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York. Though her beginnings were as an engraver and painter, by the 1940s she had turned her attention to sculptural work, for which she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader. Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist artists who immigrated to the United States after World War II, Bourgeois’s early sculpture was composed of groupings of abstract and organic shapes, often carved from wood. By the 1960s she began to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger, more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work—her childhood. She has famously stated “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” Deeply symbolic, her work uses her relationship with her parents and the role sexuality played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand and remake that history. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take—the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade—are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two. Bourgeois’s work is in the collections of most major museums around the world. She lives in New York.
