Tracey Emin on Louise Bourgeois - Women Without Secrets Secret Knowledge

In order to liberate myself from the past, I have to reconstruct it,

ponder about it, make a statue out of it,

and get rid of it through making sculpture.

And I am able to forget it afterwards.

I have paid my debt to the past, and I am liberated.

It was like Louise was holding hands with me.

When I think about the artists that Louise would have known,

these great historical figures, Louise knew these people,

knew these artists.

I don't have much humility.

I'm not going to pretend I do, but in that situation, I really did.

I felt like I was holding the baton of time, in history,

and that Louise was, like, helping me through to next stage of my life.

Louise could have done anything.

Louise could have been a doctor, a scientist...

probably if she was a bit younger, an astronaut.

But she chose to do art.

She could master her materials so well, whether it was a tiny piece

of work on fabric, a small delicate print,

or these giant monumental sculptures -

some of her bronzes are like colossal.

There was no doubt that a woman made that work

and I think that's very inspiring.

And I think Louise is probably one of the greatest artists

in the last, like, two centuries.

When I look at Louise's work, or when I talk about Louise's work,

I don't talk from a point of view of someone that's well-read

or I'm learned on the subject of Louise Bourgeois.

For me, I just have a natural response to the work

and it's what I feel like when I look at it.

This is the first piece of work of Louise Bourgeois'

that I want to talk about.

A lot of people probably expect me to talk about the sewn works,

or the figurative works, but this one in this exhibition

in Edinburgh is the one that really interests me.

It's called 'Poids' which actually means in French 'weights'.

The whole thing is counter-levered.

Here, you have all the weights, which are really, really, really

heavy, and this is what retains the balance for the whole piece of work.

And here we have this sort of like spiky,

fragile, kind of chandelier shape going up to the glass balls.

And of course this is very much like a kind of female figure with the

breasts and almost like a womb-like shape with the kind of eggs,

hanging on to it. But the main is, within this work, you would think

it's...like the weights are actually protecting all of this fragility.

And it's this balance thing of Louise Borgeois' work

that really interests me. Everything she did was about balance.

What really I think...you know these little things you have on buildings

to stop birds from landing? That's what this reminds me of.

It's almost like something which could be quite harmful

but yet protective of something.

The eye at the top, as well, looking out.

No matter how simple it is, to me I see a whole, strong,

figurative element that is about balance

and about sustaining something.

And I've heard that if you remove just one these weights,

the whole thing could just fall and crash, which would be horrific.

But that's what Louise was like,

that's what her work was about, about sustaining a kind of fragile

moment, whether it was emotional, or whether it was intellectual.

And for me, in this whole exhibition,

this is the piece of work that I would very much like to have.

You have talked about the making of the work...

Louise, throughout the last 30 years of her life, she would have

these soirees, these tea parties,

and my gallery in New York had promised me a treat.

And I said what I'd really like is to meet Louise Bourgeois.

It's an analogy.

I asked you an explanation and you give me an analogy.

I went into the back parlour where Louise was sitting,

and the first thing that I thought about Louise was that she had

the most ginormous breasts and her hands were on the table,

and she had these really strong hands.

They were almost like an eagle's talons or something.

And I grabbed...

And she looked incredibly formidable and really strong.

And of course, I'd seen photos of her, but seeing her in real

life was really...almost like seeing an entity, not a human being.

I want my work to speak for itself.

And what is it you want it to express? We have to know.

Tell Louise exactly what you wanted.

It's about the torment of being an artist.

The torment? Yes.

But it's absurd! It's not a torment to be an artist.

Yes, it is. The premise is idiotic.

It is not a torment to be an artist, it is a privilege!

These works, 'Triptych For The Red Room',

I hadn't actually seen before until the other day.

I might have seen them in the book but I'd never seen them for real.

When I first looked at them, they kind of looked sexual

but I knew they weren't sexual. I knew it was more like a kind of...

not a repulsion but a kind of like joining of something.

As you walked down them, I actually don't really know which order they

go in, but as I walk down them, this figure,

they're kind of entwined

and it kind of looks semi-sexual but it's not.

What we're actually seeing is some kind of hysterical fear

on the female figure's form.

And here, we have Louise's arch of hysteria.

And this also looks like a very surrealist, kind of dream-like

erm, unreal situation too.

These figures are kind of suspended away from each other

and she's suspended within time,

and they're not together.

And in this one, which is really interesting,

this is definitely a boy.

This is not a man, this is a boy.

And now you can really understand that it's the form of the mother.

And so with this, it's kind of like tricky subject matter

that she's dealing with.

She's actually responding to how it feels to be a mother,

and maybe the repulsion of the child,

and wanting to distance herself from the child.

But yet you've got this thing where she's completely joined

as well, and so close and bound up.

It's Louise dealing with, like, a kind of emotional, er...

psychotic reaction to something

and trying to deal with it within her work.

'Spider' for me was something romantic.

I could imagine people saying "meet me underneath the spider",

like you'd go on this fantastic date

and then you get that idea of the spider

devouring you or getting caught up in its web.

I mean it is a mother and it's got the egg, it's got a marble egg

in there, but this one's really like a mechanical spider.

Like something out of some Mad Max kind of film or something.

It's quite scary.

So this was like the really beautiful book that was made

about the collaboration, 'Do Not Abandon Me'.

Many different images, but the main thing is that the subject matter

is male and female images.

And even though these look kind of sexual,

it's actually about this tiny female figure, actually paying homage

to this giant male figure. Almost like a God.

I did the drawing over the top, Louise did the watercolours.

'I Lost You' - this is about losing children, losing life.

You know, whether or not it's abortion, miscarriages.

You know, my grandmother told me this thing - she said,

"People in your life expect...you kind of expect maybe your husband

"to die, or your parents to die

"but you never expect to bury your children."

And Louise had to bury her son.

So I also think with Louise's subject of abandonment,

there was also not just about her mother abandoning her,

but also her son leaving her to another world.

The interesting thing about the collaboration is that

I could do whatever I liked.

But I thought the images of Louise's were so beautiful

and so perfect, I felt like I didn't need to do anything to them.

That's why it took me two years of deciding what to do.

And the day that I did welcome them, I did them all in the one day

and every single one worked out perfect, as far as I was concerned.

But I had to be in this kind of Zen-like state.

This one is really interesting.

Most people, when they see this one, they can't tell what is me

or what is Louise. And usually people think Louise did the writing

and I drew the figure, but actually it's the other way round.

And that's really what I wanted as well.

I didn't want it to be, erm,

I didn't want anyone to be able to tell what was mine

and what was Louise's.

I wanted the collaboration to look like one person, one work.

But the simplicity of it just works brilliantly.

And when you think about the age gap and the difference Louise and

myself, it really is incredible that it works so easily and so gently.

She turned me into a wild beast, right?

I don't say that I am a wild beast all the time,

but I am a wild beast some of the time.

The frustration, instead of turning into a running away muscular thing,

the frustration was a kind of stiffening like this,

and keeping the resentment inside.

And 25 years later,

I have not come to terms with my resentment which is there...

which is there forever.

Like...

That's it.

Now if you do not let me have the last word once in a while,

then everything goes.

All these drawings are me.

Jerry, you worked with Louise for 30 years from 1980 until she died,

almost every day. You probably knew her better than anybody.

You know, for me, she still remained a mystery until the very end.

I was fascinated with her from my first encounter with her and...

just trying to figure out what makes this woman tick.

And from the very first, I was totally captured by her.

I liked the way she looked, I liked the way she styled herself, I liked

the way that, when she invited me to the house, everything about her.

So this work's called 'Give And Take' and it's actually your hands.

Yeah. A cast of your hands but it's also like the other work,

it actually is about...it's like a seesaw, it's like a balance.

All her work has almost this duality,

of two things co-existing together.

I mean it sounds like a cliche, this idea really of two things

co-existing, and it's sort of a balance, how these two

things co-exist, and it can tip one way or the other.

Do you think, for Louise,

that it was important that it was your hands?

Pretty much everything of Louise is not general.

It's not the body, it's her body, or the body of someone else.

So she used me in a lot of pieces.

'10am', which is about our relationship, erm,

there's a specificity to it.

To the...at least the initial

beginning of a work has to be addressed, really,

to the way she feels. And usually the way she feels

really has to do with the interaction to somebody else.

Louise was one of these people, when she was anxious, she would attack.

At certain times, I'd just arrive at the house

and I could just look her and I know - uh-oh!

This is, you know, a storm brewing, this is going to be a rough day.

But there's fantastic clips of film I've seen of her smashing

plaster casts, smashing things on the floor.

Dishes, everything. Yeah, everything.

She'd start screaming, jumping up and down,

on the floor, just like a tantrum, like a little kid.

I mean, quite juvenile in a way.

I mean, the emotions were so intense and her fear was so intense,

I don't think people realised she was so sensitive

that everything was magnified way beyond proportion.

Which makes sense with her work,

because her work is so emotionally magnified as well.

It's emotional but yet highly intellectual,

and it kind of gets into the nooks and crannies of the mind, you know.

This is a very simple piece of work to look at,

but what it actually stands for and what it signifies is highly complex.

I think it's really beautiful,

and I think Louise made this because she loved you, very much.

Louise was an insomniac.

She would wake up

and she would make these drawings in the middle of the night.

She was always looking into other worlds. The twilight zone.

And you were really good friends with her, not just a curator,

you didn't just work with her on massive shows,

you were good friends with her.

How do you relate the insomnia drawings to the real Louise, or do

you think that was another kind of Louise, like a ghostly Louise?

What was really interesting is that she was very confrontational.

I mean, I was terrified of her.

She would absolutely put me on the spot

and made me feel about an inch high.

And then when I discovered these drawings, they, in a way,

revealed a different kind of Bourgeois.

The Bourgeois that emerged at night, when people had gone.

And they seem to me to kind of exist in...

I think I once called it the slipstream between past and present,

between reality and imagination.

She has a memory of the orange trees in the Luxembourg gardens in Paris,

and somewhere talks to... Worrying about whether they'd survive

the cold winter, because, of course, they have oranges on them.

And you know, so I think that's a reference to that, again.

So memories, really old, you know, memories of a long time ago,

coming back to haunt her at that period.

What is really, really

so overwhelming is the genuine innocence of them.

They weren't done to be seen.

You can really see that when you look at them all,

and it really is like going into her mind. Yes.

I first got to know Bourgeois' work as an artist from the 1950s,

then to rediscover her as a contemporary artist in the '80s

and '90s, still making incredibly young work was extraordinary.

When I came across Louise's work, I thought she was the same age as me.

Yeah, exactly! "Oh, who's this young American artist who makes work that

"I really relate to?" Because, when I first started,

nobody was making working about emotion or about these

so-called embarrassing subjects that you shouldn't be talking about.

And if you were a woman and you kept making constant references,

people say, "Oh, get over it, will you?"

But of course, in life, how you get over things is to readdress them,

revaluate them, and that's constantly what Louise did.

It was her own psychoanalysis through her work.

"I have failed as a wife, as a woman, as a mother, as a hostess, as

"an artist, as a businesswoman, as a friend, as a daughter, as a sister.

"I have not failed as a truth seeker."

And I love that, you know, and it's so Bourgeois.

She kind of failed at everything, but at the really important thing,

which is about integrity, sincerity, truth...

And this is being blatantly honest with yourself.

It's cruel almost, to think that you've failed at so many things.

I think Bourgeois slipped in and out of depression.

And there's an addendum to this - it says "lowest ebb". Oh, no.

She was writing from bleak, black despair.

She lived with an exclusively male household.

She was struggling as an artist.

It was a very male environment in New York in the 1950s.

She hadn't been in America that long.

Erm, she was a French woman, English was her second language.

She was struggling on all fronts.

"I am afraid of silence. I am afraid of the dark.

"I am afraid to fall down.

"I am afraid of insomnia.

"I am afraid of emptiness.

"Is something missing?

"Yes, something is missing and always will be missing.

"The experience of emptiness.

"To miss.

"What are you missing?

"Nothing.

"I am imperfect but I am lacking nothing.

"Maybe something is missing but I do not know,

"and therefore I do not suffer.

"Empty stomach, empty house, empty bottle.

"The falling into a vacuum signals the abandonment of the mother."

Louise, when she was 21, her mother died and lot of her work was

based about her mother and father's relationship.

Even right to the end of her life, she always continuously

reworking these subjects in a very cathartic way.

And I find this a very honest statement, about how you feel

when you feel totally isolated and totally alone.

And what's really amazing and lovely in this,

is Louise is having a conversation with herself.

That's how alone she felt at that time when she wrote this.

And it's so pure and so simple, it's almost looks like an epitaph,

it looks like a eulogy, epitaph...

Something you could almost have on a gravestone,

it's that pure, and that simple and that beautiful.

There's two people here.

There's a very strong person that can deal with the emptiness

and then there's this other person that's questioning it.

And with that, Louise makes a balance with the work again,

and that's why I respond to it so much.

There's nothing schizophrenic about it.

What it is is someone being really, really, brutally honest with themselves,

in a way most people wouldn't want to be.

I indicate my space...

and I put inside my fears.

What is in this space is under my control.

This work's called Janus Fleuri, but I'm not very good on titles.

I've always called this work "That Thing,"

that kind of...you know, it's kind of like an organ,

like something sexual, something physical.

But I could never work out if it was male or female, and for me,

it was like a kind of womb-like shape that had kind of exploded.

It was also very phallic, like a penis is, it was also breast-like.

There was all these things that I saw in it

and the title comes from a Roman god

and a god with two faces.

This again is about the two things going on, the duality,

and it's a duality of male and female,

and you see so many things in this.

But for me, it's about fecundity on a really big level,

it's about this kind of sexual energy of this organ.

It's very tactile, you want to kind of touch it,

and you want to sort of find out more about it and you think...

The most interesting thing about this work

is you think you've seen something like this work before.

You think you might know what it is

but you don't, you really don't know.

This is an organ

invented by Louise's imagination and by Louise's hands.

This is a large series of works,

and they're actually prints, etchings.

And then Louise has painted over the top.

And what's really amazing about this is the size and the energy involved.

And Louise was right at the end of her life when she created these,

and the words are really, really incredibly profound and beautiful.

"I am packing my bags." "I leave the nest."

"Something atrocious must have happened that I don't understand."

How many times in our lives has really terrible things

happened that we didn't understand?

How many times in our life, we felt something's happening

behind the scenes and we just feel awful?

You know, this is what she's dealing with and also all the shapes,

there's nothing aggressive here.

Everything... It's almost like looking into...maybe into her mind,

into her blood, into her body, into her soul.

There's only one purely figurative picture here, of one figure,

but all the rest are like a breakdown of what we are.

"When terror pounces, grips me, I create an image."

So it's almost she responds to the fear, she's ready for the fear.

And then she captures it, she makes something of it.

"Struck by utter revulsion, I do nothing, paralysed,

"immobilised by the horror."

Yet again, it's about being struck by fear

and not being able to do anything, yet Louise is analysing that fear

by actually making work about it.

This is a really strange image, the whole image is very peculiar.

You have like these intestines, this innards

and it's kind of like the body.

But also you've got this strange face with four eyes,

that actually does look quite afraid.

And just walking around this room, you can actually feel the emotion

but it's very beautiful at the same time. It's about fear and beauty.

"I leave my home."

All of these things are about someone who's preparing

themselves for a journey, and not an angry journey,

a journey that she's come to terms with.

Where do you go? Where would anyone go?

Where would someone go at the age of 97?

I think there's only probably one place to go.

Louise did say to me, "Do you have plenty of time?"

But I think it's about how I use it

and how dedicated I am towards that time and seriously I take it.

We've only got one life, we've only got one thing.

I'm lucky enough to have found my vocation, that it's art

and I really shouldn't abuse that in any way, whatsoever.

It's like the world of Louise has kind of opened up to me as well,

and for me to facilitate and use, which is incredibly generous

but I think that's what Louise's intention was.

Work was her main thing, her main focus, her main drive in life

and that's why she was so successful at the end of her life

because that was her ambition, that was her vocation.

So I'm hoping that a bit of that is rubbing off onto me.

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