Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play: Louise Bourgeois’s Sculpture, 1947–2000(New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts)

This book considers the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) in light of psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s (1896-1971) radical ideas regarding transitional objects, potential space, and play, offering a model for exploring the complex and psychologically evocative work Bourgeois produced from 1947 to 2000. Critical concepts from British object relational theories – destruction, reparation, integration, relationality and play – drawn from the writings of Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Marion Milner, and Christopher Bollas, among others, bear upon the decades-long study of psychoanalysis Bourgeois brought to her sculptural production that was symbolic, metaphorical, and most importantly, useful. The book demonstrates how Bourgeois’s transformative sculptural objects and environments are invested in object relations, both psychical and tangible, and explores Bourgeois’s contention that the observer physically engage with the intricate sculptural objects and architectural spaces she produced. Each chapter focuses on a key body of work – Femme Maison, Personages, Lairs, Janus, and Cells – examining how these imaginative and playful objects are staged as embodied encounters in space and time to invoke the mutuality, reciprocity, and ambivalence of our object relationships. Weaving a tapestry of aesthetic, cultural, and psychological encounters, Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play addresses critical relationships among Bourgeois’s work and that of other artists from Pieter Brueghel to Eva Hesse. It brings together practical, archival, and theoretical material, offering close examinations of historically situated objects and analyses of their complex affects and spatiality. Gathering critical perspectives from psychoanalysis, cultural analysis, feminist, queer, literary and affect studies, the book extends its specific art historical scope to investigate the crucial roles that art and cultural experience assume in everyday life.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 0.1 Art and the Aesthetics of Play 0.2 Art and Transitional Objects 1: Femme Maison and the Materiality of Home (1945–1949) 1.1 Affects of Home Space 1.2 Metaphors of Body and Home 1.3 Home and the Material Unconscious 1.4 Environments of Estrangement 1.5 Unbearable Objects 2: Personages: Making, Transition, and Use (1947–1955) 2.1 Paradoxical Objects 2.2 Matter, Making, and Materiality 2.3 Sculpture Embodied 2.4 Sculpture as Theoretical Object 2.5 Objects for Losing One’s Balance 3: Unruly Objects (1960–1968) 3.1 Pliable Stuff 3.2 Bound and Unbound 3.3 How to Undo an Object, or the Aesthetics of Undoing 3.4 How to Disturb the Order of Things 3.5 How to Use a Sculptural Object 4: Janus: Mothers, Ambivalence, and Play (1968–1989) 4.1 The Beginning(and End)of Softness 4.2 Paradoxes of Madness and Reason 4.3 War in the Nursery 4.4 Ruthless Love 4.5 Objects of Play and Imagination 4.6 Not Less than Everything 5: Cells: Evocative Object Worlds (1990–2000) 5.1 Containers and Containing Spaces 5.2 Cells as Bodily Spaces 5.3 Hidden Worlds 5.4 Collections, or Places, for Getting Lost 5.5 The Value of Nonsense Conclusion Index

About the Author :
Lynn M. Somers is an Independent Scholar and Adjunct Assistant Professor of art history at Drew University, USA.

Review :
How can a work of art be at once completely an object and not merely an object? Somers shows, thrillingly, how works by Louise Bourgeois evoke the transitional objects that mediate our earliest encounters with the world. Transformative Objects is at once an incisive study of a major artist, a lucid introduction to object relations theory, and a richly immersive experience in its own right. Louise Bourgeois once said in an interview: ‘I carry my psychoanalysis within the work’. In this intricate and lively study, Lynn Somers stages encounters with Bourgeois’s images and objects that reveal how this psychoanalysis emerges from and embraces that work.