Louise Bourgeois' Trauma'?

It is probably more appropriate to say that the ninety-five year old female artist’s work is currently on display at the Tate Modern, rather than to say that her life is on display, but I am unsure as to which is most accurate. Of course her work is intended to be autobiographical, once inside the exhibition you cannot escape that fact. I felt as though I’d just walked into some strange nightmare in which memories take on the form of darkly psychedelic objects.

Her obsession with her past is undeniable, and for a brief moment she is able to draw you into it. I was curious to find out what had made her so angry, and why exactly the word ‘trauma’ was written in every corner possible inside the exhibition, but I have to say I was sorely disappointed to understand that it was merely that her father had invited his mistress to live with them and be tutor to Louise and her siblings. Ah yes, the Oedipal complex all over again. I was immediately bored, how many times have we heard a story about a man having an affair with the live in maid/governess/whatever and the child’s confusion at the situation? Surely there was a more disturbing trauma behind all these tits and willies. One gets the feeling therefore, that she has realized the power behind the ‘oedipal’ qualities of her work, and has since sucked as much out of it as she could.

She is also inconsistent. She says that it is not the penis she dislikes, but the bearer of the penis. This is all fine and dandy, but then why is there a bodiless penis hung from a hook in the ceiling? It seems she doesn’t really know in which direction to point her anger, towards only her father or towards all men in general? Her work speaks contrarily to what she says.

On the other hand, one interesting thing about her work is that she recognizes that both men and women share feminine and masculine qualities, and she quite openly if not unconsciously expresses a degree of penis envy, which in today’s modern society is something most ambitious women can relate to.

Another issue that irritated me about her exhibition was why should we be so concerned with this woman’s history? Especially when it does so little to enlighten us on issues surrounding trauma. The theory of the Oedipal complex has already been offered to us by Freud, and we all seem to accept it as a truth, so there really is nothing that distinguishes Bourgeois from the rest of us other than her obsession with it, and there is nothing new we can learn from her work. It serves simply as a confirmation of Freud’s theories, so why all the fuss over it?

In my opinion, Bourgeois shows nothing else of herself but a woman from a wealthy background who has nothing else to complain about other than daddy’s sex drive and his supposed tyrannical personality. But in all honesty, how many of us have not had a fallible, overbearing parent?

One would have thought that by now she would have dealt with her past ‘traumas’ and moved on to something different… she is ninety five years old, after all. It saddened me to be confronted with a woman who cannot seem to look past herself.