Saturday 27 October 2007, 10.30–18.00

On the occasion of the Louise Bourgeois exhibition this conference brings together a fascinating range of perspectives on the extraordinary work of this artist who has worked in dialogue with most of the major artistic movements of the twentieth century, but has always followed her own path, powerfully inventive and at the forefront of contemporary practice.

Speakers include psycho-analyst Juliet Mitchell, curator Frances Morris and art-historians Linda Nochlin, Briony Fer, Tamar Garb and Mignon Nixon.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£20 (£15 concessions), booking recommended
Price includes entry to the exhibition

    

Timetable

10:30
Introduction

10:40
Mignon Nixon
Wars I Have Seen: Louise Bourgeois and Gertrude Stein (with Melanie Klein
Louise Bourgeois’s first sculptures, called Personages, came about as a response to the losses of war. This paper considers the role of war in Bourgeois’ art, reflecting on its explicit engagement with themes of exile, guilt, and mourning in the shadow of the Second World War, but also on her work’s sustained involvement with the dynamics of aggression and remorse in everyday life. “What is there inside one that makes one know all about war?” pondered Gertrude Stein in her 1945 memoir, Wars I Have Seen. At the time of Stein’s death in 1946, Bourgeois was beginning to pose this very question in sculpture. Six decades later, her art, often in dialogue with psychoanalysis, still contends with the vicissitudes of loss and aggression “inside one.”

11:25
Briony Fer
Turbulence
This paper considers a range of Bourgeois’ small work that is shown in the final room of the exhibition. I want to think about what it means to confront this work when the pieces themselves seem to fall below the threshold of what we think of as sculpture. Do they have to hold meaning? Or do they occupy some subterranean and turbulent relation to her other work. I explore the question of work without a proper name in comparison with Eva Hesse’s studiowork which is equally problematic for existing categories of thought.

12:10
Frances Morris
Curating Louise Bourgeois
This is an informal `curator's talk' addressing the processes and challenges involved in creating three very different projects involving Louise Bourgeois: an exhibition of recent work, a major commission, and the current retrospective at Tate Modern.

12:55
Break: Independent visit to the exhibition / lunch

14:20
Start of afternoon session

14:25
Juliet Mitchell
Learning from the Sculpture
“I was invited to look at the work of LB from the perspective of my own work as a psychoanalyst and gender scholar. In fact I found that the sculpture 'looked' at my work, giving me a new perspective on old ideas. Informed mainly by the three works on 'permanent' display in the Tate Modern (Amoeba, Fillette, Mamelles) placed there alongside three paintings by Francis Bacon, my talk will examine the interaction of the sculpture and (gender aware) psychoanalytical clinical observation and its theoretical formulations.”

15:10
Linda Nochlin
Old Age Style
Linda Nochlin discusses Bourgeois’ late work and presents new readings of some key works. In particular, her presentation explores the themes of age and softness in relation to her sewn and stuffed works.

15:55
Tea and coffee

16:30
Tamar Garb
Response

17:00
Panel Discussion chaired by Tamar Garb

17:50
Concluding Remarks

18:00
End

Speakers' Biographies

Briony Fer
Briony Fer is Professor of Art History at University College London. She has written extensively on art since the 60s, including on Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse. Her most recent book is The Infinite Line, Yale University Press 2002.

Tamar Garb
Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor in History of Art, University College London.  Her publications include Sisters of the Brush: Women's Artistic Culture in late Nineteenth Century Paris (Yale, 1994); The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (with Linda Nochlin, Thames & Hudson, 1995); Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (Thames & Hudson, 1998) and The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814-1914 (Yale, 2007).

Juliet Mitchell
Juliet Mitchell is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies in the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK. She is a Psychoanalyst and full Member of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Her books include Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974/2000), Mad Men and Medusas (2000) and Siblings: sex and violence (2003).

Frances Morris
Frances Morris is Head of Collections (International Art) at Tate and co-curator of the exhibition `Louise Bourgeois’. Frances also curated the first in the series of Unilever, Turbine Hall commissions, with Louise Bourgeois in 2000 and an exhibition of the artist's recent work `Stitches in Time’ for the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin in 2003/4.  As Curator and Head of Displays at Tate Modern Frances led the first installation of the permanent collection as well as its rehang in 2006. She has curated numerous exhibitions, large and small, including `Paris Post War’, 1993, `Rites of Passage’ (with Stuart Morgan, 1995) and `Zero to Infinity’ (with Richard Flood) 2001.

Mignon Nixon
Mignon Nixon is Professor of art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and an editor of October magazine. She is the author of Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (MIT Press, 2005), the editor of the Eva Hesse October File (MIT Press, 2002), and a contributor to the Tate catalogue of the Bourgeois retrospective..

Linda Nochlin
Linda Nochlin is the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. She is famous for her ground-breaking work to advance the cause of women artists, beginning as early as 1971 with her article, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", closely followed by her book Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730-1970, (1972). Nochlin's other publications include Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848-1900, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904,and The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society. Nochlin served as a professor of art history and the humanities at Yale University from 1989-92, Distinguished Professor of Art History at City University in New York (CUNY) from 1980-90, and Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Art History at Vassar College from 1971-79. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and of New York University's Institute for the Humanities.

This event is related to the Louise Bourgeois exhibition