Siri Hustvedt : The places that scare you

On Louise Bourgeois at The Guardian (06.10.2007) :

Before I had read a word about or by Louise Bourgeois, I was fascinated by the emotional power of her work, how it stirred up old pains and fears, summoned complex and often contradictory associations, or echoed my own obsessions with rooms, dolls, missing limbs, mirrors, violence, nameless threats, the comfort of order, and the distress of ambiguity. Bourgeois can take you to strange and hidden places in yourself. This is her gift. What may be deeply personal for her finds its translation in art that is far too mysterious to be confessional. Throughout her long career, however, there have been repetitive themes and forms that appear in multifarious guises and mutations. From the paintings first shown in 1947 under the collective title Femme Maison to the mesmerising Cells of the 90s, the artist has vigorously reinvented versions of the body/house - as refuge, trap, or a bit of both - and she has done it with an eye and mind that interrogate the history of art as well as the human psyche.

The mind and its memories as a metaphorical place, topos, is an ancient idea. Freud, too, was fond of a spatial trope - archeology. Dig and you shall find. Repressed memories. Screen memories. Fantasies. For Aristotle, every memory has two parts: simulacrum, a likeness or image, and intentio, an emotional colour that is an associative link to a person's inner chain of experiences. Word association as a clue to unconscious processes would become an essential part of psychiatry in the 19th century, and today brain scientists know that emotion consolidates memory. What we don't feel, we forget. I have come to think of Bourgeois as an artist who roams the antechambers of a charged past, looting it for material that she reconfigures as external places and beings or being-places.