经济学人20:雕刻大师路易丝·布尔乔亚

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　　讣告;路易丝·布尔乔亚;

　　Louise Bourgeois, sculptor², died on May 31st, aged³ 98;

　　雕刻大师路易丝·布尔乔亚卒于5月31日享年98岁;

　　When she was photographed by the great Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois decided⁴ she needed a prop⁵. She didn't like to have her picture taken. At 70, she might have chosen a handbag, a book, a rose. Instead she took a two-foot-long, fully⁶ erect⁷, fully veined and muscled phallus, which she had made of latex and plaster. She called it “Fillette”, and cradled it in her arms like a doll. Indeed, she said, it was not a phallus at all, but “Little Louise”. And with her sharp, puckish look, she dared anyone to contradict her.

　　著名的摄影家罗伯特·梅普勒索普给路易丝拍照时，她决定需要一个道具。她不喜欢被拍摄。70岁的她也许会选择一个手提包，一本书，或者一朵玫瑰。而她却选了一个两英尺长，完全直立的，充满纹理和肌肉感的阳具，这是她自己用乳胶和石膏做成的。她称之为“菲勒提”并让它像一个布娃娃般安睡在自己怀中。诚如她所说，它根本不是一个阳具，而是“小路易丝”。她犀利而恶作剧般的神色，不惧怕任何反对者。

　　Her sculptures were often not what they appeared to be. A beautiful white marble piece called “Cumul I” (1969) which seemed to show a cluster of eyes, or yet more phalluses, emerging from sheets, was about huddling⁸ together, she said; or just a collection of clouds. Her “Lair”, a big rubber pear-shape of 1986, was a hiding place, or a prison, or a peaceful orb⁹, or a trap in which the viewer might find himself stuck. Her giant steel spiders, which teetered across the world from New York to St Petersburg to London's Tate Modern, were both terrorising and protective. London's, 35 feet tall, was called “Maman”.

　　她的雕刻作品常常不是表面上呈现出的那样。一件叫做“累积1号”（1969）的美丽白色大理石作品看上去像是展现一簇目光，或者更多的阳具，从一堆床单中涌出来，混杂在一起，她说；或者就是一团云彩。1986年作品“巢穴”，一个巨大的橡皮梨型，是一个避难所，或是一个艰巨，还是一个和平的天体，抑或是观者发现自己被卡在其中的一个陷阱。她的巨型钢制蜘蛛，从纽约到圣彼得堡到伦敦的泰特现代美术馆，在世界各地摇摇欲坠，既令人毛骨悚然又给人保护之意。伦敦那个35英尺高的，被称为“小妈妈”。

　　With the art world in awe¹⁰ of her from 1982 onwards, when a New York retrospective drew her, very late in life, to popular attention, she got tired of explaining this or that protuberance in her landscapes of mounds¹¹ and udders. Freud came in handy; she quoted him often. But claims of eroticism puzzled her. The shapes just suggested themselves, so she followed. They were all about pain, fear, demons¹² and her past.

　　1982年开始，艺术界对她生起敬畏，在她艺术生涯的晚期，纽约的一次艺术回顾展引起了公众对她的注意，她厌烦了解释小山和乳房风景中这个或者那个隆起。佛洛伊德用起来倒是顺手；她常常援引他。但是性爱主义倾向的主张却让她迷惑。那些形状只是代表他们本省，她仅仅是追随。那些都是关于痛苦，恐惧，鬼神合她的过去。

　　That, too, seemed a contradictory¹³ place. A comfortable middle-class upbringing south of Paris was presented as something close to child abuse; yet her first sculpture show, in New York in 1949 after she had married and left, was of tall, sad balsa-wood figures that represented “homesickness”. Her mother was not only a spider—a reference to her career as a weaver¹⁴ and repairer of tapestries¹⁵—but a “She-Fox”, a huge-breasted creature of enduring stone squatting¹⁶ on haunches under which Louise tried to burrow¹⁷, like a worm. Her father, handsome and philandering¹⁸, was someone she longed to please; yet in 1974 an enormous tableau¹⁹ in plaster and latex, “The Destruction of the Father”, showed huge mammary forms round a table in a red-glowing cave on which the hated paterfamilias was torn up and devoured²⁰.

　　这看起来也是一个矛盾的地方。巴黎南部舒适的中产阶级出身教养所表现出的则像是虐童；而1949年她结婚又离开纽约，在纽约的第一场雕塑展则是一个高高的，轻木做成的雕像，代表了“乡愁”。她的母亲不只是一个蜘蛛——对于她职业像一个织锦画的编制者和修补者——而是一个“母狐狸”，一个大胸的生物，在路易斯试图像个蠕虫般大洞的桥墩上不断地垒石头。他的父亲，帅气而风流，是她试图取悦的对象；而在1974年名为“父亲的毁灭”的巨型橡胶和石膏人物场景作品，展示了一个泛着红色光芒的山洞中，很多乳房形状围绕在一张桌子旁边，可恶的一家之主被撕成碎片并被生吞活剥。

　　Even the gentle art of tapestry²¹ itself was transmuted²² into violence. In her works the spiralling spindle represented the beginning of chaos²³. The needle threatened the desecration²⁴ of the stone, the penetration²⁵ to the core. The twisting of the wet tapestries, lugged²⁶ from the tannin-filled river, made Ms Bourgeois dream of twisting the neck of the plump English girl who had been her father's mistress. Her childhood task in the workshop was to draw cartoons of the missing feet of figures; her mother, with delicate scissors, would snip²⁷ out the genitals from tapestries destined²⁸ for the puritan American market. Hence the liking²⁹ for scattered³⁰ body parts in latex, wax, bronze or marble, and the odd assemblages, such as “Nature Study” of 1984, where figures lacked heads but had multiple breasts, and phalluses, and claws.

　　即便是优雅的织锦画艺术本身也被变形为暴力。在她的作品里，旋转的纺锤代表了混乱的开始。针威胁着石头的亵渎，威胁着核心的穿透力。拧那些从充满丹宁的河里捞出来的湿漉漉的织锦，让路易丝梦见了拧断父亲那个丰满的英国情妇的脖子；她小时候在车间里的工作是为雕塑缺掉的脚画草图；她的妈妈，用精致的剪刀，从那些准备销往美国清教徒市场的织锦上剪掉生殖器。因此喜欢用乳胶、蜡、铜或者大理石，以及奇怪的组合来拓展身体部位，比如1984年的“自然研究”，作品缺少头，但有很多乳房、阳具以及爪子。

　　From the volcano

　　来自火山

　　She had claws herself. For years they went undetected. She attended the New York art shows on the arm of her art-historian husband, Robert Goldwater, like any smiling post-war wife, and brought up three sons placidly³¹ on huge bottles of milk, while thinking of the delicious fear induced by milk seeping³² from the mother, water from the earth, saliva³³ from the snail³⁴, lava³⁵ from the volcano. Her own “volcanic subconscious” was channelled into work done in wood, because it was quiet, or cobbled from objets trouvés, because she did not want to spend her husband's money, and then hidden away, as a squirrel hid nuts, since art was a man's world.

　　她自己也有爪子。只是多年来并未发现。她挽着艺术史学家丈夫罗格特·戈尔德瓦特参加了纽约艺术展，和任何微笑着的战后妻子一样，并平静地用大奶瓶养育了三个儿子，同时她还想到了母亲乳汁引发的美味的恐惧，以及大地的水，蜗牛的唾液，火山的熔岩。她自己的木制作品“火山潜意识”水到渠成地完成了，因为它很安静，或者由objets trouvés草草拼成，因为她不想花丈夫的前，所以就把它藏了起来，就像是雄鼠藏起坚果，因为艺术是男人的世界。

　　She believed this even in her last three celebrated³⁶ decades. She was not a feminist³⁷ particularly, but had seen enough of the power-games of the Duchamps and Bretons, the Pollocks and the Warhols. Some of her sculptures were of women trying to turn themselves into weapons. They remained fragile. She was not. Faced with a solid block—even the lovely curve of white marble that went to make “The Sail” in 1988—she needed to hack³⁸ it to pieces, then rebuild it as she wanted. She raged to understand the stone. The more the material resisted, the more she fought it.

　　即便是在她最后声名卓著的三十年里，她依然坚信这一点。她不是女权主义者，但是也看够了杜尚们和布列塔尼们，波洛克家族和沃霍尔的权利游戏。她的一些作品是女人试图武装自己。她们依然是脆弱的。她不是。面对坚硬的石块——即便是用来完成1988年“航行”的美丽白色大理石曲线——她需要把它劈成碎片，然后重建成她想要的样子。她以一种激进的方式来理解石材。材质越是抗拒，她就越是与其斗争。

　　It was all about self-esteem, she said. She gained confidence by destroying the past. And if the finished work caused disquiet³⁹, as it usually did, that pleased her. She had connected with other people and attracted their regard, maybe their love. Isolation⁴⁰ always haunted her. It lay behind the “Cells”, her series of installations in the early 1990s in which small, bleak⁴¹ rooms were viewed through half-opened doors or dirty windows. One contained a metal-framed bed in which someone was hiding. Another showed, beside a tray of perfume bottles, two stone hands twisted in pain.

　　她说，这完全是出于自尊。她通过捣毁过去来获得自信。如果完成一件作品导致了不安，正如通常那样，这才会让她高兴。她与其他人建立了连接并赢得了他们的敬重，也许是他们的爱。隔绝感也经常萦绕于她。它隐含在她的系列装置艺术卓品“细胞”之中，在该1990年代作品中，透过半开的门或肮脏的小窗户，可以看到一些小而荒凉的房间。其中一个里面有一个铁架床，里面藏着一个人。另一个展现的是在一个香水瓶的托盘旁边，两只石雕手痛苦地纠缠在一起。

　　Almost everything, she confessed, could be seen as a self-portrait. This was her, arching her body in a bronze hoop⁴²; her as a splayed, bug-eyed rabbit; her as a torso with orifices, like leaves, down her spine⁴³. And, yes, her being carried, tenderly as a doll, by an elderly woman in a monkey-fur coat with an impish, vicious smile.

　　她承认，几乎所有的一切都可以看作是自画像。弓身于一个铜箍里的是她，八字脚暴眼的兔子也是她，布满孔洞的躯干，像一片叶子，卷起她的脊柱。是的，她被像个布娃娃般温柔地抱在一个老妇人怀中，那人穿着猴子皮大衣，恶作剧的坏笑。

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