Mumbling Beauty: Louise Bourgeois—portraits of the artist as a much older woman

Abstract

This article examines how Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) plays with different modes of self-presentation in Mumbling Beauty (2015), a photo book consisting of 81 photographs of the artist taken in the final years of her life by Alex Van Gelder. I start by outlining connections and divergences between these self-presentations and interpretations of Bourgeois’ late style. As the portraits make the artist hypervisible as a much older vulnerable woman, I ask how Mumbling Beauty can resist abjection. I will argue that strategies of performance, masquerade, and displacement, in combination with playful interactions with mirror surfaces and images, and flirtations with photography’s death drive, enable these portraits to diversify notions of self and beauty. Furthermore, through the concepts of the ethical stare and the holding gaze, I interpret the relational, intercorporeal, and affective potential of this particular photographic practice. To conclude, I speculate on how these particular portraits of the artist as a much older woman can be inspirational in terms of conceptualizing creative skills that even people who are not professional artists may need in their quest for meaning in later life beyond hegemonic discourses of “successful” and “healthy” ageing.

Keywords:

• Louise Bourgeois
• photography
• performativity of gender and age

Herkenhoff: Why have you never made a realistic self-portrait?

Bourgeois: Because I am not interested in myself. I am interested in the Other … “I, me, myself” horrifies me. (Paulo Herkenhoff 2003, 11)

Introduction

This article examines the photo book Mumbling Beauty: Louise Bourgeois (Alex Van Gelder 2015), which consists of 81 photographs of Bourgeois taken by Alex Van Gelder in the final years of her life, between 2008 and 2010. Van Gelder was introduced to Louise Bourgeois in the late 1970s, but it was not until the early 2000s that their relationship started to develop, and it became a routine that he would photograph her whenever they met. In the preface to Mumbling Beauty, Van Gelder recollects how Bourgeois became a “consummate performer in front of the camera” (2015, n.p.) and how she chose him as chronicler of her last years, which made me approach the photo book as a collaborative practice that opens up conventional ideas of authorship as well as artistic autonomy.

Christophe Ribbat (2011) warns that photographic projects in which older subjects figure as central characters should be met with suspicion. He links this suspicion with two developments in cultural studies. Firstly, skepticism regarding photography’s truth claims prevents an uncritical appreciation of images following realist conventions (2011, 69). Secondly, ageing studies has critiqued the youthful gaze that automatically positions the viewer as younger than the subject (2011, 69). I will argue that, through its performative and serial character, Mumbling Beauty prompts a practice of ethical looking that might prevent Bourgeois’ ageing body from disappearing into the category of women in their nineties classified as abject “other.” This is significant in our late-modern society divided by intersections of ageism and sexism because photographic projects, just like literature and other art forms, “have the capacity to shift how we understand, embody, and perform” (Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin 2015, 355) late-life femininity. As such, this article is in line with Sabine Kampmann’s (2016) call for a Visual Ageing Studies that addresses the mediality and contextuality of images of ageing.

Louise Bourgeois, creativity across the life span, and late style

The figure of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) dismantles the very idea that creativity is a prerogative of youth. The artist was already in her seventies when she experienced an international breakthrough in the form of a first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and continued working until her death at 98. Moreover, art critics claim that Bourgeois’ late work is among her finest. Allan Schwartzman (2003) aligns Bourgeois’ art historical significance with Andy Warhol’s importance for the shift from Modernism to Postmodernism and describes how she “wags her finger at Modernism’s compulsive and sterile obsession with The New” (2003, 102). From this it follows that Bourgeois exemplifies the discourse of creativity across the life span that “asserts that creativity continues, grows, and renews itself … throughout an artist’s life” as opposed to the decline model of late-life creativity that assumes there are “mid-life peaks after which creativity either declines into unimaginative aesthetic expressions or hardens into statistic stylistic conventions” (Stephen Katz and Erin Campbell 2005, 101). According to Ulf Küster (2013), the fact that Bourgeois never became her own epigone may be a positive side effect of her many years of relative obscurity in the art world. This obscurity came with the absence of specific expectations on the part of the public and art dealers that Bourgeois otherwise would have had to succumb to (Küster 2013, 73).

The interpretation of Bourgeois’ art is mostly based on her psychobiography—not in the least because the artist herself repeatedly drew parallels between her life experiences and her work. Kathleen Woodward (2006) and Rosemary Betterton (2009) have identified the thematic prevalence of the relation to the mother figure throughout Bourgeois’ career, in contrast to the earlier emphasis on the trauma caused in her youth by the promiscuity of the father figure. They suggest that it is possibly in the combination of recurrent topics like fertility and birth with the visibility of older maternal bodies that Bourgeois’ late works demonstrate their subversive potential to the fullest. Woodward describes how, for instance, a photograph of an enigmatically smiling Bourgeois (1975), wearing a latex body suit reminiscent of an ovary releasing a large number of eggs, presents “a new kind of female body in older age […] a creative female body that is not post-reproductive” (2006, 170). The playful performance of this new productive body coincided with the advent of reproductive technologies that enable older women going through or beyond menopause to have children.

In her article on Bourgeois’ old-age style, Linda Nochlin states that it is “impossible to summarize the work of her [Bourgeois’] last years in any coherent way” (2008, 384). She describes Bourgeois’ late “soft works” in textile (1996–2002) and the “harder” work “The Institute” (2002) as “far from elegiac” and “more unsettling than what had come before” (Linda Nochlin [2007], 2015, 384). Similar to the scholars mentioned above, Nochlin ascribes the emergence of these feelings of unsettlement to “concerns both feminine and geriatric” (2008, 387) and points to Bourgeois’ combination of sexual ambiguity and erotic pleasure with older age. In the very first part of her piece, Nochlin introduces two generalizing claims about late style: artistic apotheosis and transcendence versus rage and unresolved contradiction that supposedly characterize the work of artists facing the immanence of death. Bourgeois’ work resists being categorized along these lines. Such paradigms essentialize late-life creativity in that they ignore the specific context and time in which creativity as a product and a skill occurs at a later stage in an artist’s career. As Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon remind us: “late style is always a retrospective critical construct with its own aesthetic and ideological agenda, and most importantly, its own view of both ageing and creativity” (2012, 3). As such, we should consider the writings of Woodward, Betterton, and Nochlin as specific readings of Bourgeois’ artistic production in her later years rather than as statements about ageing and creativity in general.

Bourgeois also played with expectations of gender and age in front of Robert Mapplethorpe’s camera (1982). Gisela Pollock (1999, 91–92) and Betterton (2009, 34–35) address the frankness and wit with which Bourgeois presents herself in this famous portrait: Bourgeois looks into the camera with an ironic smile while holding her sculpture “Fillette” (1968), a giant latex phallus. The image is characterized by a discrepancy between the age of the sitter as revealed by Bourgeois’ wrinkled face and hands on the one hand, and the sexual object that she is holding on the other. Through posing as a visibly older woman with the phallus, Bourgeois challenges the idea that sexuality and older age are incompatible. As Betterton writes,

Mapplethorpe’s photograph is more than a portrait of the artist as an old woman; it is a record of a particular performance of age and gender enacted by Bourgeois herself. Her burlesque upsetting of categories confronts our cultural horror of older women’s sexuality (2009, 35).

Both Bourgeois’ late works and performances of her older creative self seem situated at the intersection of gender and age and committed to questioning hegemonic age and gender scripts.

There are several photographs in Mumbling Beauty in which Bourgeois poses with her art, especially from The Fabric Works (2002–2010), such as a multitude of felted breasts and a sewn head with closed eyes and open mouth (Figure 1). The presence of these art works links back to the themes of sexuality and the maternal and combines these themes with the older human subject. In these images, Bourgeois looks at the spectator with an amused expression or imitates the facial expression of the object that she is posing with.

short-legendFigure 1.

However, in my reading, the majority of the images from Mumbling Beauty are unsettling in a different way than the ironic blurring of gender and age categories characteristic of images such as the ones mentioned. In the photo book, Bourgeois is not just shown as an older woman artist but as a much older woman artist. Next to the portraits of Bourgeois posing with her art or at work in her studio, the photo series reveals the increasing vulnerability of the artist, now in her mid-nineties, by documenting her resting on a bed, posing in a wheelchair, or moving around her apartment behind a walker. These images are paired with many portraits that make the artist’s older face—and, to a lesser degree, hands—with wrinkles, folds, and spots, hypervisible, or that manipulate and distort this hypervisibility. In addition, in some portraits, the subject clearly flirts with the notion of death, for instance, by holding an hourglass or posing as almost lifeless. As such, Bourgeois is embodying, revealing, and destructing visual evidence of her creative gendered and aged self. The risk of such a multi-layered and unusual performance of self is to be reduced to the category of abject “other.” I now turn to Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs’ (2011) extension of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to the third and especially fourth age to further frame my interpretation of Mumbling Beauty and the premises of its play with the abject.

Abjection, gender, and the fourth age

Julia Kristeva’s (1982) concept of abjection refers to experiences of shame and disgust that result from the confrontation with the failure to uphold the distinction between subject and object, or self and other. For Kristeva, abjection is gendered. Following a Lacanian-inspired model of individual psychosexual development, she locates the first instance of abjection in the moment when the child starts to separate itself from the mother figure. Moreover, abjection as a primarily bodily affect is linked with the physical repulsion at “leaky” bodies, especially women’s bodies whose very materiality is signified by menstrual blood and pregnancy. The corpse is the prime example of abjection as it is “death infecting life” (1982, 4). Abjection has the potential to destabilize the very society that permits and controls its exclusion. Kristeva writes that the abject “neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them” (15).

Gilleard and Higgs (2011) reconceptualize Kristeva’s notion of abjection by thinking through the significance of age in addition to gender. Through elaborating on the concept of abjection, they want to understand the power mechanisms underlying the categories of third and fourth age as “social imageries” or “contested cultural spaces” (2011, 140). In their view, third age, commonly understood as “young old age,” offers more potential to transgress abjection than fourth or “old old age.” The reason is that consumerist later-life lifestyles have developed and become available to older people in relatively good physical and financial health. These lifestyles typically come with counter-cultural images of older people that refuse to act their age, i.e., to conform to conventional ideas of what makes proper embodied old age (Aagje Swinnen 2016). To Hanne Laceulle and Jan Baars (2014), the consumerist lifestyles available to older people are characteristic of what they call the cultural narrative of age-defiance that propagates everlasting youthfulness. This cultural narrative may have a stronger hold on older women, especially older women in celebrity culture, who are scrutinized and condemned for not continuously being able to embody the hegemonic script of youthful femininity into perfection despite resorting to rigorous bodily regimes, including plastic surgery (Josephine Dolan and Estella Tincknell 2012; Aagje Swinnen 2012; Estella Tincknell 2011). The increase in possibilities for people in the so-called third age to resist being positioned as old and “other” in combination with “the ‘densification’ of old age (through general improvements in mortality, institutional policies and practices)” (Gilleard and Higgs 2011, 140) has resulted in old age being shifted elsewhere.

Old age is moved “either chronologically upwards towards an age and a place that appears beyond the reach of such transgression or buried deeper into sites of darker, more profound abjection” (Gilleard and Higgs 2011, 137). This is how the category of the fourth age is constituted. The meaning of fourth age draws heavily upon observations and images of older people in institutional settings. In this context, Gilleard and Higgs assert, abjection “is not so much weakness or frailty but the evident failure of social intent, the inattention that betrays ‘self control’ and ‘self direction’” (2011, 139). Challenging this particular positioning is especially difficult in the fourth age, as performing everlasting youthfulness is now beyond reach. Nonetheless, Gilleard and Higgs propose two options to counter this dynamics of exclusion. The first is inspired by a feminist ethics of care that foregrounds the quality of intersubjective relations. The second lies in the acknowledgement of “the universal vulnerability of our bodies and our relationships” (141).

To what extent is Gilleard and Higgs’ (2011) reconceptualization of abjection productive in understanding Mumbling Beauty as a portrait series of a nonagenarian woman artist? On the one hand, several of the portraits show an artist who is in control, still working in her studio, consciously role-playing in front of the camera, and offering us a glimpse into her life. On the other hand, there are images that show a Bourgeois seemingly out of control, raging and “uglifying” herself to the extent that she almost becomes a death mask. Abjection as bodily affect seems an integral part of her creative play with self-representation in front of and in collaboration with Van Gelder’s camera. I read the photo book as an intervention in the contested cultural space of fourth age and as an attempt to unmask the negative implications of this social imagery, particularly for women. As Bourgeois is always portrayed in solitude, we have to examine the interaction with the viewer as a space in which intersubjectivity might come about through practices of ethical looking. The questions of how and to what extent the images of Louise Bourgeois are able to transgress abjection, and what we can learn from this creative practice, further guide my argumentation.

Performance, masquerade, and displacement

Mirrors are a recurring trope in Bourgeois’ art, and Mumbling Beauty too contains many pages with reflecting surfaces and mirror images. In Western art history, Diana Tietjens Meyers (2002, 112–113) explains, woman-with-mirror imagery has two main functions. Looking into a mirror may symbolize introspection and the development of self-knowledge on the one hand, or criticize vanity, especially in light of the inexorability of death, on the other. Whitney Chadwick (1998) argues that Surrealism became the first modernist movement that offered women artists the opportunity to reclaim the conventional woman-with-mirror imagery and address issues of female subjectivity. Through various practices of self-representation, Surrealist women artists examined the complex relation between the female body and identity. Characteristic of these practices of self-representation is the ways in which the artist adopts a number of different roles and identities. Images of fragmentation, duplication, and masquerade serve to challenge the “social construction of femininity as specular consumption and the narcissistic identification of the woman with her reflected image” (Chadwick 1998, 9). Disconnecting photography from truth claims through montage makes even this particular medium suited for shifting the focus from the notion of the unitary to the idea of the fragmented and multiple self and the latter’s possibilities of female agency.

Surrealist women artists paved the way for feminist artists, including Bourgeois—even though she may not have identified as such (Hannah Westley 2008)—who “mobilized the female body as marker of a new sexual and cultural politics” (Chadwick 1998, 15) from the 1970s onward. The photographs in Mumbling Beauty share with Surrealist photography psychic and bodily displacements through montage. Many portraits of Bourgeois are manipulated mirror images that distort, dissolve, deform, or overexpose Bourgeois’ face, thereby making the subject simultaneously appear and disappear (Figure 2).

short-legendFigure 2.

These manipulations generate the extension of the perceptible photographic space. Playing with the photographic surface—by including two versions of selves within the same picture, for instance—shifts the attention from the mimetic quality of a photograph to the subjectivities of Bourgeois. Through particular costume choices, Bourgeois also engages in a play of masquerade. The first photograph on the inside of the book, left of the title page, shows Bourgeois dressed in black and hiding parts of her face through a black mask while holding a knife. The picture is reminiscent of Zorro or less benevolent bandits, and blurs gender and age boundaries by linking an aggressive pose with the face and hand of an older woman. The same may be true for the images in which Bourgeois is wearing a blue and white hat reminiscent of a sailor cap. Kathleen Woodward writes:

As “pretense,“ masquerade is a form of self-presentation. But I also want to call into question, the unequivocal notion of the mask as “mere outward show” that hides “a truth.” A mask may express rather than hide a truth. The mask itself may be one of multiple truths (Kathleen Woodward 1991, 148).

The mask of youthful aggression (Zorro) or adventure (sailor) discloses the norm of youthfulness as well as the limits of strategies of age-defiance (cf. Laceulle and Baars 2014). In a similar vein, the refusal to fully reiterate the conventional script of femininity (e.g., peaceful and passive), reveals “the performative production of a sexual ontology” (Judith Butler 1990, 47). As such, Bourgeois’ play with masquerade brings the performative character of both gender and age to the fore once more (Leni Marshall and Valerie Lipscomb 2010).

It is the combination of different images rather than a single image that gives the viewer an impression of the many different people Louise Bourgeois is and has been. The numerous small changes in her performance in front of the camera, despite similarities in pose, composition, camera angle, and the apparent visible markers of her corporeal agedness, offer a kaleidoscope of the many dimensions of the artist’s subjectivity. The portrait series subtly generates a narrative of evolving emotions. Close-ups of Bourgeois’ face show different affects ranging from resignation, rage, detachment, and unease/pain, to contemplation. The facial expressions may not only indicate a range of emotional dispositions but also—if I may speculate a little—of attitudes toward the interplay of age, gender, and creativity. In this respect, we could read Mumbling Beauty as an example of what Anca Cristofovici has called speculative photography that “concerns the visualization of inner and fictional worlds” (2009, 2).

Revisiting the mirror stage of old age

In addition to being a common trope in art history, the mirror is a recurrent theme in ageing studies, specifically the psychological mechanism of the mirror stage of old age. The mirror stage of old age refers to the disconnection of older persons from their own visage as reflected back in the mirror. Building on Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, Woodward (1991) argues that the rejection of this mirror image in later life dismantles the illusion of the first mirror stage when the reflection in the mirror enables the child to differentiate itself as an individual and to develop a self-identity. While this initial reflection of the self as a cohesive, un-fragmented whole is perceived as a reality and serves as a foundation for lived and social selves, it is actually an idealized representation by the individual. The second mirror stage breaks this illusion, which, according to Woodward, results in the aggressive rejection of the unrecognizable visage in the mirror, a face that points toward impending death. This could be understood as a process of self-abjection whereby the person concerned is unable to accept the image of the older self as his or her own.

Leni Marshall (2012) subscribes to Woodward’s theory but asserts that the misrecognition—she prefers the original French term méconnaissance—of the mirror image in later life also offers the prospect of opening up “possibilities for understanding and developing the lived self and the social self that seemed to be permanent and sealed during the first mirror stage” (2012, 53). Marshall finds examples of this potential to transform the older self in research into ageing dancers and actors as well as in literary and cultural critique. The ultimate challenge lies in the creation of “a richer, more nuanced understanding of the possibilities that méconnaissance offers” (57). While our first selves emerge from the mechanism of the first mirror stage, the second mirror stage offers the opportunity for ageing persons to consciously participate in the development of a new set of age identities. Marshall calls the latter “being through (with) the looking glass” (71). Not being able to recognize the positive potential of misrecognition implies that the mirror image of the older self is deferred to the realm of the abject. As a result, “the body becomes a mask that hides the lived self somewhere inside” (67). Women might be more disposed to processes of self-abjection in a cultural context that urges them to heavily invest in outer appearances rather than inner development.

Meyers also ascribes the anxiety women in particular experience over their changed appearance to what she calls the “identity constancy postulate,” i.e., the false presumption that people have stable identities” (2002, 156). She explicitly connects the identity constancy postulate with exclusionary beauty ideals: “If an attractive, unchanging inner nature is most aptly represented by a certain type of conventionally pretty face, a youthful face and an ageing face cannot both be attractive” (2002, 156–157). Just like Marshall, Meyers believes that women have the agency to move beyond the mismatch of their mirror image and their experience of their inner self. She suggests two concrete ways to rethink the mechanism of méconnaissance. Firstly, Meyers advocates “a looser conception of the self” (2002, 157) which is in line with the practice of feminists and feminist artists mentioned above. Surrealist women artists and feminist artists moved away from the idea of the unitary and stable self through evocations of heterogeneous and dynamic selves. Secondly, Meyers proposes to “diversify our conception of beauty” (160). This entails embracing the beauty of postmenopausal bodies rather than simply equating these bodies with immanent death, and no longer confining beauty ideals to youthful bodies.

This brings us back to the mirror images in Mumbling Beauty, also in the figurative sense (cf. Marshall 2012, 59). Just like the image of the visage, the photographs of Louise Bourgeois’ hands that are included in the book—the photographer previously published a book exclusively featuring similar hand pictures—could possibly elicit feelings of misrecognition in older age. In medium close-ups of Bourgeois sitting in front of a mirror, her investment in the mirror image seems low. She turns her head away from the mirror, wears dark glasses, or closes her eyes, seemingly having fallen asleep with her chin resting on the reflection surface. In the images in which we can clearly identify the setting of the photographs as her studio, the mirror just seems a random object between other objects, part of Bourgeois’ creative practice. Some might read these images as attempts by Bourgeois to reject the mirror image. Yet, nothing really points to the subject’s negative attitude toward her reflection or nostalgia about her youthful appearance in these particular images. There is only one image of a younger Louise Bourgeois in Mumbling Beauty. This photo is taken from the cover of one of the publications on her work, L’aveugle guidant l’aveugle (Makhi Xenakis 1998). Yet, the image is almost unrecognizable as bars function as a grid behind which the face is framed. Maybe the bars suggest that Bourgeois cannot get back to a younger unified self-image. However, the overwhelming presence of the older face in Mumbling Beauty seems to suggest that this is not what is at stake. The combination of the hypervisibility of the older face and the lack of self-abjection with the fact that Bourgeois poses with some of her later rather than earlier works points toward an emphasis on the importance of the final stages in her development rather than on an idealization of the earlier ones.

In the photographs featuring disfigured mirror images, especially the blurry ones conveying Bourgeois’ “rage,” the subject clearly engages with her mirror image in a different way. These photographs are examples of the strategy to put forward a looser conception of the self. But there is more to these images in that they explicitly separate Bourgeois’ face from conventional notions of feminine beauty.

For example, the images featuring Bourgeois grimacing with an open mouth that seems to be missing some teeth, depart from beauty ideals in a rather shocking way (Figure 3). Even in the more traditional portraits, epitomes of youthful-coded feminine beauty (foregrounding the subject’s golden earrings and long hair, sometimes worn in a ponytail) are combined with the hypervisible markers of the artist’s corporeality as an older woman (such as thin, gray hair). As the title of the photo book suggests, this type of beauty is different and “mumbling.” How could we interpret “mumbling” in this context? Mumbling could refer to speech that departs from hegemonic discourse and, therefore, is marginalized. Yet, the unexpected meanings that may arise out of these poorly repeated speech acts potentially destabilize hegemonic discourse. The diversification of beauty and self in the portraits of Mumbling Beauty unmistakably departs from conventions. As such, the images may “speak for” new meanings of ageing, femininity, and creativity through their surprising and diverse visual language. Yet, it remains unclear what the ethical potential of these visuals could be, especially in a cultural context that supports practices of looking that are youthfully and male structured (Woodward 2006; Swinnen 2012). How can the viewer move beyond this conventional positioning while reading Mumbling Beauty?

short-legendFigure 3.

The ethical stare and the holding gaze

Bodies that do not conform to hegemonic ideals of beauty risk evoking discomfort and fear that firmly separate the person that is being looked at from the onlooker who refuses to identify with the object of his or her stare. Nevertheless, a stare can hold ethical potential, according to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2009). Building on Susan Sontag’s and Elaine Scarry’s ethics of looking, Garland-Thomson raises the question of “how we should stare” and “how we will be stared at” (2009, 185). Answers to these questions are to be found in the transformative power of the interpersonal encounter or social relation that “good” staring entails. Garland-Thomson’s three-step process of visual activism starts with looking. She not only refers to the human inclination to stare at things that are unusual, but also to the role of those being stared at, who induce people to look at them. The second step implies that the person who is looked at has the agency to look and speak back and, in doing so, to prompt the starer into thinking differently, into transforming his or her initial thoughts. The final and most challenging step entails that people start acting in new ways.

In one of the photographs in Mumbling Beauty, Bourgeois is holding the cover of her unpublished work “Le mot pitié m’a apaisée” (2001), which literally means “the word pity appeased me.” In the context of the photo book, these words could be read as an invitation to “good” staring. Furthermore, the second image in Mumbling Beauty—following the Zorro-like performance mentioned above—shows Louise Bourgeois looking through a looking glass as if she is scrutinizing the viewer. This portrait, as well as the other portraits in which she looks us in the eye, have the potential to make us view this much older woman artist in a new way. Bourgeois’ diverse and playful engagement with the camera points to the agency of the sitter. As such, photographs of abject bodies have the potential to return the gaze being cast on them and make their “voice” heard. Yet, how do images in the photo book that confront the starer/looker with the increasing vulnerability and disappearing presence of the subject in her nineties work? What is the ethical potential (cf. Garland-Thomson) of an encounter with photographs that do not make an explicit appeal to the viewer to take a “better look” through role-play or fragmentation but rather have affinities with the conventions of realist photography that documents ageing as decline?

I am referring to images that show Bourgeois resting on a bed placed in front of a worn door and wall so as to suggest continuity between the subject and her surroundings. In addition, there are images of a visibly frail Bourgeois in a wheelchair unable to touch the floor with her feet, or bent over behind a walker stumbling around her apartment, as the blurs in the photograph seem to suggest. I am also referring to the series of images in which Bourgeois is wrapped in textiles or fabrics—a white faux fur coat, an old pink blanket, and a threadbare red towel—seemingly unaware of her surroundings or withdrawn in an inner world. Literature that reintegrates the body in disembodied conceptualizations of vision could be helpful to improve our understanding of these particular images highlighting Bourgeois’ frailty. Amelia Jones calls on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to address the “visible in the tangible” and “the tangible in the visible” (as quoted in Amelia Jones 2002, 970). In her view, a photograph of a body is “a flesh-like screen […] that presupposes the depth and materiality of the body as subject” (Jones 2002, 970). Engaging with a photograph of a body as a flesh-like screen establishes a relation of intercorporeity:

It is our being looked at by the photograph-as-flesh that makes us fully corporeal subjects in vision; this being looked at also substantiates the subjectivity of the person in the picture, but always already in relation to us, those it “views” (970).

From this it follows that we can add “transivity of embodiment” to the reciprocity of the gaze in trying to develop an ethical encounter with images. As Jones writes, “Plunging into the depths of the image – feeling the flesh of the other as our own, immanently mortal, corporeal skin – is to free ourselves (at least momentarily) in a potentially radically politicizing way from both prejudice and fear” (972). As there are so many images in Mumbling Beauty that confront the viewer time and again with the corporeal vulnerability of the subject, it is hard not to be physically touched by and implicated in the self-representations of the nonagenarian.

The interconnection between the tangible and the visible and its ethical potential also seem crucial to the concept of the holding gaze. Garland-Thomson describes ethical staring as a “potential act of be-holding, of holding the being of another particular individual in the eye of the beholder” (2009, 194). She refers to the work of Donald Woods Winnicot, who explained the importance of being seen and recognized by another person for the psychological well-being of humans. In comparing this holding function of looking and being looked at with the interaction between a mother and child, the connection between the vision and body comes to the foreground once more. In Winnicott’s view, it is in a mother’s holding of and gazing at her child that the holding function is enacted (Garland-Thomson 2009, 212). To Anca Cristofovici, the holding gaze is “when the body becomes too frail to even be touched” (2009, 163). The portraits of a frail Bourgeois render her ageing femininity physical and tactile, and, in doing so, resist our urge to see and instead invite us to touch. Touching is here to be understood in its double meaning—touching/feeling—similar to how Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) famously describes her affective response to a photograph of the outsider textile artist Judith Scott hugging a piece of her very tactile work. In absence of other characters in Mumbling Beauty, maybe we could think of the photographer and the viewer holding and holding on to Louise Bourgeois. If abjection can be redeemed through caring, as Gilleard and Higgs suggest, the holding gaze could be a way to support and continue Bourgeois’ presence even after her death.

In Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes approaches photographs as memorials. What we see in an image is a reflection of a moment in the past. That moment is long gone and so is the subject portrayed independent of whether that subject is still alive or not. Still, every photograph carries with it a trace of its subject. The essence of the medium then, in Barthes’ view, is this spectral conjuring of death-in-life. Louise Bourgeois and Alex Van Gelder flirt with the connection between photography and mortality. In one photograph, we just get a glimpse of her clothes hanging in a room, suggesting that the subject is already gone. The clothes on the hangers are intimate memories of her presence at a particular moment in time. In its capacity of “indexical” rather than “referential” work, to follow Ernst van Alphen’s terminology, this photograph does not “claim the presence” (1997, 250) of Bourgeois but succeeds as “an act of referring to the person to whom the objects belonged” (250). Simultaneously, I would argue, the photograph does make the artist present, as it restages and appropriates earlier mixed media works like “Untitled” (1996), and in doing so hints—once more—at how art and self-presentation are entwined in Bourgeois’ oeuvre. Photographs like this one, including the image of Bourgeois’ hand holding an hourglass, could be read in the framework of the memento mori (remember death) tradition. The most disturbing image in this regard is the portrait of Bourgeois almost looking like a death mask (Figure 4). The materiality of the face is visible but the subjectivity of the artist seems gone, as a prelude to her death.

short-legendFigure 4.

Yet, the dialogue between the images of the photo book and the multiple and varying appearances of Bourgeois in those images allow the subject to escape from photography’s death drive and death itself.

Late-life creativity and the art of ageing

As a concluding remark, I would like to raise the question of what we can learn from Bourgeois’ creative practice in front of Van Gelder’s camera in light of the art of ageing. Scholars such as Joep Dohmen (2013) and Laceulle and Baars (2014) have conceptualized a moral lifestyle for later life that departs from the neoliberal choice biography and the moral dictate to imitate youth as long as possible. They point to the creative skills that a person needs to cleverly maneuver a limiting age-defying cultural context that relegates frailer, older people to the realm of the fourth age. These creative skills include, for instance, coming to terms with the fundamental fragility of human life across the life span, embracing new beginnings at any stage in the life course, and cherishing the relations from which our subjectivities emerge. Joachim Duyndam (2017) addresses the importance of exemplary figures (that we, for instance, admire for their exceptional enactment of wisdom or compassion) for the development of these skills. Our relation to such exemplary figures is deeply hermeneutical in that we have to interpret the value that an inspiring exemplary figure applies before we can concretize it in our own context. If we approach the self-presentations of Bourgeois in Mumbling Beauty as exemplary, what are the creative skills behind this practice of self-presentation that could be transferrable or inspirational to people who have not committed their lives to a career in the arts? How could we make a leap from big C to small c creativity (Margaret A. Boden [1990] 2004) in conceptualizing practices of ageing well and resisting processes of (self-)abjection?

In my view, at least three aspects of Mumbling Beauty stand out in this respect. First, in Bourgeois’ self-presentations, the artist shows a commitment to her life and art that resists all normative and one-dimensional directives about what it means to age “successfully” or “healthily.” The different roles that Bourgeois embodies and the fragmented selves on display illustrate—through their diversity—that the artist is not to be reduced to one particular identity as an older woman artist. She is simultaneously vulnerable and strong, active and reflective. As such, the images open up the dichotomy between the third and the fourth age and invite us to imagine what lies beyond the quest for eternal youth and the abjection of vulnerable older adults.

Second, Bourgeois does not shy away from making her vulnerability and changing feminine appearance as a nonagenarian visible both in photographs that follow a realist style as well as in her more staged images. This includes the recognition of the finitude of life (for instance, by including images that are reminiscent of the memento mori tradition in fine arts) as well as of increasing frailty (as the images of Bourgeois in a wheelchair, for example, testify to). There lie courage and comfort in this visibility of ageing femininity that is puzzling yet beautiful. It may help younger viewers to already come to terms with the mirror images of our future much older selves.

Thirdly, while the artist recognizes her past artistic practice by integrating some of her art works when posing for the camera, the images are not an expression of nostalgia for a past that has gone by. Instead, they are firmly anchored in the here and now of the photographic moment and the encounter with the photographer and viewer, while simultaneously foregrounding the notion of creativity across the life span. What we see is a ninety-year-old artist at work who, with her performances of self, dismantles the idea that creativity is a prerogative of youth. It teaches us that one can reinvent and further develop oneself at any age.

In sum, Mumbling Beauty as a meaning-making practice responds to a call for art that helps us envision “possibilities beyond the norm or, indeed, a different future for the norm itself” (Judith Butler 2004, 29). Bourgeois and Van Gelder ultimately hold up a mirror to us, inviting us to envision what it could mean to age-into-deep-old-age creatively and humanely.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Aagje Swinnen is Associate Professor at the Center for Gender and Diversity, Department of Literature and Art of Maastricht University, and Endowed Socrates Chair International Humanism and the Art of Living at the University of Humanistic Studies, the Netherlands. Swinnen has published on representations of age, gender, and disability and co-edited the volumes Aging, Performance, and Stardom (with J. A. Stotesbury, 2012) and Popularizing Dementia (with M. Schweda, 2015). E-mail: [email protected]

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the conferences Critical Theory in the Humanities: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler (April 5–7 2017, Free University of Amsterdam, as a keynote lecture) and Cultural Narratives, Processes, and Strategies in Representations of Age and Aging (April 27–30 2017, University of Graz, as a paper presentation). I am grateful for the feedback I received from the reviewers and Dr. Roel van den Oever especially.