Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play: Louise Bourgeois’s Sculpture, 1947–2000

This book considers the sculptures of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) in light of psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s (1896-1971) radical ideas regarding transitional objects, potential space, and play, offering a model for exploring the complex and psychologically evocative sculptures Bourgeois produced from 1947 to 2000. Bridging themes and concerns of modernism and postmodernism, the book looks beyond the theories of Freud and Klein, typically used to discuss her work, to reveal how Bourgeois brought a decades-long study of psychoanalysis to bear upon her sculptural production that was symbolic, metaphorical, but most importantly, useful. The book demonstrates how Bourgeois’s transformative sculptural objects and environments are invested in object relations, both psychical and tangible, and explores Bourgeois’s contention that the observer physically engage with the intricate sculptural objects and architectural spaces she produced. Each chapter focuses on a key body of work—Femme Maison (1994), Personages (1946-55), Lair (1962), Janus (1968), and Cell (1989-93)—exploring how these imaginative and playful objects are staged in space and time to invoke the mutuality, reciprocity, and ambivalence of our object relationships. Treating artworks across a meshwork of aesthetic, cultural, and psychological streams of influence and production, Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play addresses the critical relationships among Bourgeois’s work and that of other sculptors. It weaves together practical, archival, and theoretical material, offers close examinations of historically situated objects and analyzes their complex spatiality. It gathers perspectives from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, feminist, and literary criticism, extending its specific art historical scope to investigate the crucial roles that art and cultural experience assume in everyday life.