Like so much of Louise Bourgeois’ oeuvre, The Worm is a testament to the artist’s profoundly complex sources of inspiration, condensed into a unique form of expression. The artist’s interest in ‘part-objects' as demonstrated throughout her practice explores depicted body parts and monumentalises their functions. Breasts, penises, and vulvae are rendered taking on a life of their own, effortlessly bridging the grotesque and the sentimental. The Worm presents a single sleek form with two nipples showing through the patina, anchoring either end. As it arcs as if to crawl forward, the tradition of the female nude is disregarded, favouring the incarnation of the body’s natural functions. In a smaller sculpture from 1967 entitled Tits, a single form renders a similar motif, consolidating Bourgeois’ fascination for the ambiguity that body parts occupy, at once sexualised and life-giving. As the viewer considers Bourgeois’ work, they in turn consider the artist’s poised regard for the complex nexus of physiological and sexual characteristics that govern our bodies.
“I made a drawing of breasts pressed against each other; there was a double attitude to be like a mother, and to be liked by a mother … the lips like sucking. The whole person becomes a breast that stretches in order to give.”
—Louise Bourgeois
Throughout her seventy-year career, Bourgeois continued to execute works that were unrelenting in their capacity to avoid being pigeon-holed. While she herself was a strong feminist and her work was undeniably disruptive, the definitive label of ‘feminist artist’ was not a term Bourgeois embraced. As such, the characteristically masculine and feminine forms that the artist included in her practice were not simply subverted or juxtaposed, they were merged. As seen in The Worm, a pair of breasts are fused together creating a flaccid phallic form that offers an androgynous solution to an age-old binary. The same can be said of the bronze sculpture entitled Janus Fleuri executed in 1968, which includes two smooth features, reminiscent of male glands that merge to create a single rough, overlapping form more indicative of vulvae. What often results from such an approach is a paradoxically unsettling and endearing corpus of work that attests to Bourgeois’ complex rationalisation of her own traumatic upbringing. Even her iconic spider sculptures are as intimidating as they are colossal, stand as a tribute to her beloved mother.
While her career was neglected in favour of her male counterparts that took part in the Abstract Expressionist movement, Louise Bourgeois’ retrospective in 1982 was the first by a woman held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This exhibition cemented her oeuvre as a formative contribution to the development of contemporary art. The artist’s substantial output has continued to be the subject of major exhibitions and publications, testifying to an approach that remained both introspective and enigmatic from the 1930s until her death in 2010.
