Tucked between high-end designer shops, Hauser & Wirth’s small exhibition space within the Colnaghi old master’s collection is an exclusive environment. The parquet flooring, flocked red wallpaper and imitation marble are not the trimmings associated with a contemporary art space.

The sixteen, framed prints (archival dyes printed on cloth) hung around the room, have been formed from a unique collaboration between Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin. One can sit on the plush leather couch in the centre of the room beneath the conservatory style glass ceiling and gaze at them as one would a renaissance painting. The prints in this setting are attached with the aura of rarefied objects, which is perhaps fitting if we are to view art history along the narrative of the “genius artist”; the celebrated artist Bourgeois died last year aged nearly one hundred and is surely to become an “old master” of our time. Hauser & Wirth have organized a series of exhibitions of the work of Bourgeois including The Fabric Works and Armed Forces; Alex Van Gelder’s photographic portraits of the artist.

Emin has said that she felt the weight of such a collaboration, when Bourgeois, introduced to her by a mutual friend, handed her the original drawings in 2009, she carried the pieces around the world, “afraid to touch” them. The sheets passed to Emin were 24 x 30 inch drawings of “fluid silhouettes” depicting bodies in states of flux; torsos of men with erect penises and pregnant women, all without heads or limbs. Their outlines filled in with shades of red, blue and black gouache on paper, some portrait, some landscape. Emin has mono printed her trademark figurative portraits of naked women and text on to many of the drawings. These miniature figures are dwarfed by the much larger torsos; they inhabit the bodies like embryos or climb the surface as though crossing a landscape, perhaps expressing Emin’s feelings about her place as a younger artist gazing up at her hero. Emin said in an interview with Jean Wainwright that in the past “I have been really careful not to make work that looked like Louise Bourgeois’s because that would be too easy for me”. Emin does indeed attack similar themes of sexuality, violence and motherhood in her work. Many critics will no doubt accuse Emin’s mono-prints of repeating the same old confessions of a broken adolescence, as expressed in the beginning of her career. A key member of the YBAs of the nineties, Emin has endured but also courted attention as unsophisticated “Mad Tracey from Margate”. However despite much criticism Emin, in her mid forties, went on to represent Britain at the 2007 Venice Biennale, a covetable position, which has given her work undeniable kudos.

Fame came to Emin young, contrasting to Bourgeois who had her first major retrospective aged seventy three at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, reflecting a very different time for women. Bourgeois battled to be recognized as a surrealist, but was rejected by Breton. She went on to contest the patriarchal underpinnings of the Freudian based movement that “celebrated” women as objects of hysteria, but expected them to remain housewives and mothers. With a strong interest in Klienian psychoanalysis, Bourgeois’s sculptures and drawings express fantasies of murderous rage between mother and child, and position the male as hysteric. She both problematised and celebrated female sexuality, highlighting violence and pain as well as erotic abandon. Bourgeois, known as a sculptor, began with drawings and paintings as she struggled with postnatal depression and at the end of her life returned principally to drawing and the themes of motherhood. The prints in Do Not Abandon Me are characteristic of these late drawings; which were often created obsessively throughout the night in red ink, flowing apparently unmediated from the unconscious. This repetition became catharsis:

Repetition gives a physical reality to experience. To repeat, to try again over again towards perfection. If a person is an artist, it is a guarantee of sanity. He is able to take this torment. (Bourgeois)

Emin’s painful re-inscribing of experiences over and over in her work, whether through quilts, wooden constructions or mono-prints, could be valued in this way. Her figurative prints are generally self-portraits; they too flow erratically like streams of consciousness and read as autobiographical through her added text. In Do Not Abandon Me a print entitled I just died at birth shows Emin’s scrawled words “I never asked to be part of you… my own birth stopped me from giving birth” the long monologue fills the pregnant silhouette and a small figure emerges beneath the bump. The intimate physical and emotional relationship back and forth between the mother and child, expressed for example, in the trauma of being born and giving birth, are common threads for both artists. Bourgeois’s truncated female bodies are reduced to pure conduits of reproduction. One is reminded of her work The She-Fox (1985), a sculpture representing a jealous anger towards her mother; an amputated creature with a line of swelling breasts. Both artists create a sense of how women can be caught within expectations of their bodies to reproduce; a space within to be filled and penetrated, but also an enveloping container that traps the mind and directs life course.

There is a mixture of “bumps” and “lumps” in the interchanging prints of male and female, horizontal and vertical torsos, an undulating and provocative landscape is created. Bourgeois has played, in her sculptures with the partial objects of bodies, inverting genders so that in some cases, the penis becomes the breast and vice versa, often subverting the “threat” of the phallus. Emin has however interpreted the standing males in Do Not Abandon Me, as oppressive; in Just hanging, her miniature figure swings from a noose attached to the giant dark blue erect penis, the clotted blue paint reminiscent of the close proximity of sex to death. Emin does add moments of lightness and humour; the horizontal male torsos read as submissive, representing, perhaps what Jennifer Doyle would term in her essay on Emin, the “good sex” perspective. In one of these red prints we see Emin’s tiny figure embracing a giant penis and written beneath “And so I kissed you”. One can see how Emin, has a delicate, yet humorous way of turning the pornographic in to the intimate and allowing for female ownership of erotic representation. The comedy of the disproportionate scale in this print is reminiscent of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photo of Bourgeois smiling cheekily and cradling, Fillette (1968), her giant sculpture of an erect phallus, as though it were a baby.

When viewing Emin’s work it would be easy to proclaim that, “it has all been done before” by second wave feminist artists and the likes of Bourgeois, but as Rosemary Betterton points out, the reason for this may be that the position of women has not changed as much as hoped for. Emin like Bourgeois, continues to repeat and repeat in the hope of a personal resolution, which could reflect a wider political landscape. It is great, however, to live in a time where a female artist such as Bourgeois can become a contemporary “old master.” Emin, by Bourgeois’s standards is still early on in her career and so who knows, maybe she too could come to be revered in a similar way. Do Not Abandon Me, amongst the series of Hauser & Wirth’s exhibitions, celebrates the late artist Bourgeois as a “great”, but also embodies a leveling between Emin and Bourgeois; a fluid synthesis between generations, and expressions of corporeality from the female perspective, which is not necessarily conducive to the idea of “genius artist.” Whether or not we can still use such a bounded (or for that matter, gendered) conception of authorship is an old question continuously up for debate.
Laura Bleach

Do Not Abandon Me: a collaboration between Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin

Hauser & Wirth, Old Bond Street
18 February – 12 March 2011