03/03/2020
À 93 ans, Louise Bourgeois, artiste contemporaine toujours fougueuse, s’était interrogée sur l’importance des textiles dans sa vie et dans son œuvre.
Explorant sa propre garde-robe, elle y trouva des vêtements remontant aux années 1920 et décida de les faire témoigner dans un livre textile intitulé Ode à l’oubli. Découpés, cousus ou brodés, les vêtements et textiles (utilisés notamment pour rembourrer certaines de ses sculptures), se retrouvent transformer pour créer de nouvelles explorations graphiques.
Témoin de sa vie d’artiste, le vêtement, objet intime et personnel est désormais une trace artistique et créative de l’incroyable Louise Bourgeois.
Louise Bourgeois. Untitled, no. 22 of 34, from the fabric illustrated book, Ode à l’oubli. 2002. Fabric collage, page: 11 3/4 x 13” (29.8 x 33 cm). © 2013 Louise Bourgeois Trust
Imagine the busy hands and loud machinery on a factory floor producing yellow and white checkered shirts. Imagine a shipment of those shirts arriving by truck at a department store. Imagine a woman in New York City, perhaps in the 1950s or 1960s, pulling one of these shirts off its rack and paying for it in cash and coins. Imagine all the scenes of daily life this shirt becomes infused with in the eyes of its wearer each time it’s pulled out of the closet. Now, imagine a stranger’s hands—my hands—running over this fabric that is nearly unrecognizable as a shirt many years later on a quiet afternoon in MoMA’s Department of Prints and Illustrated Books.
As I catalogued Louise Bourgeois’s Ode à l’oubli, carefully examining and recording data about the book, I felt subtly challenged to invent stories like this. On page 18, the book even seems to admit to evoking these imagined histories: “I had a flashback of something that never existed.”