Donald Kuspit on Louise Bourgeois

In the Cornerstone Lecture series

4 Ara 2008
4 Ara 2008

Another excellent lecture evening at Witte de With, this time introducting Professor Donald Kuspit who will speak on the work of Louise Bourgeois. In Donald Kuspit’s lecture 'The Phallic Woman: Conflict and Fragmentation in Bourgeois’ Conception of the Female Body', he argues that virtually all Bourgeois' representations of the female body are symbolic depictions of the phallic woman.

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Louise Bourgeois in 1990 with her marble sculpture Eye to Eye (1970), Photo: Raimon Ramis, from the Telegraph website . -

Kuspit will illustrate the tensions presented between the phallic and the womanly and how this suggests Bourgeois’ uncertainty about the nature of the female body and the character of female selfhood. An uncertainty that Kuspit will trace to animosity towards men, rooted in childhood traumas, making her a feminist by default, even when she explicitly denies that she is one. Bourgeois can be seen as the last of the -‘‘classical’’ modern artists, as much as a -‘‘postmodernist’’, for she reconciles Construction and Expression, the two poles of modern art which thinkers such as Adorno and Greenberg erroneously thought were at their best when they were kept apart.

Donald Kuspit is University Distinguished Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is a contributing editor at Artforum, Sculpture and Tema Celeste and the Editor of Art Criticism.

Date: December 4, 2008
Location: Witte de With’s Auditorium
Time: 7 – 8.30 p.m.
Entrance: €10,- (reduced price €7,-)
Language: English
Reservations: reservations@wdw.nl

Check out the website of Witte de With for all information on their Cornerstone Lectures.