The art of confrontation

The work of sculptor Louise Bourgeois can be seen in Basel - curated by Jenny Holzer. Why is this a feeling.

The big infernal machine that currently stands in the basement of the Kunstmuseum Basel is formidable in its size. A jet-black painted iron piston on rails moves slowly, humming softly and in endless motion in and out of an equally black casing. The mechanical installation breathes violence below the surface, but also shows a certain sense of humor. "Twosome" is the name Louise Bourgeois gave to her 1991 work. It looks like a cross between a steam locomotive and a submarine. A red light spins inside the object. Usability - an indefinable thing with a risk of injury?

The exhibition was curated by American artist Jenny Holzer, born in 1950, who was friends with Bourgeois. It's rare for a world famous artist to tamper with another world famous artist's work in public, so to speak. Also because we can expect her to have fewer reservations, fewer scruples than a curator, an art historian or an exhibition organizer. The tribute, which can also be a retrospective, becomes a confrontation.

Holzer once described his own art as "text relating to light and its effect on people". And although she shows no art, Holzer's affinity with language is just as noticeable as the willingness to take risks with the art of her older colleague, who for her part did not shy away from the intensity of his own emotional world. .

First of all, we notice that Holzer, contrary to all museum conventions, renounces captions and showcases. She thus succeeded in for a moment snatching bourgeois art from historicity and making it again appear completely contemporary. Holzer has also distributed Bourgeois's works throughout the museum as a route, where in places they have the effect of feminist commentaries on art history. For example, one of the flagship works of the Basel collection, Cézanne's lyrical and voluptuous painting "Five Bathers" (1885/1887) in the permanent exhibition is challenged to a duel by a large bourgeois marble sculpture.

The elevator leading to the exhibition on the top floor of the museum looks haunted. A French nursery rhyme is sung. It is the voice of Bourgeois, who in his art kept returning to his childhood. "My childhood never lost its magical power, never lost its mysterious darkness, never lost its drama." These scenes form the prologue to the real thing: a bourgeois spectacle that unfolds like a psychologically intimate drama in nine halls of the gallery with around 250 exhibits – writings, drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures and installations.

"The violence of handwriting on a page" is the title of this exhibition. Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and moved to New York in 1938. She raised three children in their 40s and 50s. Haunted by depression and insomnia, the artist produced works of poetic frankness and vulnerability that still stick to your skin today. Bourgeois, who died in New York in 2010 at the age of 98, became world famous with her large-scale spider sculptures and cell-like cage installations.

In Basel, Jenny Holzer mainly presents her drawings and her writings. The artist's works are installed in the museum up to the ceiling, sometimes in three superimposed rows. Their order does not follow chronology, but is based on certain thematic threads that run through the work underground, such as architecture and spaces, water and blood, family, love and sexuality, the body , birth and death.

There is, for example, the nine-part text-image cycle "He Disappeared in Complete Silence", which was published in a small number of books in 1947 and now marks the beginning of the show. Bourgeois combines short texts, in which a fiery man is decapitated by an elevator, with etchings of constructions and spatial situations that nevertheless seem nightmarish. Small sculptures can be seen on small shelves below, which aim at the gendered dimensions of the servant. The theme of the "House Woman", the female figure who grew up with the house, often appears as a basic motif in Bourgeois' work. Sometimes the architectures appear as places of refuge, sometimes they turn out to be traps. The artist found simple and impressive images for the suffocation felt at home: for example, only the legs, arms and hair of a Barbie doll stick out of a long earth-colored mass.