Passing Through The Fantasy: Representation And Evolution Of Louise Bourgeois' Spider Images

The theme of my research is looking at Louise Bourgeois' spider images through psychoanalysis.Mama is one of the most famous workpiece of Bourgeois,which impressed people for its colossal size.However,Mama is so shinny that many other works especially paintings in spider series are overshadowed.Spider images have been evolving as the spider works continuously producing in her 60 years' career.Why spider series changed from flat images to three-dimensional sculptures,then regressed to planar images? How could we connect representation and evolution of spider images to artist's unconsciousness?Bourgeois said: “Spider is my mother.”,but we should avoid simple,reductive individualism.With the rise of visual cultural study,interdisciplinary research in visual arts and psychoanalysis is significant.Fantasy formula “$?a” created by Lacan demonstrates dialectical relationship between subject and desire,which projected in art works by artist as his/her fantasy.Art fantasy is a paradox because it constructs our desire on one hand,and on the other hand,defends it.I contend that the logic of fantasy contributes us to read representation and evolution of spider images through a new angle.Drawing on the discovery about evolution of spider images,I combed spider series thoroughly and found that changes about spatial expression are vital characteristics.In the thesis,the first thing was reading bourgeois' diaries,poetics and other texts so that dug up the primal traumatic scene from her childhood and art experiences.Then,the spider series were divided into 3 stages according to different ways of spatial expression,and representative works in each stage were chosen for accurate description and formal analysis in order to draw the outline of space reconstruction progress.Furthermore,representation motivations of spider images were analyzed,including superficial one that considered as historical and cultural contexts and underlying one,that was spatial narration derived from metaphorical relation between “spider-web” and “mother-family”.In the last chapter,through the logic structure of fantasy,I demonstrated the connection between changing spatial expression of spider series and evolving unconsciousness desire of Bourgeois,in the views of art sublimation and female subject construction.And finally,the seemingly unreasonable reconstruction of space shows that Bourgeois had clear thought about the lack of Other and the drive to “pass through the fantasy” against Other's desire.