Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010)
Father and Son, 2004–2006
Stainless steel, aluminum, water, and bronze bell
Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle
Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010)
Father and Son, 2004–2006
Stainless steel, aluminum, water, and bronze bell
Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle
To explore the question “Am I worthy of love, even without him?” more fully, I looked not only at Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son, but also at Father and Son by Louise Bourgeois.
This question—“Am I worthy of love, even without him?”—is the central question explored in the eponymous issue of the mini magazine SATURDAYS with Diana. There, the question is examined through, among other things, articles I published on my blog and articles by others, but also through works of art such as this one.
To get a better feel for Bourgeois’s Father and Son, I looked into what relevant art historians, such as Lisa Graziose Corrin (art historian and curator of contemporary art) and Patricia Failing (Professor of Art History at the University of Washington), have written about the work. I also looked at the Seattle Art Museum’s official interpretation of the piece, as well as what Louise Bourgeois herself had to say about it.
Reading the work
Lisa Graziose Corrin, who was Deputy Director of Art and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum during the development of the Olympic Sculpture Park, where Father and Son can be seen, interprets the figures’ nudity as a form of emotional vulnerability: although father and son reach their arms toward one another, the water prevents them from actually reaching each other.1
The Seattle Art Museum’s official collection page likewise describes the situation as vulnerable and poignant: father and son stand facing one another with their arms outstretched, attempting to overcome what appears to be an insurmountable distance. At the same time, they are alternately engulfed by the water and separated from one another.
Here too, the interpretation centers on the outstretched arms as representing a desire for contact, the water as representing the separation between father and son, and the inability to reach one another as representing their emotional distance.2
In Sculpture Review Magazine (“Time and Duration: Louise Bourgeois’s,” Summer 2008), Patricia Failing apparently approaches Father and Son not merely as a representation of a father and son, but places particular emphasis on time and duration. From Failing’s emphasis on time and duration, one might infer that the meaning of Father and Son lies not solely in the depiction of father and son, but also emerges through the continuous movement of the water and the length of time during which the viewer experiences the work.3
Art critic Jen Graves describes Father and Son as “a monument to the limits of masculine family relationships.” She notes how the columns of water alternately obscure the stainless-steel father and son from one another as their hands reach across the divide. Her description draws attention to the tension between physical proximity and separation within the work. Building on this observation, one might interpret the sculpture as presenting a father-son relationship in which closeness is repeatedly interrupted or made difficult.4
This can also be connected to Corrin’s idea of “emotional nakedness.”
These art-historical and museum interpretations of Father and Son generally place the tension between the desire for closeness and an insurmountable distance at the center. The outstretched arms suggest a desire for contact, while the water continually prevents that contact from taking place. At the same time, the cyclical movement of the water makes the relationship dependent on time: father and son alternately appear and disappear from view. Their nakedness further reinforces the motif of emotional vulnerability.
In Bourgeois’s own words
Personally, I like to take the liberty of departing from these interpretations to a considerable extent. I assume I can permit myself that freedom because, in an artist profile for Art21, Bourgeois says:
“A work of art doesn’t have to be explained. If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn’t touch you, I have failed.”
I would cautiously conclude from this that Louise sent her creations out into the world with perhaps a personal meaning of her own, but left it to the viewer to give that same work their own personal meaning.
Louise’s own explanation of the design for Father and Son is quoted by Cathy Sorbo in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (2005) as follows:
“The passage of time and its continuity have long been a theme in my work. ‘Father and Son’ is a fountain … which consists of two mounds of water arising from an oval basin. ‘Father and Son’ is also a clock that will mark the 24 hours of the day. In the interior volumes created by the water are two naked figures cast in bronze.
One represents the son who is approximately 6 years of age, and the other represents the father, a man in his 40s. The figures will be held in the air on a column that will serve as a feed to create the two mounds of gushing water that will hide the naked figures. The boy’s hand reaches up and out to embrace the father. The father in turn reaches out to embrace his son. The volumes of water will be on a timer to mark the 24 hours of the day, accompanied by the ringing of a bell. On the hour, the water of one of the mounds will be lowered to reveal the son. At the next hour when the bell rings, the water will rise hiding the son, while the other mound of water will descend to reveal the father …
There will be a constant alternation between the revealing of the father and the son. At night, the fountain will be lit, using optic fibers to bring in color.”5
What strikes me about most of these interpretations is that they are expressed exclusively from the perceived perspective of the two figures depicted, with the exception of Patricia Failing, who also brings the viewer’s perspective into the equation.
Because although the title of the work is Father and Son, I wonder whether we are really looking at two different entities or people, or at two different states of one and the same entity or person. In other words: could it be that Father and Son is perhaps less about a father and a son, and more about fatherhood and sonhood as experienced by one and the same person?
1. Sam Howe Verhovek, “Plan for Statue of Nudes Exposes Seattle’s Modesty,” Los Angeles Times, 2 oktober 2005.
2. Seattle Art Museum, “Father and Son,” Louise Bourgeois, 2004–2006.
3. Seattle Art Museum, “Father and Son,” Louise Bourgeois, 2004–2006.
4. Jen Graves, “‘Father and Son,’” The Stranger, March 26, 2007.
5. Cathy Sorbo, “Here in America, Art Isn’t Easy,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 7, 2005.
My own reading
I started wondering this because of the water, and because of the importance Bourgeois herself apparently attached to time by having the fountain alternate between the two figures every hour. Only when the fountain shifts from father to son, or from son to father, can the figures briefly perceive one another and catch a glimpse of each other.
The reason I think this might not be about two separate entities—a father and a son—but rather about two states of the same entity, namely that person’s fatherhood and sonhood, is that, in my perception, the two figures are not so much separated from one another by the insurmountable water, as the museum interpretation suggests, but are instead made invisible to one another by it, with the exception of that brief moment when the fountain shifts from completely obscuring the father to revealing him while simultaneously concealing the son, and vice versa.
Father and son each receive an equal amount of attention from Bourgeois: every hour, one or the other becomes visible. It is not as though, for example, the father is visible for an hour and a half while the son is visible for only half an hour. At least, our attention is thereby distributed equally between father and son.
Because, again: the figures are barely visible to one another, but they are visible to us, the viewers.
The viewer’s perspective here is also the perspective of the outsider. And the perspective of the outsider is, in turn, a perspective one can adopt when trying to reflect on one’s own situation, one’s own history. The viewer’s position of observation therefore becomes equivalent to that of someone trying to look back over their own history by adopting the perspective of an outsider. Yet the two perspectives differ in terms of knowledge. The viewer has no access to the inner emotional world of either the father figure or the son figure. In that sense, the viewer remains excluded—and therefore remains an outsider. The person who adopts the position of an outsider in order to reflect, however, does have access to the inner emotional world of at least one of the two figures… and perhaps even to the inner world of both.
“What if these figures aren’t actually Father and Son? What if they are actually Mother and Daughter?”
Father and son, or mother and daughter?
Because what if these figures aren’t actually Father and Son? What if they are actually Mother and Daughter? More than that: what if both the mother and the daughter are different sides of the same person?
In an interview with Richard D. Marshall, Bourgeois says: “I miss my mother. I am a mother. I am looking for a mother.” Louise had a very strong bond with her mother, one characterized by guilt, a sense of inadequacy, and a complex identification. One particularly interesting statement by Bourgeois is: “The most important person in my life was my mother.”6
Could the child’s outstretched arms toward the adult perhaps express Louise’s search for a mother, while the adult’s outstretched arms toward the child represent her own motherhood?
And perhaps the equal alternation between the perspectives of father and son—or mother and daughter—means that we remain a son or daughter forever, even after we ourselves have become a father or mother. And perhaps this latter realization means that, through that experience, we begin to look back at our own father or mother more like an observer. In other words, perhaps becoming a father or mother causes a shift in perspective in how we relate, as sons or daughters, to our own father or mother—a shift that may affect our judgment of our parents, but also our judgment of our own fatherhood or motherhood.
That would explain why, as viewers—or from a perspective we can adopt as “outsiders” in relation to our own history as children or parents—we are able to see both figures, albeit alternately and almost never simultaneously.
Father and Son at the Olympic Sculpture Park
But as long as we remain confined to one of the two roles, that of the child or that of the parent, we can only see from within our own inner emotional world.
That is also how I see the fountain of water: as a blinding and therefore restricting cage, even a prison, surrounding the figure of the son/daughter or the father/mother.
It is important to note that this is clearly a relationship between a child and a parent of the same sex.
If my hypothesis is correct—if Louise Bourgeois was perhaps trying to represent her own perspective on her personal experience of being both daughter and mother—then why did she do so through two male figures?
Why is the work called Father and Son? Why didn’t it become Mother and Daughter?
Simply because the money that had been made available came with specific conditions: a life-size male nude + moving water.
How the sculpture came to be
In his will, Stu Smailes left $1 million to the city of Seattle. He attached a very specific condition to the donation: the money had to be used for a public artwork featuring a realistic, life-size male nude, to be placed in a prominent public space and incorporated into a fountain.
The city of Seattle initially wasn’t quite sure what to do with such a specific bequest. Eventually, the project was placed under the auspices of the Seattle Art Museum, which at the time was developing the Olympic Sculpture Park. Lisa Corrin, then Deputy Director of Art and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at SAM, was the artistic lead for the project. Proposals were solicited from several artists, including Anthony Gormley, Glenn Ligon, and Louise Bourgeois.
Ultimately, SAM selected the proposal by the renowned French sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who was 94 years old at the time.7
6. Richard D. Marshall, “Louise Bourgeois,” Issue Magazine, interview, images by Mary Ellen Mark, for Whitewall Magazine.
7. Regina Hackett, “Fountain Art Sure to Make a Splash,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 14, 2005.
Documentary on Louise Bourgeois
Back to the question
So how can this entire analysis now be connected to the question: Am I worthy of love, even without him?
Because that is where this story began, after all.
Perhaps one possible answer lies in transcending the question itself by stepping outside our limited perspective and no longer perceiving him solely from our contemporary, limited point of view—from within this particular, finite moment in time.
Perhaps we can place ourselves outside that moment and try to perceive things from the more neutral, more contemplative, and emotionally more detached perspective of the outsider, while still retaining an understanding of the inner emotional world belonging to both separate perspectives: that of the child as well as that of the parent.
Those two perspectives are ultimately connected by the passage and continuity of time, just as the water in the basin flows continuously from father to son and back again.
Hero photo: Ingrid Taylar, CC BY-NC 2.0
What do you think of my interpretation?
Please keep in mind that this is the interpretation of a layperson. I have not studied art history or anything related to this. I am simply following my thoughts wherever they lead me.
So, what do you see when you look at Father and Son? I’d be very curious to hear what the work evokes for you.
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