Art and Archive: Louise Bourgeois through a Feverish Gaze

Abstract

This article examines uses of archival documents in the work of French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010). Jacques Derrida’s seminal essay on “Archive Fever” (1995) provides a framework for the close study of Bourgeois’s multi-modal archives. The article discusses how the artist’s archives, while embedded in the site that manages them, pursue their existence outside their institutional home: displayed in exhibition spaces, reproduced in print publications and recorded on film, they are constantly moving, all the while pointing to a continuous shift in the place, value and nature of the artist’s archives and a reconsideration of their relationship with Bourgeois’s oeuvre and its evolving critical reception.