Old bones and cocktail dresses: Louise Bourgeois and the question of age

Focusing on two works about moments in the history of feminine sexuality, P recious Liquids (1992) and Untitled 1996: a tree-structure on which from ha ngers made of old beef bones are suspended cocktail dresses and lingerie of an earlier era, this article considers Louise Bourgeois' sculptural instal lations of the 1990s as dialogical with major contemporaries from Duchamp t o Mary Kelly whose work defines the problematic representations of sexualit y and desire within the transformative vocabularies and intellectual frames of twentieth-century artistic and sexual politics. Arguing against both mo dernist terms of 'influence' and current critical entrapments in psychobiog raphy, while insisting upon the play of cultural cross-currents and the 'ne cessity' of singular psychic intensities pressing from the artist's life hi story, the paper argues that both the anxiety of aging, with its disruption s of temporality and memory through the radical dislocation of subjectivity from the body, and the belatedness of trauma piercing the ever more permea ble psychic shield to make the past an almost unbearably intense present th at must now be worked through, offer ways to read the work (in the Freudian sense of dream-work) effected by Louise Bourgeois' inventive sculptural vo cabulary of interrelating installations, objects and spaces that came to in vest in images of the cage, bones and fleshless spider that presided over t he 1997-8 exhibition Recent Works.