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Mon 5th Mar, 2007, Amazing art, Thai art

Articulating loss

The structures of life that were torn away by the tsunami continue to be replaced, in some tiny hopeful way, by memorials to the dead and to the memories, and the latest to be dedicated in Thailand is “Hold Me Close”, a work by no less a figure than Louise Bourgeois, the Paris-born, New York City-based adventurer of the psyche who, at age 95, remains an active link to the uncompromising early days of surrealism and at the same time a beacon of individualism.

The photo above and the others on this page of Bourgeois’ new pieces are by my colleague at The Nation, Phatarawadee Phataranawik. As she reported last month from the site in Nopparat Thana National Park in Krabi, this larger segment of the work sits among the trees just off the beach and has a view of Koh Phi Phi, the resort island that was brutally swept clean by the great waves.

The monument had been intended for Phi Phi itself, but as I’ve learned since, the owner of the proposed location there would rather hang on to his beer bar, if it’s all the same to anyone else’s conscience. The government’s Office of Contemporary Art and Culture secured an alternative site on the mainland for the Bt6-million work, which Bourgeois donated.

The larger segment rests at the end of a 40-metre wooden walkway through the woods: a tall, wooden beehive-like structure that houses a sculpture of the hands of a man and women in gold leaf on bronze. The women’s hands were modelled on the artist’s.

Nearby in a man-made pool is another sculpture, a child’s hand in bronze enfolded in a granite wave.

Interestingly, replacing something that was missing was how Bourgeois was introduced to art. Her parents repaired tapestries and, as a pre-teen, Louise drew for them the sections that had been worn or torn away so that they could be rewoven. She went on to study geometry at the Sorbonne and dabbled in cubist painting, for a time serving as Fernand Léger’s assistant and also studying under Brancusi and Giacometti.

Bourgeois has notoriously relied on her not-always-pleasant childhood memories for her inspiration, recalling an adulterous father and uncaring mother, so that anger, betrayal and jealousy appear in her work. The sentiment behind the new sculpture of the child’s hand is on the order of “please don’t leave me behind”.

“My childhood never lost its magic, never lost its mystery, and never lost its drama,” she has said. Another time she said she’s always identified with Eugénie Grandet, a Balzac character, who was never given a chance to grow up.

Ignored for the most part in the art market of the 1950s and ’60s, she came into her own following the deaths of her father and her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater.

She became famous for her cells, “Maman” spiders and erotic /sexual images. The huge spinner of webs stands for labour and protection, its home a welcoming deathtrap. This one is outside the Canadian parliament in Ottawa.

Below, “Fallen Woman”, unstable against the power of gravity, as unpredictable as desire, and “Fillette”, a Venusian phallus, an ancestral image, unveiling men as Picasso unveiled women, as Paulo Herkenhoff put it for the Bienal Internacional in São Paulo.

In 1999 Bourgeois was the first artist commissioned to do a piece for the Tate Modern’s new Turbine Hall. She produced three nine-metre-tall steel towers named “I Do”, “I Undo” and “I Redo”, each containing a bell jar with sculpted figures of a mother and child and each topped with a platform on which visitors can sit in the contemplative presence of huge swivelling mirrors. What they invariably discuss there is the 35-foot spider she placed alongside the towers.

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Further along the Andaman coast at Phuket’s Kamala Beach is the huge, stainless-steel “Jit Jakawan” (”Heart of the Universe”) by Udon Jiraksa, a meditation on the coexistence of all things in the universe and the survival of the fittest. ‘’Each line and each circle represents reason,” Udon told the Bangkok Post. “I believe there are causes and effects in everything that happens. The tsunami disaster was no exception — we lost a lot of lives and property — but losing something also marks the beginning of something new too.’

At Ban Bang Niang in Phang Nga’s Takua Pa district, where many Scandinavian tourists were killed, you can see “Stabile” by Lars Englund of Sweden. The photo here shows another of Englund’s pieces, “Borderlines”.

I haven’t been able to find images of these two sculptures, but they surely must resonate more deeply than the “tsunami wall”, which strikes me as mere cheesy brickwork suitable for holding flowers and other insertable mementoes. I’m sure the survivors and those who lost loved ones get some comfort from it, and that’s wonderful, but it could have been much nicer.

Bottom of the ladder has to be the underwater statues that divers’ organisations have installed to both commemorate the disaster and help rebuild the shattered submarine reefs. The concept was great, the execution merely maudlin.

Elsewhere again on the shaken coastline there were several sculptures in place before the tsunami catastrophe’s first anniversay. The gaily named ‘’Art on the Beach'’ in October 2005 had a slew of fanciful works on Phuket’s Patong Beach both evoking grief and pulling in the reluctant tourists. German’s Frank Roedel survived the waves on Similan Island but returned with a digital photo-montage entitled “The Lost”.