"The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos. It has two directions. Where do you place yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex?" 
—Louise Bourgeois

At once geometric and biomorphic, masculine and feminine, interior and exterior, Labyrinthine Tower is one of Louise Bourgeois’ most well-known forms. Labyrinthine Tower marks the artist’s return to sculpture in the early 1960s after a nine-year hiatus when she began experimenting with plaster and other pliable media to develop intricate spiraling formations, which would become a recurring theme in her oeuvre. Evolving from its base with a centrifugal force, Labyrinthine Tower combines the architectonic construction of her earlier work with a softness of organic drooping. In 1962, Bourgeois conceived two eponymous plaster casts of differing sizes and created variants in iron, bronze, and marble. The present work is from an edition of five cast-iron iterations executed in 1967. Anticipating the artist’s phallic and implicitly sexual works of the later 1960s, Labyrinthine Tower “prefigured the future direction of her sculpture.”ⁱ

 

Spiraling In

"Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing control; the winding in is a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance." 
—Louise Bourgeois

The helicoid structure of Labyrinthine Tower showcases the significance of spiral forms in Bourgeois’ practice. Holding a deeply personal resonance, the spiral was, in Bourgeois’ words, a “study of the self.”ⁱⁱ The deconstructed torsion metaphorically reflected at once her anguished psyche and her liberation from it: “The spiral is important to me. It is a twist. As a child, after washing tapestries in the river, I would turn and twist and ring them with three others or more to ring the water out. Later I would dream of getting rid of my father’s mistress. I would do it in my dreams by ringing her neck. The spiral – I love the spiral – represents control and freedom.”ⁱⁱⁱ For Bourgeois, the reflexive solution to avoid spiraling out of control was to control the spiral by creating it, as she wrote in a diary entry from 1986: “inward spiral tightens + tightens / Control of “attack of anxiety” / “through understanding the geneses of it.”^iv With Labyrinthine Tower and her other spiral sculptures, she “attempted to make visible psychological states such as fear, vulnerability, and loss of control, as well as basic instincts and forms of behavior, including withdrawal, hiding, protection, sheltering, and nurturing.”^v

 

Spiraling Out

"Beginning at the center is affirmation, the move outward is a representation of giving, and giving up control; of trust, positive energy, of life itself." 
—Louise Bourgeois

Embodying a shift in her oeuvre from exteriority to interiority, Bourgeois’ sculptures of the 1960s also anticipated her interest in deconstructive hybridity through fusing relationships of opposite forces. “Her forms no longer emerged by subtraction, but rather by addition, starting from an inner core, moving from center to edges,” Marie-Laure Bernadac observed.^vi “Suspension replaced erection, softness replaced hardness, liquid replaced solid, inner replaced outer.”^vii This deliberate inversion was at the crux of Bourgeois’ mind on a macroscale, as she once journaled, “control of the space....the center of gravity to change from the container toward the contained.”^viii In Labyrinthine Tower, the structural rigor progressively dissolves into an organic amorphism from base to peak, encapsulating Bourgeois’ hybrid evocations of architecture and flesh—epitomized in the present work’s cast-iron form.

 

Towards a Mutable Identity

 

Prefiguring the artist’s phallic and implicitly sexual works of the later 1960s, Labyrinthine Tower captures her concerns with the mutability of sexual identity and gender. Despite the phallic invocation, Bourgeois viewed the labyrinthine twisting as “a feminine geometry.”^ix “A torsade is something that revolves around an axis. This geometry is founded on poetic freedom and promises security.”^x Robert Storr spoke of the amorphic quality of the artist’s work during this period, stating, “In Bourgeois’ restless hands, Surrealist biomorphism thus allowed not only for allusions to, or alternate representations of, the body, but for a fundamental remaking of the world in which simple elements…could be made to change identity or referent according to its ‘behaviour’ in isolation or in groups. At any given moment, such an element might suggest the geographical or geological, the vegetal or the animal, the male or the female.”^xi Cohering the body and identity, the material and organic, life and art, Labyrinthine Tower exudes the energetic force captured in Bourgeois’ words: “I am involved in a kind of spiral, a spiral motion of motivation.”^xii

 

ⁱ Marie-Laure Bernadac, Louise Bourgeois, Paris, 1996, p. 67.
ⁱⁱ Louise Bourgeois, quoted in Paulo Herkenhoff, “Louise Bourgeois, Femme-Temps,” in Louise Bourgeois: Blue Days and Pink Days, exh. cat., Fondazione Prada, Milan, 1997, p. 273.
ⁱⁱⁱ Paul Gardner, Louise Bourgeois, New York, 1994, p. 68.
^iv Louise Bourgeois, diary entry, December 23, 1986, quoted in Louise Bourgeois: Spiral, exh. cat., Cheim & Reid, New York, 2018, p. 56.
^v Deborah Wye, Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1982, p. 24.
^vi Marie-Laure Bernadac, Louise Bourgeois, Paris, 1996, p. 66.
^vii Ibid.
^viii Louise Bourgeois, diary entry, September 16, 1957, quoted in Louise Bourgeois: Spiral, exh. cat., Cheim & Reid, New York, 2018, p. 34.
ix Louise Bourgeois, quoted in Paulo Herkenhoff, “Louise Bourgeois, Femme-Temps,” in Louise Bourgeois: Blue Days and Pink Days, exh. cat., Fondazione Prada, Milan, 1997, p. 11.
^x Ibid.
^xi Robert Storr, “Abstraction: L’Esprit géométrique,” in Louise Bourgeois, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 2007, p. 32.
^xii Louise Bourgeois, quoted in Donald Kuspit, “Interview with Louise Bourgeois,” in Bourgeois, New York, 1988, p. 45.