ART : Unbearable Darkness of Being : Fame builds for the ever-defiant Louise Bourgeois, who at age 80 is still making art out of personal rage

Louise Bourgeois has the kind of access to her unconscious you’re only going to find in some artists and psychotics.

“Thank you,” she says, when I mention this.

It’s a vintage Bourgeois moment: defiance, acquiescence and ambiguity, all in the same breath.

Is that “Thank you,” as in “Thank you for the compliment”? Or maybe “Thank you,” as in “You fool” or “You swine”? Or even “Thank you” as in “Now shut up and sit down”?

Bourgeois could mean any of them, wearing that gotcha grin on her elfin, sharp-featured face, insouciantly trilling her Parisian Rs.

At 80, she is the mistress of the multiple meaning. Right now, for instance, she’s brandishing a needlepoint rendition of an 11-foot banner she conceived for strikers picketing the Museum of Modern Art back in 1973. “No!, no, NO, no,” it says in every conceivable species of black-and-white type. She’s about to send “No!, no, NO, no” to France as her way of saying “Yes, Yes, Yes” to a French government commission to make a Gobelin tapestry.

In her sculptures, a gaggle of marble breasts can turn into a plethora of penises; the accommodating plaster bust of a woman can hide an avenging arm that’s hinged to snap like a guillotine.

She began making her compelling, unsettling and darkly hilarious sculptures in the mid-’40s, not too many years after she married art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938 and made good her escape from France and family to New York.

It’s only this summer, though, that her adopted country is finally taking notice in a big way. She’s a woman after all, prickly and shy. It took the women’s movement to open the doors that led to a small, if brilliant, 1982 retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art. The artists who came to look were influenced, and her fame has been building since. There are plans afoot for a drawing show at the Pompidou Center in Paris, a print show at MOMA in 1994 and one of sculpture of the ‘40s and ‘50s at the National Gallery in Washington that year.

But right now, she’s being honored on both sides of the Atlantic. She’s still the talk of this summer’s Documenta show in Kassel, Germany. She is the only woman to get the full genius treatment amid the “great-man” names like Picasso, Brancusi and Kandinsky in the new, improved Guggenheim, both uptown and down. And she has been chosen to represent the United States at next summer’s Venice Biennale, the oldest and most prestigious of the international art exhibitions. (Bourgeois’ Biennale exhibition, organized by Brooklyn Museum curator Charlotta Kotik, will travel in Europe and eventually make it back to Brooklyn and Washington.)

Some of these honors are not without irony for Bourgeois. On opening night, the downtown Guggenheim was picketed by the Women’s Action Coalition and the Guerrilla Girls, carrying “One White Woman Just Won’t Do” banners. Bourgeois, finding herself inside, and somehow on the wrong side of the barricades, left early, murmuring, “It’s wonderful, wonderful, what can I say?”

As for being chosen at 80, French-born and a woman, to represent the hottest U.S. art in the Italian survey of the up-to-date, Bourgeois says, “I’m not gloating; I’m not making a fuss. I’m not representing the U.S. at 25. A lot of artists have. I have been on the fringe. I have been in the middle of all the scandals.”

Like the controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts funding that went to support an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs. Bourgeois, who has a kindred-spirit admiration for Mapplethorpe’s erotic honesty, was an outspoken supporter of his work.

And it was Mapplethorpe who shot the quintessential Bourgeois photograph: Dressed in a fake fur jacket, she’s looking comically pleased with herself. Tucked under one arm is her 1968 sculpture “Fillette” (“Little Girl”). “Fillette” is a giant rendition of a penis, complete with testicles that, this being Bourgeois, can also be seen as breasts. “It is a child you really have to take very good care of,” she says with her usual double-entendre.

Her fringe affinities, she says, “explain the fact that I’m not hopping up and down” about being an official artistic representative. “I am philosophical about it. The government wanted to cash in and show how liberal they are by accepting someone who went through all these scandals.”

Basically, the Venice exhibition will be a retrospective from the vast amount of work she’s done since the MOMA show. And she’ll make two new pieces for outdoors, incorporating an inconvenient tree that stands in the courtyard of the Biennale’s American pavilion.

Perhaps, if she finishes it, one of them will be the “Adrenaline” piece she is working on; something to do with bottles and fluids, both often present in her most recent work.

Bourgeois has a love-hate relationship with adrenaline. On the one hand she appreciates the adrenaline of energy and health. On the other, she fears the danger when it runs amok. Like so many of her pieces, this has to do with the fragility of balance, of equilibrium.

“If there is an excess of it or if it comes at the wrong time, adrenaline has very serious consequences. First of all, it makes me make a fool of myself,” she says. “I talk. I feel like a fool to say all the things I say.”

This is on a summer morning in her Brooklyn plant-turned-vast studio. She is sitting primly behind a desk, hands clasped, diminutive in lace collar and cuffs, gray smock, gold earrings. The day before, a powerful critic had come to meet her for the first time, and she had been up all night replaying the encounter:

“I think of the things I said. Atrocious! I shouldn’t have said anything, but when I am afraid I become a compulsive revealer of things that could seem offensive. I lose my will, I lose my self-respect, I lose everything. And after that, I think: ‘Why did you say that? Why did you say that? You shouldn’t have said that, about your father your mother, your brother. You shouldn’t have said that!’ ”

And yet, her years of secrecy about the early life that infuses her work ended with the revealing film that was made to accompany the 1982 MOMA show. Since then, she has reworked, rethought and elaborated on the stories that fuel her art--and the unbearable anxiety that makes release through art a life-giving necessity.

Bourgeois re-enacts infantile rage in her work. Her sculptures juggle childhood traumas, replay psychodramas. Like her, they tease, manipulate and pun. They take primal positions on sexuality, terror and death in materials as pure and adamant as marble or as fugitive and tough as doors recycled from the junk pile or blood-dripping joints from the meat market that have been cast in plaster.

“My pieces are made out of exorcism, things that are bothering me and I have to get rid of,” she says. Over and over, in endlessly inventive forms and permutations, Louise Bourgeois replays her family drama. Not the domestic drama of her marriage and motherhood--”my marriage was uneventful,” she likes to say. The family drama she deals with in her art is the one that began when she was born in Paris, on Christmas Day, 1911.

Louis, the father, was charming, handsome and macho, and when the first child was a girl, mother Josephine was disappointed.

“She was afraid of not measuring up to his macho expectancies,” Bourgeois says. So when the second child too was a girl, Josephine, to reconcile her “sharp disappointment,” named her Louise, after Louis. Immediately, Louise became his favorite; in a confusing way she became the favorite son, even after there was, in fact, a son. “I was supposed to make myself forgiven for being a girl,” she told MOMA curator Robert Storr for his upcoming critical biography.

After World War I--when the family had moved to the suburb of Antony, where there was a river in which to rinse the tapestries they restored and sold as a business--Louis took mistresses. One of them, Sadie, he introduced into the household, ostensibly to teach the children English. It was a double betrayal: betrayal because the woman brought into the house for Louise was really for Louis; betrayal of the mother, which Josephine seemed to take with equanimity, much to Louise’s bewilderment, admiration, guilt and rage.

It was the first of many betrayals, which included the father’s inviting his daughter on his Parisian prowls so that she would learn something of the world.

She learned to tease, to manipulate, to turn the situation to her own advantage.

By the time she was 14 and had been trained to make drawings to complete the missing parts of the tapestries the family workshop was repairing, she began to learn the power that could come from being needed and the calm and pleasure that could come from making art.

Bourgeois prizes the calm that eludes her. She uses words like predictable the way other people use the word good . Her husband was predictable, meaning kind; the mathematics she studied at the Sorbonne was predictable, meaning peaceful.

Her father, on the other hand, was volatile, treacherous.

“He was a very, very difficult person; he was not predictable. You see it goes back to that,” she says. “I was afraid of him. He teased me, but he never hit me. It has sadistic overtones. It’s like an animal. If you have a nasty dog, they are not predictable. There are good animals that have not hurt anybody, but it does not mean that they will not bite you because of something you cannot control. You cannot even know what makes them tick; you can hurt them by mistake. It would be your mistake.”

“You felt that way as a child?”

“Yes,” she says, treading carefully in many ways. We are threading our way through narrow walk spaces between sculptures in various states of completion that she keeps about to contemplate, rework, recycle--she is loath to declare them finished because her dealer, Robert Miller, will take them off to be exhibited and sold when she does.

She is concerned, she has been saying, that her studio is “unsafe,” that her visitor will trip. “Here, there is a little passage, just big enough. Right? But I don’t use it, because I might catch my dress. So would you call this a labyrinth? I just want to show you why I am so terrified my visitor might trip. You see that placard I have written there? I am quoting Le Corbusier. I knew him quite well. And he had a big placard in Marseilles, and it said, ‘Enter at your own risk.’ Why did he say that? The whole thing was insured a hundred times. Why was he concerned about that?” she asks rhetorically, in tour-conductor tones.

“He was concerned about that, because he projected on his visitors a possibility of risk, a possibility of danger. Right?” And she has come back full circle, to her father. He too was dangerous, and it was her responsibility not to provoke him.

“OK, so now you have how it is today; it is my responsibility not to have you trip,” she says in an aha kind of voice.

By the time she began making sculpture, Louise Bourgeois was the mother of three sons, wife of a respected professor, living in New York, continuing the explorations that she began as an art student in Paris.

“Arriving in New York, I felt a depression on the spot,” she told Robert Storr. “As soon as I got here I realized what I had done . . . that I had left everything behind. I was alone all day.”

She began making oil and ink paintings on linen, paintings in which a woman’s body was topped or subsumed by various kinds of houses. They were horrifying pictures; pictures of the dictatorship of domesticity, of loss of identity. She has returned to the house theme intermittently, most recently in a series of haunting, realistic sculptures of the houses she has lived in.

Almost immediately, she began to show and became, at least in a small way, an intimate of the New York art scene.

When her figures became sculptures, they were totems at first, wood or cast bronze, pared down, pierced, reduced to primal, phallic form. Early in the ‘50s, she began to make figures, like “Femme Volage” (“Fickle Woman”), out of jittery stacks of wood slabs--fragile, flitting, anxious. These were not widely shown at the time, because from 1953 to 1959 Bourgeois hardly exhibited at all.

When she reappeared on the scene in the mid-’60s, it was with equally jittery figures, but they had volume now, like rib cages or beehives made of plaster, clay or bronze. She called them “lairs,” because they could be either shelter or treacherous traps. The female body had become womb, cave, house, even sometimes male. It was the seat of regeneration and revenge.

But the full violence of the sculptural possibilities did not entirely present themselves until after Robert Goldwater died, suddenly, in 1973. Then she turned her rage at the loss not on her husband but on her father. Her most dazzling result was a major piece called “The Destruction of the Father,” constructed of plaster and latex casts of hunks of meat that represent a family attacking a pontificating father, in order to tear him apart and eat him.

And after that, she took on all the authorities in the art world with “The Confrontation,” which is ritual feast, funeral pyre or a bed for coupling. She invited art world luminaries to participate in the work by donning costumes she had constructed. Noted art historian Gert Schiff was clothed in latex studded with breasts. It was her revenge on the father who had teased her.

“My accomplishment was I made Gert Schiff look ridiculous,” she says. “So I had done to (my father) what he had done to me, laughed at me.”

Now she makes the sculptures laugh, perform their rites of exorcism and mourning. Much of Bourgeois’ art concerns the difficulties of making contact between people divided by murderous rage, without victimization. It replays her childhood scenario endlessly, in whatever sculptural form it takes to untangle her demons.

“A great deal of Modernism which comes out of Cubism is about fragments,” Storr says in a telephone conversation. “Bourgeois’ work is about how things that don’t belong together fit together, or how you can transform one kind of object into another object. It is as if you took flesh and turned it inside out and kneaded it and everything male becomes female; it’s not opposite, not male versus female, or hard versus soft, but male becomes female.”

Says Bourgeois: “You take a chance, when you are an artist, not to be understood at all. But it doesn’t matter, because I’m not a teacher, I’m not a preacher. I want to express myself, that’s all. It is self-expression, but it is not a guarantee of the validity of a work of art, because anybody--any dog or cat--can express one’s self,” she says with characteristic theatricality.

“That’s where talent comes in. If the person who wants to express doesn’t have talent, well, it’s just too bad. It falls on the floor.”

Bourgeois’ cathartic expressions never fall on the floor, because, as in Greek tragedy, they become not just her catharses but ours. Her work has the cadence and the majesty of Greek tragedy--and also the spiteful, subterranean play of Greek comedy.

“Don’t think my unconscious is dangerous,” she says. “I may be afraid of it, but it’s not dangerous. How can your unconscious be dangerous? It’s inconceivable. . . .

“If you knew my unconscious,” she says, “you could not fail to love me. My unconscious is my better self. Yes. My worst self is what fear makes me do. If you have a problem with your unconscious, by trying to stifle it, or destroy it, or hide it, your unconscious will kick back. But if I treat it as a friend, it will in return trust me that I am not going to hurt it, or disfigure it. I am going to accept it.”

For Louise Bourgeois, the emblem of that acceptance is a sculpture.

“Art is the guarantee of sanity,” she says.