ABSTRACT
But if the reaction of critics and public alike was so negative, there was surely something beyond the visual impact of the work on display. The effect of all the unusual formations described as ‘sick’ and part of an ‘aesthetic of nastiness’10 could not have been the sole cause of an overwhelmingly negative response. The art historian Mignon Nixon, who extensively analyses Bourgeois’s work in the context of modern art, paraphrases Bochner, for whom the work was demoted ‘to the condition of matter under the impress of mindless physical process: in the nullity of this “not-work”, form and content both were subsumed in something like the muteness of the autistic, or the inarticulacy of the infantile’.11 This critique suggests that behind Bochner’s comment lay hidden aesthetic and moral values that certainly classified the material (matter) as belonging to a lower rank, and the conceptual (mind/process) to a higher one. Perhaps, these comments have to be understood not just as a reflection of their time, but as part of a broader aesthetic transformation process in Western culture that marked a passage from bodily to intellectual values and, at the same time, from a tactile to a visual perception. Bochner’s critique has then to be evaluated in terms of a more general and long-standing aesthetic refusal of both material and visceral qualities of flesh against which, as Pierre Bourdieu has stated, ‘by an immense repression, the whole of legitimate aesthetics [in modern times] has been constructed’.12
