Wise woman

Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time ****

FRUITMARKET, EDINBURGH

Bonnie Thompson ****
OPEN EYE GALLERY, EDINBURGH

In traditional societies, age is revered. Wisdom is seen as a product of experience and so it accumulates with the years. But we see it very differently. Age for us is an affliction. We try to stay young as long as we can, and then crumble quickly into oblivion, preferably out of sight. We make one exception to that rule, however: the artist. Though we are also obsessed with youthful genius, we still love the idea of an artist’s late style, and look for that final flowering enriched by experience that gave us late Titian, or Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta.

The reason for this apparent inconsistency seems to be the role we assign our artists. We think we are a secular society, but in fact we pursue the spiritual in all sorts of unacknowledged and misguided ways, from witchcraft medicine to attributing value to Tolkien’s turgid Tory tales; and for the same reason we tend to attribute magical powers to our artists, to see them as shamans and treat them as though they had privileged access to some kind of enlightenment. They very rarely do, no doubt, but, undeterred by the lessons of experience, in approaching their work we no longer use such criteria as skill in execution, richness of structure, or complexity of image. Instead we look for the totemic, the meaning, or indeed the power that an object attains by its association with the mystery that the shaman does not just represent, but actually embodies.

The chief artist-shaman of our modern mystery was Joseph Beuys. He explicitly cultivated that role. His work has no meaning without its connection to him and his life story. I always thought that Louise Bourgeois was the feminists’ Joseph Beuys and an artist for whom the making of a work of art was nothing beside the power it gained from association with her and her life story. By dwelling on her own childhood and her experience as a woman in her art, she also explicitly encouraged her admirers to think of it that way, to see it as totemic, believe it matters most because it is hers. And its appearance seems to confirm its totemic character. Frequently it consists of primitive doll-like figures that look like the sort of thing a witch might stick pins into.

But at 92 Louise Bourgeois is also very old, if it is not ungallant to say so, and her show at the Fruitmarket is mostly of art made in the last two or three years. She is a shaman perhaps, but she also really does have a late style. She is a wise woman of the tribe on two counts. But if she is a shaman, she is not just a self-appointed one. Although that is part of her appeal, her art is not only dependent on its connection to her. It also reaches out to touch universals, but it does so in a uniquely feminine way. This exhibition is called Stitches in Time and that title declares that it belongs to the distaff side, the woman’s side identified in that phrase by the female activities of spinning, sewing and weaving. Almost all her work in this show is made of stitched and woven material, or reflects it in one way or another. Her figures, almost always female, are usually made from a patchwork of flesh-pink material. They look like rag dolls. The most striking of them has the straining, arched back that is the image of hysteria, once seen as the definitive women’s ailment. Indeed, the root of the word is the Greek for "womb". But Louise Bourgeois’s hysterical woman is not just in the grip of a female ailment, whether real or imaginary - she is also looking into a magnifying mirror. We can see her face, its wild expression exaggerated. The mirror is a defining symbol of femininity from the Mary Magdalene to the Rokeby Venus, but it is also the vehicle of the self-portrait and so it is a symbol of self-knowledge. This woman may be in the grip of violent emotion, but she is also self-aware.

This kind of complexity of reference runs through the show, but it always comes back to weaving and sewing. There are heads made from scraps of fabric, including pieces of old tapestry. There are flags made of woven ribbons and there is a set of lithographs that use imagery of stitching. In one a field of interlocking lines that look like knitting is accompanied by the statement: "To unravel a torment, you must begin somewhere." You cure pain by unravelling it, she suggests, by treating life as a piece of knitting that has gone wrong.

One of the strangest works is a construction with pieces of a woman’s clothing hung on meat hooks and beef bones, a brutal image that somehow feminises Rembrandt’s Flayed Ox. But the clothes in this piece, we are told, belonged to the artist’s mother. That association points powerfully to the idea that autobiography is the key and, indeed, her family in France, where she was a child before she emigrated to America before the war, also worked at restoring tapestries. So all this weaving is part of her personal story. The totemic is there. But there is also something far beyond the merely personal invoked here. Spinning, weaving and sewing were not part of the female responsibility in a household by some casual division of labour. The oldest artistic tradition in the Mediterranean, cradle of civilisation as we are often told, is not the Greeks, nor even the Egyptians. It is the weaving of the Berber women of the Atlas mountains. They saw their art as a sacred mystery that leads us back to the umbilical cord and the thread of life itself. It is definitively female and it is because it is that it embodies a universal. The weakness of classical feminism has always been that it has seemed oppositional: men and women, them and us. Instead of tackling the dualism that is the greatest intellectual weakness of the post-Christian West and the source of the problem that feminism set out to solve, this attitude reinforces it. Louise Bourgeois gives us back the universal feminine which lies deeper in our consciousness than any such dualism.

And if Louise Bourgeois gives us the flowering of her late style, Bonnie Thomson is still very young. She emerged as an outstanding artist when she was a student at Edinburgh College of Art. You can still just catch her most recent work at the Open Eye Gallery. It shows how she has moved on.

Her earlier work was beautiful in execution and observation. Its very refinement seemed to be its mystery, but some of her work now is touched by a wistfulness and a kind of poetic tension. There are tiny hints of disquiet. Flowers drop their petals. In an exquisitely painted pile of gooseberries one seems crushed and apart from the rest. The ever so slightly unexpected happens. Delicate silver fish swim past two pieces of dried seaweed. They are in their element, but at the same time they are not. Scale is upset. Eggs that were white are now golden. Such things suggest that in a subtle and understated way she, too, is reaching into her own experience to find poetry and expressing it through a surrealist distortion of the ordinary rules of appearances. This seems to be confirmed by several selfportraits. In one she sits naked, examining herself, but ill at ease. In another her reflection is distorted as though by a curved mirror and in the third she is just an enigmatic reflection in a light bulb like Van Eyck in the convex mirror in the Arnolfini Wedding, a presence and not a presence. And that is as it should be. As Louise Bourgeois demonstrates to us, we may see her as a shaman, but in the end it is the art that speaks to us, not the artist.

• Louise Bourgeois runs until 9 May, Bonnie Thompson until tomorrow