Gendered Futures: Reproduction and Production in Women’s Lives

In the retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern Art Gallery in 2007 stands one of Louise Bourgeois’ cell installations. Wooden panels enclose a bedroom scene. A blood-red mattress lies on a wire bed-frame. A square red pillow (for the man?) sits next to a small white pillow with the words ‘je t’aime’ embroidered on it in the same scarlet red. Built into the mattress is a penile shape. A child’s toy lies on the bed. One of the wooden panels, through which the visitor peers at the exhibit, has a label: ‘fermez la porte SVP’. Across the gallery room, a huge wooden vat encloses another cell, this one entitled ‘Liquid Pleasures’: these, the commentary informs us, are bodily secretions – sweat, tears, sexual flows. Above the bed (again a wire framework) a series of glass vessels or retorts are fixed on metal stands forming a rather beautiful forest above the bed. We are told that this symbolises the bodily release experienced by the adolescent girl as she grows into sexual maturity.