Now pushing ninety, prominent modern sculptor Louise Bourgeois has consistently shocked the public with barely-disguised, larger-than-life representations of male genitalia. When questioned, though, she has always played the innocent. Where all this comes from, Brazilian performance artist Denise Stoklos never quite broaches in I Do, I Undo, I Redo. Stoklos has pieced together excerpts from the French sculptor's writings to create this lively sketch combining biographical detail with trenchant personal observations. From her artistic family headed by an authoritarian father to meetings with Fernand Leger (a Stoklos masterpiece portrait) and Marcel Duchamp, there is plenty to digest. Laments about women's status echoing Simon de Beauvoir alternate with desire for artistic independence at all costs.
Most refreshing, Bourgeois via Stoklos offers her art as a gift to the public, not as expatiation or Freudian disclosure. Her working method as embodied in the piece's title, though, is pure Hegel (thesis-antithesis-synthesis). Stoklos turns all this into a superb performance piece. Full of theatrical energy, she paces to and fro and indulges in wild dancing to rock music, all the while shaking her blonde, curly escarole mop of hair with dark roots. Forceful, strongly-accented English underscores her subject's equally decisive character. Stoklos makes full use of the three-sector set, a debut design by Bourgeois herself. Stoklos perches atop a stationary ladder to philosophize under a spotlight (skillful lighting design by Thais Stoklos Kignel) on the left side of La MaMa's Annex Theater. However, most of the action unfolds within a hexagonal wire cage the size of a small room. This space unites childhood memories (which Bourgeois says are her sole inspiration) with the sculptor's studio effects, all of which get hammered and thrashed about during destructive moments.
A gigantic oval mirror to the right that seems ripe for true introspection is all but unused. Even if we don't learn much from this show about Louise Bourgeois as an artist, Stoklos makes the story interesting and lively. Other quibbles are minor -- including that Bourgeois's husband, art critic/arbiter Clement Greenberg, gets off too lightly.
