Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play : Louise Bourgeois's Sculpture, 1947-2000

a key body of work - Femme Maison, Personages, Lairs, Janus, and Cells - examining how these imaginative and playful objects are staged as embodied encounters in space and time to invoke the mutuality, reciprocity, and ambivalence of our object relationships.Weaving a tapestry of aesthetic, cultural, and psychological encounters, "Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play "addresses critical relationships among Bourgeois's work and that of other artists from Pieter Brueghel to Eva Hesse. It brings together practical, archival, and theoretical material, offering close examinations of historically situated objects and analyses of their complex affects and spatiality. Gathering critical perspectives from psychoanalysis, cultural analysis, feminist, queer, literary and affect studies, the book extends its specific art historical scope to investigate the crucial roles that art and cultural experience assume in everyday life. [Publisher's Text]