Louise Bourgeois, Pillar, 1947 – 49,
wood and stainless steel
Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel Street
Like a road sign outside Sodom, salt fashioned, this Louis Bourgeois Pillar stands, ominous, at a Yale art gallery window. Here is a wasteland grave marker, a divining rod paralyzed above the sand, or some god’s clothespin. It might well be the sapling from which Giacometti later grew his tree for a production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Out of place, it is not out of power. A recent acquisition, it haunts the room as another Bourgeois piece does the Swartwout Hall gallery downstairs, a wooden shooting gallery from some makeshift sideshow where everyone fires and misses.
