Louise Bourgeois: Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum, New York.

A FRIEND RECENTLY told me of her visit to one of Louise Bourgeois's salons a few years ago. Another guest had gifted Bourgeois a box of bonbons, which the Grande Dame had been enthusiastically sampling, covering herself and all she touched with chocolate in the process. My friend had taken a painting to show--a small gouache requiring close inspection--and suddenly Bourgeois made a grab for close inspection--and suddenly Bourgeois made a grab for it. Facing the prospect of having her work amended with cocoa powder, my friend demurred, and finally a third party was recruited to hold the piece before Bourgeois's eyes. But for the rest of the afternoon, no one would be entirely safe from Bourgeois's caked brown fingers.

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This is an anecdote that presents Bourgeois as I have always imagined her--taking hold of the world with hands dripping in luxury and squalor. She is the one who, hair unkempt, would parade through the streets of New York in the latex regalia of a dozen tits. She is the one who, in photographs, would direct her affectionate gaze down to her mutating sculpture as if it were a favorite pet. She is the one who would use a material as noble as marble, but only to sculpt and polish the stuff so that it might be easier for someone to fuck. Yes, I have always thought, she is in it, in everything, shamelessly relishing bodies and all their sloppy, ridiculous protruberances, their hooded members poking through silken mucus. This is the Louise Bourgeois who has inspired generations of artists (many of them women) who see in her wicked smile a beacon that leads toward artmaking at its most gorgeous and cruel.

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Bourgeois is a towering figure who made herself so through acts and displays of intimacy: small sculptures demanding close, private looks; large sculptures that dwarf audiences, putting them in the place of children. Yet this play with scale necessarily presents a problem for installation, particularly in the vast spaces and compartmentalized ramps of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Upon entering the museum, one could barely see two interlocked spiders wrestling at a distance, obscured by milling crowds and backlight from the window. The only other pieces in the rotunda were the artist's Untitled aluminum coils, 2004--an erudite choice, though not terribly sensitive to the operations of scale in her work. Reminiscent of the hanging Les Bienuenus (The Welcoming), pieces Bourgeois made for the park of Choisy-le-Roi in France in 1995, the vaguely excremental series of loops extended a perverse welcome to the museum visitor. Because the coils are each about the height of a person, however, they seemed dainty in the central space, like silver earrings dangling beside a concave cheek.

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Some of the artist's pieces likewise suffered the disadvantage that sculpture can face in the Guggenheim: The ramp often does not leave enough room for objects to beplaced out among viewers with ease, so works are pushed against the walls, to be looked at from a frontal position rather than engaged through circumambulation. Cumul I, 1969, for example, needs to be in an open gallery space in order for us to perceive its striking ambiguity of scale. While Minimalist pieces (particularly those of Robert Morris) tend to operate in a literal size that hovers between that of architecture and traditional sculpture, relying upon a neutral gestalt to throw perceptual and contextual awareness back upon the viewer, Cumul I harnesses contradictory representational cues in order to play with scale. More lateral than vertical, it can read like a landscape, so the forms bubbling up seem like craters rendered in something less than actual size. Yet the sculpture's biomorphism, as well as its persistent intrusion into the viewer's space, nevertheless encourages one to compare Cumul I to the scale of the human body, in which case the rising tumescent shapes seem bigger than anything a person could muster. When one cannot fully look around the piece, it loses this complex valence.

The cordoning-off of works did not always sap them of their power, but it did alter their effects. The "Personages," 1946-54--slender totems of human height that balance en pointe (their pointed ends were originally meant to be driven into the ground like stakes)--seem to have irrevocably lost the conditions of installation that they first enjoyed in the modest rooms of the Peridot Gallery in New York in 1949 and 1950. When they were initially exhibited, the sculptures were clustered and subsequently rearranged in different small groups, and viewers were invited to wander among them as one might mingle at a cocktail party. Such installations thus created a sacred yet social space, an interactive terrain in which a ghostly presence might seem at once otherwordly and casually familiar. Like her Woman with Packages, 1949--Bourgeois's self-portrait as a "Personage," in which drooping sacks around the hieratic figure's waist suggest shopping bags (the sacks, in fact, represent her children), a version of which was included in the show--the "Personages" manage to capture a moment in which totemic eternity meets the quotidian now of modernity. These days, however, the "Personages" tend to be herded into an isolated zone and seen from afar so that the archetypal tone prevails; as a consequence, the forms remain wonderfully spooky and auratic, but definitely less personable.

Some of Bourgeois's objects do well when they are given a boundary to rub up against, however, however. In one group of modestly sized pieces presented on a buffet-level vitrine, the curators managed to complement Bourgeois's play with things that might typically operate in domestic or popular contexts. Encased in glass, her latex and plaster Soft Landscape, 1963, for example, looked like it was ready for sale at Claes Oldenburg's Store under the name Cheeseburger. Her Molotov Cocktail, 1968, a rounded dark cylinder with a sort of nipple on the side, could take its place among other works that were testing the overlap between art and protest that same year, such as Barnett Newman's Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley. Looking more industrial than is typical in Bourgeois's oeuvre, the metal Molotov Cocktail is also an exercise in disobedient design. It is of the right size and general shape to be a martini shaker (Molotov cocktails can be, as any revolutionary knows, as intoxicating as they are dangerous), but it seems far too heavy for anyone to imagine shaking it; there is no flat end on which it can rest, so it would roll away if that nipple didn't serve as a sort of kickstand. Like the Femme Couteau (Knife Woman) pieces, 1969-2002, and a host of others for which Bourgeois is famous, this object dares us to use it, and promises disturbing results for anyone who actually does.

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Just as seductive and treacherous are Bourgeois's larger installations from the 1970s wherein tables seemingly laden with viscera are surrounded by elusive figures. Bourgeois productively gleaned the kitsch of Catholic ritual for The Destruction of the Father, 1974, which turns her cannibalistic fantasy of a family eating its father into a sort of Last Supper tableau, with lumpen stalagmites draped in black velvet surrounding the table. All is bathed in a reddish light that warms the ordeal like a heat lamp. In enticing viewers to smirk at the high drama, Bourgeois ropes the audience into her sadism (and maybe even into some guilt for giggling at the Eucharist). Confrontation, 1978, made viewers even more complicit in such irreverent theatricality, as onlookers were originally invited to sit in odd wooden wedges and gaze at one another across latex carcasses on an ultramarine velvet gurney. Videos in the exhibition document the fashion shows Bourgeois had set up around the central table, in which men and women clad in the artist's multimammary outfits lurched and vamped. The ringing weirdness of these works serves as an invigorating counter to other, more affirmative dinner parties in feminist art; unlike Judy Chicago, Bourgeois didn't set her tables with porcelain monuments to womanly achievement, preferring instead the corrupted leftovers of desire.

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The exuberance and humor threatened to fade as one ascended to the upper two ramps of the Guggenheim's spiral, which was top-heavy with Bourgeois's "Cells," 1991-2008. Their dilapidated doors enclose moody accumulations of antiquated objects. Yellowing cloth embroidered with proclamations such as ART IS THE GUARANTEE OF SANITY drapes the interiors, lending the works a Delphic tone. Body fragments and melancholy gray surfaces round it all up under the rubric of allegory. For all the scholarship that has sought to salvage these installations as parables of mediated memory, beneath Bourgeois's bric-a-brac of the psyche can lurk an all-too-stable referent--grounded in the familiar narrative of Bourgeois's traumatic childhood and cemented according to popular convention in which artistic expression equals personal pain (see the reproduction of Bourgeois's childhood home with a guillotine threatening it like the sword of Damocles). As such, these works are in perpetual danger of flattening allegory into symbol. If they are saved from such a fate, however, it is by their very extravagance, the sheer shameless heaping-up of lost meaning (another dead body on the table) and its operatic presentation. Here is the final confrontation Bourgeois offers today: As onlookers crane their necks to peer through doors at piles of the past, they are asked to think about what might happen to personal memory when it has slipped, finally, into art-historical legend.

"Louise Bourgeois" is currently on view at the Museum of contemporary Art, Los Angeles, through Jan. 25, 2009; travels to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, Feb. 26-May 17, 2009.

SARAH K. RICH IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY AT PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY