Abstract

This essay focuses on a current project: to publish a selection of letters between the artist Louise Bourgeois and her husband, art historian Robert Goldwater. A detailed account is provided of an archival object of study, describing a corpus of letters in quantitative and material terms, as well as reporting on the various personal circumstances and historical events to which they refer. The essay also examines specific passages from letters by Bourgeois addressed to her husband, and from letters by Goldwater to Bourgeois. These letters, for the most part hitherto unpublished, offer an unprecedented glimpse into the inner workings of a marriage, which Louise Bourgeois, despite the self-constructed autobiographical nature of her work, kept mostly aside and private. Arguing that a publication of the Bourgeois–Goldwater correspondence enriches the scholarship on Louise Bourgeois and provides new research leads, this essay also instigates a subjective approach to the edition of Bourgeois’s and Goldwater’s letters as a work in progress, reflecting on the technical and ethical challenges it creates. The essay poses a wider interrogation of the possibilities and difficulties of archival research and the recasting of archival documents into published pieces of writing

摘要

这篇文章的重点是一个当前的项目：出版艺术家路易丝·布尔乔亚和她的丈夫、艺术史学家罗伯特·戈德华特之间的信件选集。提供了对档案研究对象的详细说明，以数量和材料的方式描述了一组字母，并报告了它们所指的各种个人情况和历史事件。这篇文章还研究了布尔乔亚写给她丈夫的信以及戈德沃特写给布尔乔亚的信中的具体段落。这些信件，大部分迄今未发表，提供了对婚姻内部运作的前所未有的一瞥，尽管路易丝布尔乔亚的作品具有自传性质，但大部分时间都保持在一边和私密。认为布尔乔亚-戈德华特通信的出版丰富了路易丝·布尔乔亚的学术研究并提供了新的研究线索，本文还提出了一种主观方法，将布尔乔亚和戈德华特的信件的版本作为一项正在进行的工作，反思技术和伦理挑战它创建。这篇文章对档案研究的可能性和困难以及将档案文件重铸成已发表的作品提出了更广泛的质疑