“Yes, the main thing in our life is stairs, because in the end any road is the same staircase, only at the beginning invisible. And curves are especially dangerous when, due to turns, you don’t feel that you are going lower and lower. This is what the old staircase leading upwards told me, which suffered greatly when they rolled down it. Do not offend the stairs!”[14]
Many artists of the XX–XXI centuries, realizing the irreversible process of the de-sacralization of art, appeal to their audience through the personification of the art form. Even Hegel at the beginning of the 19>thcentury noted the loss of sincere reverence for the work. Today one can observe how religious consciousness gives way to social consciousness by visualizing everyday life. By putting forth new, or updating old, approaches during crises in the worldview and identifying themselves with some of them, artists bring personal experience to their work.
French-born American artist Louise Bourgeois (V1, p. 251), in the “Woman House” series, places a brightly lit staircase inside a female body enclosed in the shape of a silent, dark building, making it the only possible way of communication. The house serves as both a safe haven and a prison. Its complete confluence with the figure reflects the inner world of a woman who is enslaved but rebellious. In an earlier series by Bourgeois “He Disappeared in Complete Silence” (1947) (V2, p. 251), the theme of alienation between people, which is portrayed through lonely architectural structures, is revealed. The composition of sheet 8, filled with a surreal spirit, allows the artist to combine multiple ladders that have lost their basic function of a “connecting element” and hang in space in defiance of gravity. From the embodiment of her personal history, through the image of the ladder, Bourgeois goes on to explore issues of gender self-identification, which, in turn, are the central theme of the feminist trend in art. In the graphic variations “Mother and Child” (1999/2000), the staircase forms the silhouette of a high-rise building, and the figure depicted at its foot allows us to discuss the place of women in contemporary society. Another form of stairs in the work of Bourgeois is a spiral, which is identified with the image of reversed time, return to oneself, to one’s body. This psychological component is disclosed in the installation “Cage (Last Climb)” (V1, p. 315) (2008), executed shortly before her death, in the center of which is a spiral staircase, preserved from her old Brooklyn studio. Going beyond the allotted space of the cell, it symbolizes the release of the artist herself from the shackles of memories of the past.
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