Louise Bourgeois was born on December 25, 1911, in Paris. As a teenager, Bourgeois assisted her parents in their tapestry-restoration business, making drawings that indicated to the weavers the repairs to be made. In 1932, she entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics, but abandoned that discipline for art. In the mid- to late 1930s, she studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, École du Louvre, Atelier Fernand Léger, and other Parisian schools. In 1938, Bourgeois married an American, the art historian Robert Goldwater, and moved to New York. There, she studied for two years at the Art Students League and was soon participating in print exhibitions.

After moving to a new apartment in 1941, Bourgeois began to make large wood sculptures on the roof of her building. In 1945, her first solo show, comprised of twelve paintings, was held at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York and her work was first included in the Whitney Annual (later the Whitney Biennial). In the mid- to late 1940s, she worked at Stanley William Hayter's printshop, Atelier 17, where she met Le Corbusier, Joan Miró, and other Europeans exiled by World War II. In 1949, she exhibited works from her Personage series in the first show of her sculpture, at Peridot Gallery in New York.

In 1951, Bourgeois became an American citizen. Continuing her mode of abstracted figuration instilled with psychological and symbolic content, she remained stylistically distinct from New York School developments. She did, however, join American Abstract Artists in 1954. In the 1960s, she taught in public schools and at Brooklyn College and Pratt Institute in New York. She would continue to teach at colleges and universities during the following decade. In the late 1960s, Bourgeois's imagery became more explicitly sexual as she explored the relationship between men and women and the emotional impact of her troubled childhood (her father had had a ten-year affair with her governess). From 1967 until 1972, she made trips to Pietrasanta, Italy, to work in marble.

With the rise of feminism and the art world's new pluralism, her work found a wider audience. In the 1970s, she began to do Performance [more] pieces—among them A Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Parts (1978), in which she wrapped art historians and students in white drapery with sewn-in anatomical forms—and expanded the scale of her three-dimensional work to large environments.

The first retrospective of Bourgeois's work was organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1982–83), and her first European retrospective was assembled by the Frankfurter Kunstverein (1989). Bourgeois was selected to be the American representative to the 1993 Venice Biennale. Her collected writings were published in 1998. In 2000, three thirty-foot-high towers by Bourgeois, commissioned by the Tate Modern in London—I Do, I Undo, and I Redo—were featured in that museum's inaugural exhibition. Many of her large-scale works have been exhibited as public art, including three spider sculptures installed at Rockefeller Center in New York in 2001 under the aegis of the Public Art Fund.

Bourgeois's achievements have been recognized with, among other honors, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973), membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1981), a grand prize in sculpture from the French Ministry of Culture (1991), and the National Medal of Arts (1997). Bourgeois lives and works in Manhattan.

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_21.html

Portrait Louise Bourgeois von Ralph Ueltzhoeffer.

Louise Bourgeois Website: Ralph Ueltzhoeffer (www.ueltzhoeffer.de).

jusqu'au 28 septembre 2008

>>> exposition Louise Bourgeois

E ela o protegia, pois sabia como o mundo é triste e malvado.

Ele tinha uma naturaza tranqüila e era bem inteligente, mas não estava interessado em ser amado e protegido, pois ele estava interessado em outra coisa.

Conseqüentemente, ainda jovem, ele bateu a porta e nunca mais voltou.

Um dia, ela morreu, mas ele nunca ficou sabendo."

(Louise Bourgeois)

O trabalho acima faz parte de uma série de nove gravuras (acompanhadas por pequenos textos) da artista francesa radicada nos Estados Unidos Louise Bourgeois, em exposição na mostra "The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock", em cartaz no British Museum, até 7 de setembro.

A exibição traça um panorama da gravura produzida nos EUA entre 1900 e 1960, com 147 trabalhos de 74 artistas, entre eles John Sloan, Edward Hopper, Josef Albers, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning e Jackson Pollock, além de Bourgeois. As obras fazem parte do acervo do museu, considerado um dos melhores do mundo em gravura americana desse período, marcado pela chegada do modernismo ao país, o jazz, a grande depressão, o crescimento do fascismo na Europa e a Segunda Guerra. A entrada é franca.

Guggenheim Museum, New York

Louise Bourgeois
Full-career retrospective
Exhibition > 28 September 2008






Louise Bourgeois, a full-career retrospective of one of the most important artists of our time, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Organized by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in association with Tate Modern, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris, the exhibition fills the Guggenheim’s entire Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda and an adjacent gallery, making it the most comprehensive examination to date of Bourgeois’s long and distinguished career.

Louise Bourgeois in 1990 with her marble sculpture Eye to Eye (1970).
Photo: Raimon Ramis
© Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois encompasses representative selections from all of the major phases of the artist’s career. Visitors are greeted in the museum’s rotunda by one of Bourgeois’ iconic spider sculptures, Spider Couple, 2003, and a pair of hanging aluminium works dating from 2004 that draw on another of her signature motifs, the spiral.

Appropriately, this recurring form in the artist’s iconography finds a corollary in the unique structure of the Guggenheim’s spiralling ramps, on which the works are arranged along predominantly chronological lines. Throughout the exhibition, the works on paper that are an integral and constant element of Bourgeois’ creative process are juxtaposed with her sculptural works.

The main body of the exhibition begins with paintings and drawings dating from the mid-1940s that depict female bodies half eclipsed in architectural structures – a vision of the “femme maison” whose identity is literally subsumed by the responsibilities and constrictions of the domestic role. These works are interspersed by an installation of Bourgeois’ Personnages in the High Gallery.
These anthropomorphic wooden totems, created as surrogates for the artist’s former life in France, are placed in staggered relational groupings, echoing their original installation in a series of solo exhibitions at the Peridot Gallery in New York between 1949 and 1953.

Continuing up the ramps, the transitional multi-part sculpture The Blind Leading the Blind, 1947-49, introduces smaller groupings of Personnages. These slightly later works diverge from monolithic rigidity in favor of multiple segments threaded onto a central rod, such as Femme Volage, 1951, or the stacked columns of blocks that characterize Memling Dawn, 1951.

Louise Bourgeois
The Blind Leading the Blind, 1947-1949
Wood, painted pink
70 3/8 x 96 7/8 x 17 3/8”; 178.7 x 246 x 44.1 cm
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington USA)
© Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois
Cumul I, 1968
Marble, wood plinth
20 1/16 x 50 x 48 1/16 inches (51 x 127 x 122 cm)
Fonds National d’art contemporain
Attribution au Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou en 1976
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Musée national d’art moderne / Centre de création industrielle
© Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois
PINK DAYS AND BLUE DAYS, 1997
Steel, fabric, bone, wood, glass, rubber and mixed media
Overall: 117 x 87 x 87 inches (297.2 x 221 x 221 cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art
97.101a-s
© Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois
COUPLE IV, 1997
Fabric, leather, stainless steel and plastic
20 x 65 x 30 1/2”; 50.8 x 165.1 x 77.4 cm.
Wood and glass Victorian vitrine: 72 x 82 x 43”; 182.9 x 208.3 x 109.2 cm.
Courtesy Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve, and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Christopher Burke
© Louise Bourgeois

Around 1960 Bourgeois began to exploit the sculptural possibilities of a new repertoire of malleable materials such as plaster, latex, and resin, creating amorphous organic forms that evoke the human body and natural topographies. Works in this section of the exhibition such as Lair, 1962, and Fée Couturière, 1963, present roughly textured enclosed structures, suggesting both protective nests and sinister traps.

This characteristic ambiguity of reference is extended in the limp, indeterminate biomorphic forms of such seminal works as Janus Fleuri, 1968 and Filette, 1968, as well as in Bourgeois’ first major environmental sculpture, The Destruction of the Father, 1974 – a grisly evocation of a cannibalistic family meal. The exhibition continues with a broad selection of sculptures executed primarily in marble and bronze, in which the pliable softness of Bourgeois’ formal vocabulary is offset by the hard inflexibility of these traditional mediums. Many of these works are abstractions formed from the smooth, globular protuberances that the artist refers to as Cumuls (“clouds”). Others, such as the hanging bronze, Arch of Hysteria, 1993, render anatomical form with a new verisimilitude. An adjacent gallery displays Confrontation, 1978 – a tableaux of latex forms ringed by wooden barriers that are shown alongside archival footage of the performance that accompanied the piece when it was first exhibited.

The museum’s final ramps are devoted primarily to Bourgeois’ Cells – the large-scale enclosed installations that the artist produced throughout the 1990s. Incorporating both found or personal objects and carved sculptures within structures that are simultaneously claustrophobic prisons and shielding cloisters, these complex assemblages are vessels for deeply autobiographical, psychological narratives. The exhibition culminates with a selection of recent fabric-based sculptures. In these unsettling works, stuffed heads, torsos and intertwined figures – some of which are stitched from the Bourgeois’ own clothes and household linens – enact a primal drama of sexual and familial relationships.

Installation view at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008

Installation view of Spider Couple, Untitled, and Untitled at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008
© Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York
Photo by David Heald

Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue providing an overview of Bourgeois’ life and work. Taking the form of an A-Z glossary, the catalogue encompasses relevant themes, individual works, select quotations, and succinct essays, all interspersed with examples of the artist’s own writings. It also includes an illustrated biography and a full chronology. Published by Tate Publishing, the hard cover edition is distributed through Rizzoli at a cost of $45 in soft cover and $65 in hard cover. Both editions are for purchase the Guggenheim Museum store.

In conjunction with the major retrospective of Louise Bourgeois, the Guggenheim’s Sackler Center for Arts Education presents through September 12 “A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois, an exhibition of photographs and diaries from the artist’s archives.

Read more here

Text © Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Images © All rights reserved







Links

• Guggenheim Museum, New York
• Confrontation [video documenting the installation of Confrontation in the Guggenheim Museum]
• A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois - Exhibition at the Sackler Center > 12 September 2008











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]]> http://eaobjets.wordpress.com/?p=2711 Sat, 23 Aug 2008 06:53:35 +0000 Espaces Arts & Objets http://eaobjets.wordpress.com/?p=2711






Guggenheim Museum, New York

A life in pictures : Louise Bourgeois
Exhibition > 12 September 2008






A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois, an exhibition of photographs, diaries, and ephemera from the artist’s personal archive, is on view at the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through September 12, 2008.

This biographical exhibition is unique to the Guggenheim’s presentation of the major retrospective Louise Bourgeois organized by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in association with Tate Modern, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris, which is on view in the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda and an adjacent gallery through September 28, 2008.







Louise Bourgeois in 2003.
Photo: Nanda Lanfranco
© All rights reserved





For Louise Bourgeois, art and life are inextricably linked. Although her complex, allusive work attains a universal significance, she has spoken of the autobiographical subtext that underpins her unique symbolic language. A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois offers an opportunity to visually trace the personal narratives that have informed the artist’s work throughout the past seven decades of her extensive career. Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois grew up in provincial France, assisting with the family’s tapestry restoration business before immigrating to New York in 1938. “Everything I do,” she has explained, “was inspired by my early life.” Viscerally present in her art is the psychic trauma of her mother’s early death, her father’s betrayal of the family through his 10-year affair with their live-in English tutor, and her overlapping roles of student, daughter, wife, mother and artist.

A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois illuminates the artist’s rich life and career through a chronological display of over 75 photographs taken by her family and by fellow artists and friends such as Brassaï, Peter Moore, Inge Morath, and Baird Jones. Snapshots of Bourgeois -- in France as a child, in the studio among her iconic works, at home at her famed Sunday salons, or in the company of great artists -- are shown alongside her identification cards and passports. The artist’s original diaries, which she has kept assiduously since 1923, offer poems, sketches and daily musings, and often indicate the tensions between rage, fear of abandonment, and guilt she has suffered since childhood—tensions, however, that she has been able to channel and release through her art. Included in the presentation are 10 original invitations dating from 1945 to 1978, announcing some of Bourgeois’s New York exhibitions.

These selections from the artist’s archive contextualize the more than 150 works on view in the accompanying retrospective, such as Bourgeois’s early Femme Maison drawings and paintings of the 1940s, through the large-scale enclosed installations created in the 1990s known as Cells, to her more recent soft sculptures created from stitched fabric.







Louise Bourgeois photographed by Brassai at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière in Paris in 1937.
Photo: Louise Bourgeois Archive
© All rights reserved





Louise Bourgeois and Andy Warhol in 1987 in front of her 1947 painting called 1932.
Photo: Baird Jones
© All rights reserved





Louise Bourgeois working on her mixed media sculpture entitled CONFRONTATION in 1978.
Photo: Inge Morath
© All rights reserved





Louise Bourgeois seated in her Chelsea home in 1999 with THREE HORIZONTALS.
Photo: Elfie Semotan
© All rights reserved










Text © Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Images © All rights reserved







Links

• Guggenheim Museum, New York
• More about the exhibition A Life in Pictures
• About the Sackler Center
• Louise Bourgeois – Full-career retrospective at The Guggenheim > 28 September 2008











Disclaimer & Copyright

Stampfli & Turci Art Dealers - Espaces Arts & Objets








]]> http://icahabiba.wordpress.com/?p=10 Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:39:59 +0000 frederica cassis http://icahabiba.wordpress.com/?p=10 Now she is 97 years old! I saw her "maman" in Tokyo....marvellous



"Maman" by L.B homenage `a sa vrai maman qui réparait les tapisseries Aubussons



]]> http://blood4.wordpress.com/?p=856 Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:46:33 +0000 frederica cassis http://blood4.wordpress.com/?p=856 Asakusa Temple,Tokyo again



THESE 2 ANGELS SHOW UP WITH MUSIC FROM A BUILDING EVERY HOUR SHARP TIME!

ESSES ANJOS APARECEM SAINDO DE UM PRÉDIO A CADA HORA E COM MÚSICA!!



Louise Bourgeois´"MAMAN" ....marvellous view

A aranha gigantesca de Louise Bourgeois, minha artista preferida. A aranha chama-se "MAMAN" = mÃE, EM HOMENAGEM" à mãe dela que tecía e reconstituía tapeçarias Aubusson.

]]> http://lesplaisirsetlesnuits.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/miroir-miroir/ Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:47:00 +0000 V http://lesplaisirsetlesnuits.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/miroir-miroir/
"I have a total confidence in what I am doing because I have none in what I am. My feminity is eaten up by the rats."

— Louise Bourgeois.

Qu’on le veuille ou non, c’est un fait établi en psychologie qu’on ne peut se définir qu’à partir du regard de l’autre. Notre perception de nous même, négative ou positive, ne peut que se construire et se mesurer à la lumière de notre rapport à l’autre, un peu comme nous avons besoin d’un miroir pour connaître les traits de notre visage. Sans les autres, tout concept identitaire fout le camp.

L’idée, donc, c’est de savoir choisir les miroirs qui nous entourent. Et je réalise que mes talents restent limités quand vient le temps de choisir les miroirs amoureux. J’en ai flushé un définitivement la nuit dernière. Je devrais être fière de moi, mais le cœur n’y est pas.

]]> http://salmanagah.wordpress.com/?p=221 Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:48:39 +0000 Salman Agah http://salmanagah.wordpress.com/?p=221 Yesterday we spent about 2 hours at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan tripping out on Louise Bourgeois's work. Certainly a must see. Image, a birds eye view of Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural design from above.

]]> http://afigura.wordpress.com/?p=6 Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:34:21 +0000 eueueu http://afigura.wordpress.com/?p=6

Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands)

1990-1993

Glass, marble, wood, metal, and fabric

86 x 86 x 83 inches

"Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands)" is one of several freestanding sculptural installations by Louise Bourgeois. The title "Cell" can refer to the most basic building block of a living organism or a prison. Bourgeois' Cells combine aspects of both definitions, pairing the organic with the correctional. Matching used perfume bottles, vanity mirrors, model homes, and excised limbs with steel fencing, broken furniture, a guillotine, and a mechanical saw, each composition employs domestic and institutional elements to tell a story. In "Cell (Glass Sphe and Hands)," two fragmented marble arms rest on a fabric covered table. With hands clasped in a gesture of prayer, the isolated arms appear to be soft and vulnerable in spite of their rock-hard substance. Encircling the table are five glass spheres of different sizes, each resting on its own worn chair. Each enclosed sphere is like a bubble, self-contained but fragile in its existence. The chairs and spheres face the table in a united front, cornering and further isolating the hands. The work plays with relationships such as teacher/student and parent/child. In an arrangement that is reminiscent of a family gathering or classroom situation, "Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands)" invests inanimate objects with human qualities by enacting a drama in space.

Allusive and open to interpretation, Bourgeois' "Cells" are places for uneasy contemplation. The steel and glass walls enclosing each work protect the objects inside, but also restrict them from ever escaping. Like a prison, the caged walls enforce a rigid form of solitude while offering only partial views of the outside world. In "Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands)," glass panels obscure the objects within, forcing viewers to peer through a grid of spaces where a window has been knocked out or shattered. A tension is established between the desire to look into the freestanding room and the real possibility of hurting oneself on a glass shard while doing so. By placing one's body in danger in order to look at the work, a visceral connection is made between the body of the viewer and the fragile, organic quality of the objects within. As carnal as it is symbolic, Bourgeois explains that "the 'Cells' represent different types of pain: the physical, the emotional and the psychological, and the mental and intellectual. When does the emotional become the physical? When does the physical become the emotional? It's a circle going round and round. Pain can begin at any point and turn in either direction." link


]]> http://londonlayovers.wordpress.com/?p=218 Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:24:55 +0000 Tilia http://londonlayovers.wordpress.com/?p=218 Posted by Tilia

Continued from My British Gwag - Pt. 1

So, after about four hours of happy sleep, following our little pub crawl/play reading evening, I was awakened by Jane bursting back into the flat we were staying in, tossing things into her bag and preparing to depart for the airport, whereupon she would be returning to America.

Her departure was oddly anti-climactic, involving just me standing at the head of the stairs and saying, "K, then.  Um ... see you in the States."  And her responding, "Yep, bye.  Don't forget to make the bed."

Somehow, despite the strong affection and cross continental nature of my friendship with Jane, we're not huggy friends.  I guess we both just knew we'd be hanging out again soon, and we were, so it was all good.  Kind of like a few weeks ago, when I saw her for the last time before her move.  It was kinda like, "Thanks for the book ... um ... see you in London."  "K, bye."

Since I was up, and I only had two days left in the country, I figured I might as well shower and go about my day.  I ended up taking a train to Kensington where I checked out Hyde Park for a few hours and then went over to the Victoria and Albert museum and wandered around in contented bliss for a few more.

However, I have to admit that I was watching the time with taut anticipation.  Around 1, I got back on a train to Queensway, and made my way down to a shady little internet cafe with phones in the bottom corridor.  It's worth mentioning that I didn't have a working cell phone while I was in England, and that this was a constant cause of upset for me.

When Royce answered the phone, I immediately understood what Jane had been going on about concerning his phone voice.  Very sexy.  Even after the fact that he has a hot accent, it was a sexy phone voice.  He asked me if I'd eaten yet, and I said no, and he asked me if I wanted to go ahead and meet up then.

"Can you meet me at London Bridge?" he asked.

... Okay, come on.  Really?  

Yes.  Yes, for God's sake, I will meet you at London Bridge.

He went on to tell me it was quite a big station and that I should find him in front of the Burroughs Market.

Lucky for me, none of the people at London Bridge Station spoke English, and I had to find the market on my own.  I was a bit concerned that I wouldn't recognize Royce, since I'd only met him briefly, and like I said, he wasn't remarkably eye catching (though not unattractive).  

I found myself making eye contact with every shortish, blonde British guy who looked my way, which actually put me in a pretty compromise-able situation.  In fact, one of the guys was a clipboard-carrying solicitor for something like fair wage in Africa.  I went along with him until he needed my mailing address, then I told him I lived in Florida, and he gave me a button and went on his way.

Slightly amused, and carrying my button, I spotted Royce across the way, being accosted by another clipboard carryer, and looking rather annoyed by it.  I was strangely thrilled that I recognized him, and waved, rushing over.  

Royce snapped to the guy, "See! I told you she was coming," then quickly grabbed my elbow and steered me into the market.  

Chuckling to myself, I affixed the "Save Africa" pin to the bottom of my sweater as he, rather cordially, began the tour, telling me about the history of the giant farmer's market we were passing through.

Since I wasn't fully attracted to the guy yet, and was just so damn excited to have a new friend to talk at, I got him from cordial to chatty pretty fast, and as we exited the market onto the bank of the Thames, we were fast friends, talking about everything from the publishing world to what the American South is really like and even Royce's stance on Jane's drama with Grey (which, by the way, he's deeply invested in seeing realized).

At some point, we'd reached the bottom of the Millennium Bridge.  He shot me a sly look and said, "You know ... I've never walked across it before."

"Well, come to it, neither have I," I said, with a grin.  "Shall we?"

Now, aware of how absurdly romantic this already felt, when we got up onto the platform and a gypsy woman, in a long, red skirt was playing violin, and I noticed the sun was setting in a smoky haze of pink and silver, the only reaction to the absurdly piled-on nature of the thing I could muster was a laugh.

Later, I would refuse to explain to him what was funny, but he didn't feel moved to ask right away, as we walked across, experiencing mutual silence for the first and only time during the two days we'd spend together.  In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion he was laughing too, but only to himself, as not to disturb the rhythmic lapping of water serving as a metronome for the gypsy violinist we slowly moved away from.

After the bridge, he suddenly was very keen to show me the sights I hadn't seen yet.  We went to an art museum that featured Louise Bourgeois's giant spider statue outside.  I rotated under it in total awe (absolutely brilliant), and he was clearly intrigued by a female who thought that a giant spider was a thing of beauty, and let me tell you, it was.



He also took me to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, though it was locked up for a production.  All the while, we chatted continuously, and in fact, in retrospect, I said things to him that I'd never, ever say to a guy I'm trying to woo, because I was still trying to convince myself that he was friend material.  

After all, he has a girlfriend.  And according to Jane, she's just awesome.

</bitterness>

Anyway.  

As it was rapidly getting dark, we'd begun to walk in the direction of the pub where we were meeting his friends for their comedy show.  I still have no idea where this pub was or how the hell we got there.  The magic clouded my vision, but I was already dreading the inevitability of having to meet the Girlfriend, and having the spell broken.

"So, what's your favorite thing about London, so far?" he asked me, snapping me out of my neurotic obsessing about his faceless, yet somehow uber hot girlfriend.

"The Cathedrals," I answered immediately.  I've always loved cathedrals.  I love the history behind them, I love their decadence, and the very irony of their existence.  I love the Romanesque and Gothic ones the most.

This clearly surprised him.  "Are you very religious?" he asked, with a hint of trepidation.

"No!  God, no," I answered, laughing.  "They're just so beautiful," I explained, and then gave him a minor overview of my obsession.  "We don't have anything like that in Florida," I explained.  "It's all beach condos and Mickey Mouse."

"Well, which ones have you been in, then?" He asked, visibly relaxing.

"Oh, none.  I did want to go into Westminster, thou-."

I was cut off by him demanding to know why I hadn't gone into one.  "Churches are, after all, public property," he said.  I honestly hadn't even considered that.

He picked us a chapel off of St. Paul's, a beautiful Romanesque structure with latticed doors, and ushered me up the stairs and inside, even as I protested to the discomfort of just going in.  My arguments fell silent as soon as I saw the inside, though.

It was all marble and stone, lit with candles all along giant curved arches.  We walked slowly through, him watching me, and me watching the church, completely overtaken by the whole thing.  Our footsteps were absorbed by the creamy Italian marble as we weaved our way through the fold out chairs left out for a mass or a wedding.

"Go to the alter," he said, softly.

"Why?" I asked, managing to tear my eyes away from the church to look at him.  When I did, I felt real attraction for the first time.  Just a flutter, in my stomach, but the way he was looking at me was intense and involved.  

"Trust me," he said.  And I did.

I left him with a glance over my shoulder to move through the empty pews, past the silly fold out chairs, onto the alter, elevated ever so slightly under a dome.  Once standing there, I looked at him expectantly.

"Now look up," he said, or mouthed at me.  I seem to remember us not speaking very loudly at all.

There was a fresco in the dome, a scene from Exodus, somehow managing to be ominous and comforting, a reassuring glow in the terror of a Flood.  I still think it was a strange choice for a church alter, but it was clearly very old, and there's no telling how the decision was made.  Regardless, it was incredibly beautiful.

I was startled back to reality by voices.  I glanced at him, but he clearly hadn't heard them.  He was watching me, still.

I walked quickly over to him and said, "Is something starting?" motioning to the people filing in.

"Oh, I dunno," he said, coming back to his senses.

"Maybe we should go," I said, motioning to the door, "So we don't get stuck in a three hour mass."

He laughed and agreed, and we walked out of the church and the warm shroud of unreality that we'd encountered inside.  We didn't talk about the cathedral while we walked the rest of the way to the pub, but I'm pretty sure we were both thinking about it.

 

]]> http://uncookedrice.wordpress.com/?p=26 Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:29:55 +0000 uncookedrice http://uncookedrice.wordpress.com/?p=26 Louise Bourgeois, @ Centre Pompidou (28/5)

<<Hearty and hard>>

That was the first exhibition we visited in Paris. We discussed a lot after the visit, I remembered that Linda asked me about the feeling; I remembered her question but forgot my responses.

What is interesting about Bourgeois for me is the diversed media that she has worked with. The materials that she used were somehow interesting, and the most interesting thing of all is the evolution of the usage of the materials, she chose the materials based on their qualities, e.g., flexibility. From marble ( like her work “the past being gotten rid of by the present” )to wood, then steel, then clay and after all cloth, the materials that she works with are more and more flexible as her artistic career goes on, because she needs the flexibility to mold her sculptures, especially those sculptures concerning body. She regards the body, her own body, as the only thing that can represent herself. Her own body has been a recurring topic in her works. Giving birth to her son has made a dramatic change to her body, she treated her body as a safe room to her child, maybe rather than a room, it is more like a house that can give him everything that he wanted. After the laboring, she experienced the negligence from her son; she felt sad about it and made artworks with the feeling. If she treats herself as a house, we can see her work like “woman house”, “house/wife” and “house”, then the resident should be her son, she might treat her son leaving her as a resident leaving his house, and the house became abandoned, as she might have felt of herself. Her works somehow can show the emptiness and loneliness.

And other resident of the house should be her husband, before her son lived in, her husband entered in the form of sexual intercourse. Her husband's love disappeared; she treated it as another resident left her house. Her house is tough and strong, and the support of the family, can always protect its residents, just as other housewives protect their family always. But a house need residents, housewives need their family, in her artworks, the metaphor was strongly shown. Some of the sculptures represented the family and her, her image was tough, just like a sculpture we saw there, a steel sculpture that we could see her holding shopping bags, and her family was just beside her, everything around her seemed like supporting her spiritually. She was sturdy but at the same time we could feel the weakness inside her heart and her mind, through these series of artworks.

Would mothers feel themselves as a house? I think it just depends on one sense of responsibility. A mother can feel herself as resident, and actually she is, if she lives in a house like any other members of the family. The one who takes the responsibility is the one who protects the family.

By the way, the view from the long corridor outside the exhibtion halls on the 6th floor of Centre Pompidou was nice, but it was too hot to stand there. No air conditioning in the corridor, unbelievable -_-

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Sophie Calle, @Bibliotheque nationale de France (31/5)

<<107 reactions of Sophie after she read the letter>>

I think the most suitable idiom I can use for the exhibition is 「百感交集」 - hundred kinds of feelings mixed together, this is my first impression on this artwork. When I situated in the library, (yes, the work was exhibited in a library), that was an emotional archive made by Sophie, she invited 107 women to respond to the break-up letter, I would guess that Sophie might be brave to publicize the letter, but felt weak to give a response to it. Or she didn know how to respond. Those 107 responses might represent her feeling to a certain extent.

I believe that different materials and different kind of performances can help expressing unusual feelings. Though the medium was not chosen by Calle, the variation of the expressions by the medium may be Calle intention. A static performance like writing, photography and drawing, or a dynamic performance like singing, dancing, acting, etc. Serious, hilarious, humorous, psychedelic and many other emotions that Sophie would like to express on this issue. But passively she invited 107 women to help her express. The interesting point in the work is those 107 women have different (professional and personal) backgrounds, they were from different walks of lives. So we can see 107 representatives of Calle to help her to respond. I agree with the point Carol made, the work could alienate Calle as she has put herself in a passive position in this work. This made me think of my work, a short novel about my mother, I tried to be rational and alienated myself from myself, as I thought the work could hurt me, but I felt the need to deal with it. I think Calle was kind of that, being alienated, that could be safer, and not being hurt so much, I guess.

When I came back to Hong Kong, I lost the letter. If Calle was as careless as me, might she feel better? Or has she ever felt sad about the letter? I think the wind blows it away. I am sure.

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Louise Bourgeois and Sophie Calle: Perceptual knowledge of love and hate

In Paris, we visited lots of the galleries and museums, for me, the most profound exhibitions must be Louise Bourgeois work in Centre Pompidou (28/5)

And Sophie Calle work in Bibliotheque nationale de France (31/5).

Since I chatted with Hector before, audiences and readers always compared them as two different styled artists, they used different materials to make art, but in my mind, they are very similar, when you think it deeply, and try to situate in their emotions and positions, but after all, I think I have to change my mind on this issue, I found that in the way of making art, the active and passive positions are different, as Carol said before, Sophie invited 107 women to make responses to the break-up letter from her boyfriend. And Bourgeois, she faced her problem alone, and make heartbreaking artworks on her own. I couldn’t say Calle is completely passive as she is the active one to find those 107 women, but about the artwork itself, I mean the respond, is somehow passive I think. As these were not the direct responses from Sophie. Maybe that why I think they are different, excluding the materials they used. They look similar but different, but they look different but similar, that a reaction after I went to both exhibitions.

Why I thought they are similar?

Because at the very beginning, I just concentrated on the reason why they made the artworks, and the background behind the artworks themselves. I found they were aroused by the relationship issue and love issue easily, like Louise, her sons and her husband seem like very important in her life, every steps every gestures they made would affect Louise much. And Sophie‘s boyfriend break up letter made her a chance to expose her feeling by 107 women. Maybe we can use a word”sensitive” to describe these two female artists.

7/7 in a hot night at home

]]> http://artsetoile.wordpress.com/?p=110 Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:14:25 +0000 artsetoile http://artsetoile.wordpress.com/?p=110 Amei Wallach discusses the joys and challenges of filming Louise Bourgeois in ARTINFO's fascinating interview about her new documentary film, "The Spider, The Mistress, and the Tangerine," co-directed with Marion Cajori.  The film features insight from critics/curators Robert Storr and Deborah Wye, and Ms. Bourgeois' longtime assistant, Jerry Gorovoy.

In the film, Ms. Bourgeois explains the curiously staggering power behind her sculptures vis à vis her small personal stature:  "My emotions are inappropriate to my size, it is not the emotions themselves, but their intensity - they are too much for me to handle.  That's why I transfer the energy into sculpture."  The film examines Ms. Bourgeois at work, during leisure time, and explaining the intense emotional and pyschological drive behind her work.  Mentions of her father's live-in mistress and her inspiration behind her famous 30 ft. spiders are not to be missed.

]]> http://artsetoile.wordpress.com/?p=97 Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:14:22 +0000 artsetoile http://artsetoile.wordpress.com/?p=97 Holland Cotter wrote a delicious review of Louise Bourgeois, currently at the Guggenheim through September 28, 2008.  Bourgeois, 97, was born in Paris and lives in New York.  While her work has been associated with the major movements of the 20th century, she has remained faithful to a style uniquely her own in the face of the sometimes macho art world.  MoMa held a major survey of her work in 1982 and she has held a firm place on the global radar ever since.

Ms. Bourgeois has worked in many mediums but is most famous for her abstract/organic sculptures, first executed in wood and later in rubber, bronze, stone, latex, marble, and fabric.  Her work grapples with many psychological issues ranging from depression, anger, guilt, insomnia, and most importantly her painful memories of childhood innocence lost.  The spiraling interior of the Guggenheim mirrors recurrent shapes in Ms. Bourgeois' oeuvre, providing a fitting setting for her inspiring pieces.

• Click here for more information on Louise Bourgeois, including interviews and slideshows of her at work through the PBS art:21 series.
]]> http://youenoch.wordpress.com/?p=153 Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:30:21 +0000 I, Enoch http://youenoch.wordpress.com/?p=153

Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, (Mid–1960s)
Watercolor and pencil on paper; 19 1/4 x 25 inches, 48.9 x 63.5 cm



Louise Bourgeois, Insomnia Drawing no. 174 (1995)
Mixed media on paper; 11 5/8 x 9 inches, 29.6 x 22.8 cm
{above images from Daros Collection website}

More Louise Bourgeois here: 1 / 2

]]> http://pollocksthebollocks.wordpress.com/?p=262 Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:30:08 +0000 pollocksthebollocks http://pollocksthebollocks.wordpress.com/?p=262 So says Louise Bourgeois, subject of a new film opening this month. If you watch it, however, you probably won’t agree

It’s only when you see a picture of Louise Bourgeois aged four, taken in 1916, or a portrait of her as a young woman, taken in 1937 by the photographer Brassaï, that you realise how much of contemporary history her life has spanned. Marion Cajori and Amei Wallachs’ film “Louise Bourgeois: the Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine” is a deeply affecting and compelling portrait of the artist, begun in 1993 and completed by Wallach after Cajori’s untimely death in 2006.



At times Bourgeois looks like a frail little-old lady, Mother Teresa without the habit. At others she’s resplendent in New York art-scene chic, a voluminous, pink teddy-fur coat and funky cap, snarling at any question she doesn’t deem worthy of a considered response.

Curator and academic Robert Storr says: “I call her my French mistress. I think it’s her pain level I get. She can be very wounding if you allow her to be.”

She often speaks in highly quotable aphorisms—a gift to a documentarian—which nevertheless can seem disconnected and impenetrable until, piece by piece, the film’s title is explained and those disparate statements coalesce into a portrait of the forces that drive her, that inform her art, that make her into Louise Bourgeois, artist.

“You have to be very aggressive to be a sculptor…I want it my way,” she says. “It is difficult to be a woman and be likeable. This desire to be likeable is a pain in the neck.” “The purpose of sculpture is self-knowledge.” “The bed is only a bed, unless you want it to be a symbol for something else.” Here she is referring to her “Red Room” sequence of work, a disrupted series of family rooms subtitled “Child” and “Parents”. Why red, she is asked. “Why red? Because red is the colour of blood, it is the colour of pain.”

The “something else” is, of course, the schism in her parents’ marriage. She talks of the ugly faces that emerge when we cry and how parents tell us not to make ourselves ugly by doing so. When children cry in the night, she says, it is so they can bear witness to each other’s ugliness—to their pain.

Her experiences as a child have continued to inform, if not define, her work throughout her life. “My childhood has never lost its magic,

my childhood has never lost its mystery, my childhood has never lost its drama.” A trick that her father would do, making a “model daughter” from an entire tangerine skin—and his disparaging comments when the skin is revealed to have a phallus made from the orange’s core—still wound her into her nineties, reducing her to angry tears. Her family life was ruptured by her father’s long-standing affair with her live-in tutor—the mistress of the film’s title; she felt betrayed by both parents and tutor. Yet she is forgiving towards her mother, whom she symbolises in her spider sculptures—“a message of the temperament I love”.

For her son Jean-Louis, the making of her art is “like another woman’s knitting”, it is just what she feels she must do, intrinsic to her nature. When her father died, in 1951, their relationship still at odds, she despaired, often taking to her bed for days at a time. When her husband, the American academic and curator Robert Goldwater, died in 1973, their house became her studio. She has barely changed the décor since, despite having a separate working space since 1980. According to her long-standing assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, “she is not into decoration”.

Bourgeois’s insecurity about her own work was clearly a factor in her late emergence on to the international scene. She says: “I was able to work for so many years with a complete ignorance of the art market. It is not me who ignored the market, it is the market who ignored me.”

Without doubt that was in part due to the institutionalised sexism that marginalised women artists in the first half and more of the 20th century. But there’s something else. For Bourgeois, it was as much about making—the catharsis of work that she used to exorcise her demons—that drove her phenomenal rate of production. Her friend, the curator Deborah Wye, recalls being taken to the basement at the artist’s house. For a brief moment Bourgeois switches on the light and Wye is staggered at the amount of work she can see. Then the light is abruptly turned off and the viewing is over.

Bourgeois, it is said, doesn’t describe herself as a feminist artist, despite the overwhelmingly obvious fact that her art is a product of her experiences as a woman. It’s as if she has turned the old adage that “the personal is political” on its head. For her the political is deeply personal. Her art may be rooted in her life as a woman, but she is dealing with her own specific experiences. If anyone can make common cause with that, then so be it. If not, then they can go to hell.

For the disguised members of the Guerrilla Girls, who successfully campaigned for Bourgeois to be included in the opening show of the Guggenheim Museum Soho in 1992 (the original plan featured only male artists), she is nevertheless a feminist icon, whether she likes it or not. At the opening of the show, Bourgeois attended wearing a gorilla mask.

Throughout all this, the film features carefully lit and slowly examining shots of her hugely varied work, finishing with a montage of her giant spiders in locations ranging from Cuba to Sweden to Australia.

“My emotions are much too much for me to handle. This is why I transfer the energy of the emotions into sculpture,” she says. That this film can capture and convey both the emotions and the results of their transmutation to such great effect is a considerable achievement.

Louise Bourgeois: the Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine opens at the Film Forum in New York on 25 June

The Art Newspaper

]]> http://jacquiboydalden.wordpress.com/?p=307 Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:45:06 +0000 Jacqui http://jacquiboydalden.wordpress.com/?p=307 can't believe that this time next week we will be packing to go to Scotland.  Checked out the current temps in Scotland this week and not one day was over 60f (15c).  We are going to be brrrr...cold, which believe or not, I am actually excited about.  After 4 wks of above normal temps here in Texas, I am already sick of the heat.  Day after day of temperatures of 98-100f (36/37c) is very oppressive and we haven't even started the summer months yet!

So the novelty of working has definitely dissipated, gone, zeroed out.  Framing is fine, as long as its just production.  Get a customer asking about framing a picture and I am a quivering wreck!  I really don't have a clue.  That is not strictly true, if I could get over my nerves I would know what to do but the nerves hijack every time. Then the PC system, I am getting there but s-l-o-w-l-y, very slowly. As for the cutting table, if I am there for more than 5 hours (which is the usual) do not expect me to interested in your project. Hope my brain is still active and I am counting the yards correctly because by the 5th hr, it all blurs into one!   Anyway this week I'm in the zone" which basically mean because its going to a busy week, I will where I am needed which will probably mean I will be on the register which I am pleased about because that might help with that side of framing.

The one thing that has improved has been the number of hours I am working.  Now I just have to get Nev to trust me to be there on my own at 9am in the morning so I get hours in the morning rather than mid day.  I am not very good with schedule when I have all that free time in the morning to do my own thin' .  I am just getting into the flow of things when I have to stop to go to work.  Work not being a top priority, tends to be rushed the very edge of very late, in that I am leaving almost at the time I should be starting, not good!  Its something I have known about myself for a long time, if has to be done, I need to get out in the morning before I get settled into the house.  If I have grocery shopping to do, it better be done by 10am because later than that and it likely not to be done until the next day if I can help it.

The one thing that has WORRIED me a lot this week, it the fact my brain keeps seizing up.  I want to say something, I really really draw up a complete and utter blank. If  it happened just once it would not bother  me but it happened several times this week.  Its not as if its even a complex thing I am trying to remember. It things like a person's name, a person I work with almost every day.  Or the right phrase, like what do we call ourselves over the pager system....guest?. worker...blank...blank...blank..until I had to put down the phone because I could not remember the term ' associate"  Having worked with Alzheimer's patients, I know it often starts in the person's 50's and I must admit this is totally freaking me out as my biggest fear about getting old is losing my brain like that.  I really don't want to be in that state. My husband thinks I am stressing about nothing and he probably right but its scared the c*** out me I must admit.  I want  to be like Louise Bourgeois, creating works of art in my 90's and still sharp as a fiddle!

 

CURRENT TEMPERATURE IN KILMARNOCK - 57F (14C)  - WE ARE GOING TO BE FREEZING - I'M LOVIN' IT!

]]> http://nomorecannibals.wordpress.com/?p=27 Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:56:07 +0000 reflectjune http://nomorecannibals.wordpress.com/?p=27 Arriving at the Louise Bourgeois exhibit at the modern I suddenly get goose bumps. It was at the very top.
wrong leg, bad father.
On a print: “it is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.” 2007.
“Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence and doubt.”


Niki de Saint Phalle:
Le Monstre de Soisy
I watched a Martial Raysse stencil get fatter and fatter.
Woman face.
Cai Guo-Quang.
Bon Voyage: 10,000 collectibles from the airport.
“I am in love with this giant scissor whale.” I say.
Simon Hantai – Peinture, great scribbles up close.
Marc Chagall
Max Ernst: Chimere.
Looking at all these Picasso pieces in Paris my chest gets slightly constricted, I can’t stop flipping the lid off my pen, and have to sit down. This is the first physical reaction to being overwhelmed by art I have ever had. There will be more, but my body feels wired - what are they pumping through the air conditioner?
Femme aux Pigeons is beautiful.
The realization that only seeing pictures or reproductions will never be enough again.
The close up imperfections of Mondrian’s work.
Seeing Georges Braque gives me a strange feeling because I never liked his work, but in this setting…
Staring at Picasso’s Le Guitariste.
All of these Matisse, some horrible some sublime.
Nicolas de Stael.
What is “Les Toits” made of?
and Bernard Requichot’s work reminds me of Charlene’s but was done fifty years ago.

]]> http://youenoch.wordpress.com/?p=62 Sun, 08 Jun 2008 03:23:37 +0000 I, Enoch http://youenoch.wordpress.com/?p=62 "My emotions are inappropriate to my size." - Louise Bourgeois











figures by Louise Bourgeois

]]> http://mvlturner.wordpress.com/?p=32 Sat, 31 May 2008 12:31:30 +0000 mvlturner http://mvlturner.wordpress.com/?p=32 As a twentieth wedding anniversary treat, F. secured tickets for a matinee at the old/new Globe Theatre of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare’s late collaboration with John Fletcher. £52 bought us each a foot and a half of wooden bench just under cover (it rained only confetti). The groundlings paid £5 and were forced to stand by stewards. The whole production, and especially the acting, was electrifying. The only slightly dull voice belonged to Theseus, played by an actor called Martin Turner. The "jailer's daughter", who isn't even given a name in the play, nearly stole the show with her histrionics. Some sexual gestures were attempted but - how innate is decent modesty - came over quietly. A giant horse's skull dominated the set and occasionally served as a mask for Athena, a goddess with whom, after a summer in Greece, I now feel acquainted.

 

Before this, we had explored Tate Modern, an exhibition space newly established in a vast power station next door. And as our taxi mysteriously dropped us at the back of the building, we had the opportunity, walking round, to see that power was still being generated in a corner of it.

 

Two large entrances equally beckoned. We chose the descending one and found ourselves in the main hall, dominated by three towers by Louise Bourgeois, "I do," "I undo" and "I redo". The visitor is supposed to ascend, alone, by its spiral staircase, each of these structures and contemplate, among convex mirrors at the top, reflections of the Self. However, each tower had about half an hour's queue beneath it with its own marshal, so we were deterred. This seemed unfortunately exclusive. The name of Louise Bourgeois tops the outside of the building in letters adjacent, and equal in size, to Tate Modern.

 

To one side of this massive hall is a more conventionally layered building. Escalators convey the visitor towards galleries in which hang actual canvases. Cubism, for instance, has its room, filled with muddy gloom. Matisse still provided, perhaps, the brightest memory. The best way to explore many of the exhibits seemed to be as a child. Just in front of us two women were on their hands and knees exploring, among four large mirrored cubes, each other and themselves in infinite regress. As the twentieth century progressed from heroic modernism to conceptual art, so the child's test came to the fore: Is it interesting? From an abstract photograph layered in grey, from dark grey at the bottom to silver grey at the top, the eye instantly withdraws. One cannot persuade oneself even to look at it. Equally boring was the ubiquitous preoccupation with machinery. A machine is a successful theory, something understood. To God everything is a machine. How could so many sculptors overlook this aspect of the machine - its boringness? Nevertheless many of the exhibits were hugely novel and intriguing, easily passing the child's test.

 

Of the people I have spoken with who have been to Tate Modern, a great many speak of it as "empty". Although partly an impression invited by the adoption of a huge space, this is literally not true. There are many exhibits in many galleries on many floors, perhaps rather too many for one visit. The space is daringly converted; the exhibitions imaginatively themed. Exploratory texts - integral to such a programmatic, statement-making century - are on a modest scale. Interest bubbles up everywhere.

 

Perhaps what visitors mean is that this whole stretch of art - the second half of the twentieth century - is devoted to the manufacture of significance. We came to one room in which the decorators' tools - paint rollers in trays - had been left on trestle tables. I warned Farah, this room was not an exhibit, but one to be passed through. But she suggested, rightly, that the room was, in fact, an exhibit. Some "artist" had even given it a title. We looked in disbelief at the paints and boxes, unable to decide if they constituted an "exhibit" or not, but soon converged on the only possible conclusion: that it made no possible difference one way or the other.

 

It is a daily observation that the dominance of science has created a crisis of confidence for both religion and art. The inevitable context of this obsessive quibbling over significance is the experience of its loss. Thus a pervasive sense of emptiness hovers over the whole project, even when it is playful and not overtly nihilistic. It does seem, once again, that the great vice of our time is abstraction - intellectualism - and the loss of relation to the spiritual, instinctive, spontaneous life as all previous centuries have known it. Our achievement is an inescapable self-consciousness amid suffocating peace and plenty.

 

1^st September 2000.

]]> http://needled.wordpress.com/?p=571 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:01:05 +0000 wazzuki http://needled.wordpress.com/?p=571 Needled reviews Louise Bourgeois, Nature Study.
Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. Until July 6th.

I like Louise Bourgeois. I like what she stands for. She’s a woman whose early work challenges and outlasts so many of her surrealist contemporaries, with their ludicrous, dick-swinging excesses. I like her investigative, excavatory treament of sexuality and power. I particularly like her beautiful and evocative manuscript-textiles.


(Louise Bourgeois, Hours of the Day (cover), 2006)

Threads of complicity and humour, reproach and chutzpah run through her work. And despite its inward-looking self-scrutiny, what she makes has always seemed to me to be generous and dialogic in character. I can take or leave the psychoanalytic turn some approaches to her art have taken, but I like Louise Bourgeois. So I was really looking forward to the exhibition of her new work at Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens. I visited the exhibition about ten days ago. I’ve been profoundly troubled by it ever since.

In Inverleith House’s tradition of creating conversations between new art and old archives, Bourgeois’ work is set alongside the collections of John Hutton Balfour, one of the Botanic Gardens’ most important early patrons, and a teacher of plant science. Balfour’s teaching aids, notebooks and illustrations were downstairs; Bourgeois’ gouaches and objects upstairs.



It was interesting to see Balfour’s teaching illustrations in the nineteenth-century spaces in which they might actually have been used. But I really wasn’t sure what to make of these three-foot high illustrations. The apparatus of the exhibition didn’t really help much. We were probably told enough about Balfour: his obsession with the economy of nature as evidence of divine workmanship seemed predictable enough. But these were just enormous teaching aids. It was like being in an undergraduate powerpoint lecture illustrated with (even by nineteenth-century standards) really bad slides.



I was at the exhibition with a biologist. He was mildly interested by the approach to scientific inquiry and pedagogy that Balfour’s illustrations evidenced, but felt that most other people at the exhibition wouldn’t really be concerned with this at all. “People just like the way this stuff looks,” he said, “like the way that old microscope slides are reproduced with a sort of empty fascination all over the internet. People say, ooh, that’s pretty, but don’t really ask why they like looking at hundred year-old insects”



I confess that I do like looking at such things, but I also like thinking about the why of that looking as well. Unlike my biologist friend, I believe it’s possible to regard such things not just as generic scientific ‘curiosities’ but as objects that are aesthetic and critical and contextualised (such as in the work of this talented designer, whose ‘creature series’ displays a careful reverence for the historic traditions of scientific illustration, as well as capturing the essential melancholy of the scrutinised object.)

But the thing was that Balfour’s illustrations didn’t invite this kind of looking. Rather than being (like other botanical images of their era) careful or critical or questioning, they seemed crude, expository, brazen, even. And I was completely bamboozled by what kind of relationship I was meant to conceive between these giant didactic images—whose sole purpose was instruction—and the art of Louise Bourgeois.


(Louise Bourgeois, Self Portrait (detail), 2007. Photograph Chris Burke. Courtesy Cheim & Read.)

Upstairs, the walls were awash with delicate puce daubs. Breasts multiplied in bloody repetition. This was vintage Bourgeois. These new gouaches respond, like so much of her work, to human parts and parting: separation, integrity, abjection. Femininity appears in these images as a something that’s in process—a process as disturbingly repetitive and perpetual as Psyches tasks. Bleeding, feeding, replicating—constantly iterating and re-iterating. Bourgeois’ gouaches also display her characteristic ability to shape-shift through several subject positions, using the natural transitions that a series of repetitive images provides (here most obviously between the positions of greedy, needy mother and child). And the formal quality of these gouaches—bright pink smears that are loud and fleeting, almost rowdy—add to the sense of impermanence and questioning and process in the work.

But why oh why were Bourgeois’ gouaches exhibited alongside Balfour’s teaching aids? What sorts of ways did the curators imagine that these two sets of incredibly different ‘nature studies’ speak to each other? There was no conversation or connection that I could see at all, apart from the obvious inference that the sexual parts of plants and women are, um, a bit like each other. Surely this unbelievably crass association between femininity and flowers couldn’t be what was meant here? And it wasn’t just that the two sets of images were dissimilar, but that they were produced in such completely different discursive contexts, at very different moments, for completely different purposes, and addressed to totally different kinds of audience. What was to be gained from their contiguity? This question bothered me the whole time I was looking at Bourgeois’ work. It has bothered me since. In fact, puzzling about Balfour got in the way of my enjoyment of Bourgeois. I really didn’t see how any sort of appreciation of her work was helped by accompanying it with thirty enormous and rather rudimentary diagrams through which young Victorian men might learn about the parts of plants. Where were the “strikingly similar themes” between the two bodies of work, mentioned in the exhibition blurb?

I’m still troubled by what was going on in the space between upstairs and downstairs at this exhibition. And somehow the whole experience has made me like Bourgeois less. But am I missing something? Am I misrepresenting Balfour? According to Catriona Black in The Herald, the pairing of Balfour and Bourgeois was the result of a “casual conversation” between the exhibition’s New York and Edinburgh curators. If anyone thinks that there is more to it than that, can you let me know?

]]> http://markramsden.wordpress.com/?p=247 Thu, 22 May 2008 20:39:33 +0000 markramsden http://markramsden.wordpress.com/?p=247
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