Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim
Penguin June 27th, 2008
There’s a new show opening today at the Guggenheim. Louise Bourgeois.
Bourgeois is best known for her sculptures, which range in scale from the intimate to the monumental, and across a diverse array of mediums including wood, bronze, latex, marble, and fabric. Moving freely between abstraction and figuration, she has developed a richly symbolic visual idiom that encompasses totemic forms, ambiguously gendered anatomical fragments, and towering spiders, as well as the assemblages of found objects that are encased in her environmental-scale installations.
For her art is not a job; it is a life. It is what you do when you get up in the morning, and what you continue to do all day, through headaches and phone calls, breakups and breakdowns, silences and celebrations. It is what you keep doing after dark, and when you can’t sleep at night.
[...]
She has said that she works in response to emotions: fury at the past and fear of the present among them.
[...]
Your daily life is propelled by fear? Draw fear. You can. Impossible to sleep at night? Make night your studio, the cloth you embroider with needs and dreams. The past is an obsession you can neither embrace nor release? Make an image of obsession, any image will do.- NYTimes
This is pretty much how I approach the stories that I write. Sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously. But I deal with my internal struggles and issues through my characters. I put them in the same situations, force them to deal with the harsh realities that I face. In a way, when they overcome it, I overcome it too. Of course, there are issues that are huge and require several stories to overcome, but it is extremely cathartic for me.
Luckily or unluckily, I don’t have the sort of issues that Bourgeois struggles with.
The show runs through Sept 28 at the Guggenheim Museum.
-Penguin
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