The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine
Posted by toni-s on:
This film by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach, which was made in 2008, was shown at Campbell Hall at UCSB last night, January 12.
Louise Bourgeois' work has been shown this past year at the Guggenheim in New York and now is at MOCA in Los Angeles.
The film was a touching and intimate portrait of the artist, much of it filmed at her studio in New York City, referencing earlier life events in France where she was born, and her history in the art world for sixty years.
Bourgeois spoke movingly about her life as a child in a difficult family situation. As a child, she traveled with her mother following her father who was fighting in WWI. Her relationship with her mother and her father and her father's live-in mistress as well as both of her parents deaths, informed and inspired her work, which she describes less as objects and more as representations of her deep feelings.
Her materials of choice are harder materials, and larger scale works. She uses found objects to create enclosed "cells" that are laden with her personal and historical meaning. Her reflections on family relationships, illness in all its physical and psychic manifestations have resulted in work that is profound and visually memorable. She uses marble, wood, metal and delicate glass things, like empty perfume bottles and glass formations that have a medical resonance. She uses the color red, which she explains means pain, blood and all attendant meanings, and says with finality, that it is perfectly clear what the color red "means".
Some of her most memorable creations have poetical and "meaning-full names", "Nostalgie", "Passage Dangereux" and most poignantly, "I Do, I Un-Do, I Re-do".
For anyone interested in art that touches the mind and the spirit, I recommend Louise Bourgeois and this film, The Spider, The Mistress and the Tangerine.
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