I haven’t been to the Guggenheim yet to see the exhibit, but I saw a documentary about her at the Film Forum. It’s titled Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine and will continue at the Film Forum through August 19, so go see it if you’re in New York.
The interviews with Bourgeois are mostly (apparently) from 1993, but there are shots of work she’s done since then. Her art, she says, all comes from emotion; she also said about art and the objects that become art: they are problems, and “Once you find the solution to the problem, you can let go of the object.” And about the work that she created out of her emotional need, a friend said, “If she processed this as art, no one wasa going to throw it out.
The documentary is fascinating, watching Bourgeois describe how she approached certain works, yet at the moment her interviewer asks about some crucial aspect of the work, Bourgeois shrugs, walks away, says, “It’s obvious.” Well, often it’s not. Why, for example, do spiders remind her of her mother, and that’s in a good way? On the other hand, she explains the mistress matter-of-factly: her father had a mistress who lived with the family for several years, at first under the guise of being the children’s governess. And the tangerine? This was a strange, artistic thing her father did with the rind of a tangerine, which had the result of humiliating and embarrassing Bourgeois when she was a child. How could he do such a thing? We never know, but Bourgeois’s art is her attempt to get back at him? overcome him? surpass him?
