London Report

VoCA went to the Tate Modern today – saw the Louise Bourgeois retrospective.

The artist Louise Bourgeois. Image: ocaiw.com

What is there to say, really? For us, her work is almost perfect. Her use of material loaded with meaning – from threadbare tapestry (her parents were tapestry restorers in France) to models of her childhood home – is part of a deep, lifelong self investigation that Freud would doubtlessly be in awe of.

Our favorites were her “cells” – large-scale caged installations that she creates to signifiy particular parts of her past, particular memories.

Louise Bourgeois, Cell (Eyes and Mirrors) 1989-93. Image: tate.org.uk

End of Softness, 1967, a polished bronze sculpture, was admiringly simple and loaded with meaning. Give or Take (How Do You Feel This Morning?) 1990 is a bronze sculpture of a two-ended arm, one hand open the other half closed.

End of Softness, 1967 © Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Christopher Burke

One of our favorite of the small sculptures was Heart, 2004. A small metal stand held several large spools of thread. Each thread was strung to a needle, which were stuck savagely into a red wax model of a human heart, also hanging on the metal stand.

Bourgeois’ mother was a seamstress.

Give or Take, 2002 © Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Christopher Burke

Maman, 1999 is a giant bronze spider sculpture that holds a sac of marble eggs beneath her abdomen, and is perhaps the work for which Bourgeois is best known. One of the spiders occupies the courtyard immediately outside Canada’s National Gallery in Ottawa.

Maman, 1999 outside the National Gallery of Canada. Image: mocoloco.com

From the catalogue:

“The motif of the spider has haunted Bourgeois’s oeuvre since the 1940s, but it was not until the 1990s that it took the form of spectacular bronze installations. She has explained the symbolic importance of the spider, which she associates with the figure of her mother…the spider is therefore a positive and reassuring symbol. But the sheer scale of Maman makes it an equivocal creature tht quickly comes to seem menacing.”

Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth 2007. Image: ledevoir.com

VoCA didn’t think that much of Doris Salcedo‘s installation Shibboleth, in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. The way it had been described, we had envisioned a large crack in the floor, but it was only small. The effect was kind of neat, but for full effect it should have been cavernous. Perhaps that would have been impossible.