Louise Bourgeois (On Sunday Afternoons)
The following conversation took place at the home of Louise Bourgeois in Chelsea over a period of three weeks, in the summer of 1997: July 20, July 27, and August 10. We sat at a little table in a library at the end of a long corridor. The room opened into a garden.
Bill Beckley
excerpt:
Bill Beckley: You were born in France, but you have lived a long time in the United States.
Here, we can be puritanical.
What is the difference between the aesthetics of the two countries?
Louise Bourgeois: I'll tell you a story about my mother.
When I was a little girl, growing up in France, my mother worked sewing tapestries.
Some of the tapestries were exported to America.
The only problem was that many of the images on the tapestries were of naked people.
My mother's job was to cut out the, what do you call it? Yes, the genitals of the men and women and replace these parts with pictures of flowers so they could be sold to the Americans.
My mother saved all the pictures of the genitals over the years, and one day she sewed them together as a quilt and then she gave the quilt to me.
That's the difference between French and American aesthetics.
Here the beautiful changes for me from day to day, when I am my rational self, and when I am divided between the rational and the emotional.
As my brain experiences the duality of subjective and objective, my sense of beauty swings between the two.
I refuse to choose. I am a woman of emotion who still pines for a woman of rationality.
I am torn between the two, and I have learned to accept them both.
To seduce is a harmonius merger of the two and it is the greatest art of all.
I am a total rational person, but prone to ecstasy, like religious ecstasy.
I forgive people their religious ecstasy, but I feel sorry for them.
Are you a religious person?
Read the entire article at the Bill Beckley website:
http://www.billbeckley.com/writings/louise-bourgeois
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