Bourgeois Reading

Bourgeois Reading:

1. Bourgeois has created magnificent works by channeling her memories and confronting her past. By confronting the memories of her troubled childhood, she is able to synthesize her past with the person she has become to "weave her emotionally fraught life into a piece, ultimately unified in all of its diversity of materials in forms that are coherent in themselves and within a life's work" (Why is that Art? P. 80). As Bourgeois says, "Art is a privilege, a blessing, a relief...The privilege was the access to the unconscious. I had to be worthy of this privilege and to exercise it...There is something very special in being able to sublimate your unconseious, and something very painful in the access to it. But there is no escape from it, and no escape from access once it is given to you." Bourgeois takes the content revealed to her by her subconscious, confronts it, and discovers innovative ways to express it formally.
   
   
2. 3 Examples given as reference to Bourgeois's abilities:
   --Makes a shift from form to content: She examines her own identity, and places it into the form--focusing on conceptual expression, not making art for the sake of something pretty to look at.
   --Fluidity of materials: Bourgeois uses materials such as steel, tepestry, wood, glass, fabric, rubber, silver, gold and bone to construct Spider, 1996. Amazingly, it's completely coherent and is one fluid piece.
   --Content and psychological insight: Her work contributed to feminist movements, exemplified her self-investigation, and helped to develop modern art.
   
   
3. If art has the ability to capture the intensity of raw human emotion and exquisitely articulate it, it will catch and keep my attention. If I am able to feel an artist's pain, joy, trouble, love, or hate just by looking at a work--it really says something.
   
   Pictured below are 2 works by Noel Dolla, at his exhibition at the Mac Val gallery--2 portraits of his mother. When viewing his works, especially those of his mother, I felt tense, I felt his emotions, I felt his trouble. I wished I could relate--and what's amazing is that he took his tainted childhood and produced something physical that gave me the ability to feel a fraction of what he felt.
   
   
4. Bourgeois takes, first, the risk of self-revelation. By creating art that reveals her emotions, she reveals her troubled past to the world and makes herself vulnerable--but in doing so, experiences the reward of releasing her emotions. With her works that switched the art community's focus from form to concept, she most certainly risked rejection. For so long, many had the mentality that "it isn't art until someone says it is," and she risked someone saying: "This? Psh, this isn't art!"
   Nothing worthwhile comes without risks, and in her case, her results were worth the risks she took. As for me, I'm still discovering what I'm capable of as an artist, and what risks I'm capable of taking. My desire to learn about art, art-making, and about myself is driving me to take risks--put myself out there, on the line, for rejection or acceptance. I'm ready to risk the vulnerability that accompanies the formal expression of my subconscious.