Sa Sam,
you have to be very aggressive to be a sculptor, really,
to have the energy to do so. You see something like this, you see
that it doesn't hurt anybody. It's an inert thing. And your impulse
is to look at it and say, gee,
you see? You see immediately this twisting that
is to be a sculptor. So it is aggressive. It is.
It means that this is. I don't like it that way. I want it
my way. It is aggressive. So why not?
It's also a difference in the way that we think commonly women
and men act, right? We think that women add up the smiles and try
to please and the men cut through.
Oh, I see. I hadn't thought of that.
No, I hadn't thought of that. Emma,
I'm very grateful for your input, but this
is not what I said. I did not say that women are
different from men because it's obvious to me. I don't have to prove it,
right? It's obvious.
But it is difficult to be a woman and to be likable.
You see, this desire to be likable,
it is really a pain in the neck. How are you
going to be likable and be yourself?
So there are doubts there, right?
I'm full of doubts, right?
Somebody might say, what is the use of sculpture?
Why do you make sculpture? What's the use of it? An artisan
will say that, you see? You see, I have a boon of contention,
as I said, with craftsmen and artisans,
because their proof of success is really whether
it sells or not. My proof of success is whether it
does something to me. It makes me a nicer person and
it gives me pleasure. You understand? This is very, very different.
Sculpture is a problem to be resolved and it is a pleasure
to find a solution. Right?
After you have found the solution, well, you let go of the
object so that the purpose of sculpture is
really self knowledge, right? And Montaigne
has said that. Montaigne said know yourself.
And I think that if he had, if he had been given to talk a
little bit more, he would have said know yourself in
order to be happy. That's what he meant.
That is why I was able to work for so many years with
a complete ignorance of the market.
It is not me who ignored the market, it is the market
who ignored me. And it was okay, you see, it was.
It did not discourage me at all.
But did it seem okay at the time? Or did at the time. Did you
sometimes get discouraged? No, it was very difficult. It was very difficult to stand the
competition. But it was part
of it was part of the difficulty.
So it's okay. Because, you see, I did not abandon
the work. I kept the work. I had complete faith in the work and
I kept it.
Sa it.
The first state of affair I react to is the quality
of the silence.
When I have adjusted to the silence, then I
can adjust to the concentration.
My model is not your face, right? I look
inside and my model is really my.
I measure this and I say, well, I didn't reserve
enough room to put the jaws or
I will never get the
bridge of the nose and the lips. And so I never get my profile.
I don't have enough. And I get
myself related to this by actually
touching. And see, you see how big it is from here to
here. You have to. You don't be stingy now. You have
to give yourself a lot of room for here. And then you turn around
and you say, do I have room for
my skull? No, I don't have it. It's too short,
our chat now. It's too short. It's too this, it's too
that. So it is a fight. It is a
fight with your notion of
what you need. What you need and what you get is not the same.
You need something, you want something, and you get something else.
So it is the joining of the will and
the means that counts. So the quality
of silence, I repeat, is everything for me.
I cannot do this and listen to somebody tell me,
do this, do that, or the people upstairs quarreling
in a staircase. This is what I'm afraid.
I'm afraid of people quarreling. And that upsets me.
That brings back to me horrible emotions
of being terrified by people who
fought against each other.
I'm not talking about my family. I'm talking about my terrific
effort to adjust to the climate of the studio
when I come in. Right. Who is this at the door?
Who is this? That is the assistant cameraman. Oh, okay,
okay, okay. So, shall I go into the history of
this piece? It might be necessary, because we are in 93
and this piece here was
actually made, conceived and realized 40
years ago. However, my subjects are eternal
and recurrent. This is.
Okay, this doesn't bother us. Okay, where were
So I am very busy now
finishing this piece, which has a long history.
And sure enough, it has the history of a
terrific tantrum where this little statue,
when somebody contradicted me or made demands on me,
I turned against my statue,
which is wonderful. Instead of turning against people,
I turned against the statue, which is perfectly safe.
Safe, I mean, to a degree. And I pushed It I
pushed this statue over. Later you will see it standing up
and it fell.
Or rather, well, she lost her head. And it was a great
damage. Because this is a very elaborate,
finished little piece. The head fell down.
So Jerry, sure enough, pick up the head,
put it back again. And it took 25
years to get this little piece ready to go at the
fate of the work is really to be destroyed. It is really what I
want. I want to do the things and express my rage by
breaking it. You understand that my dealer doesn't like that.
And Jerry doesn't like that. Jerry works like a horse all day.
And I was going to say, Jerry works
like a dog. I don't work like a dog. It is not to have the
thing destroyed when they are almost finished.
So could we move this?
I have had always an interest in
the runaway girl, that is to say,
runaway girl. It is a girl who doesn't function in
the family cell very well.
Who is ashamed of herself for some reason,
idiotic reason. She thinks she's too fat.
Usually she's too fat. That was my point.
I thought I was too fat and I was unacceptable.
These connections that I make in my work are connections
that I cannot face. They are really unconscious connections.
But this is the privilege of the artist. That's why the artist
should not be supported by the government. They should be grateful to be artists.
The artist has the privilege of being in touch with
his or her unconscious. And this is really a
gift. It is the definition of sanity. It is the
definition of self realization. Right?
Did I answer your question, Jerry? What is it? Why do
you identify with the runaway? You have to read between the line when I
talk. Because it would not occur to me
now in this instance that I run away from.
Or obviously I run away from home.
She was born in France 1911 and came
to New York in 1938.
She became part of the New York art
world, participated in all the major movements.
At the age of 71, she had a major exhibition
in the Museum of Modern Art. For Louis Bourgeois,
it was a beginning of a concentrated and new faith
in her work. The 10 years which ensued brought
forth the work of unprecedented beauty,
integrity and force.
Sam SA
I have a fear of hurting people.
I never hurt a fly, if you ask me. Never did.
In fact, I tried to repair everything all day.
So this is a small red room.
It is a strange room. There is lots of dust,
as you can see here,
Right? You can see by
the shape of the hand and the shape of. Of the arm
that it is the room of a child.
And this room has to do with the measurement of
time. La mesure du temps.
So you see all the hourglass.
Some work and some do not work too well.
Some do not withdraw.
But this one is concerned the cooking
of an egg.
Make us think of the measuring of time,
which has to do obviously, with faraway memories,
closer memories, forgotten memories,
detestable memories and wonderful
memories. They are all there. Is it a matter of minutes?
Is it a matter of years? Centuries? Half a
century, three quarters of a century?
You know, children, they are always complaining that everything
is wrong because their parents did this, their parents did that.
So my answer as a parent is I
do what I can. I never promised you a rose garden.
This is it. This is why the rose is here.
Now, to go back towards
earlier memories,
as I said before going back in time.
Then we have not the child's room, but the
parents room. You can see that
it's much, much larger and more realistic
in the sense that it is actually a double bed.
Real double bed.
Well, a bed is only a bed,
unless you want it to be a symbol
for something else.
Accuracy. Are you accurate or are you sloppy in your
memories? You have to be accurate.
And this is given by.
When we look back at this mirror.
Now, please don't call me maman. You move so that he can take it.
Are you taking Jean Louis in or yes or
no? Yes.
So this represents our three dimension.
Vertical dimension, which is like this.
Right. The horizontal
angle, which is like that. Right,
right. And the angle of the swivel.
And it has to do with memories, that our memories can be
distorted. Your memories of a common event will
be very different from the memory of the other
people. So we talk about the child's room,
Red room. It is red because of the reproaches.
And there is certain kind of pain there.
And considering we are talking about red,
right? Red.
Why red? Because red is
the color of blood. And so it is the color of pain.
Now, why pain?
Why pain? Well, it's obvious. It is obvious.
Okay, so that's it.
No,
sorry to say it's obvious. I'm afraid you have to work by
yourself a little bit.
The family had a converted stone barn with
wonderful thick walls. We spent summers there and
sometimes weekends. And the family was usually there
together, which was nice. It was really a
refuge. It felt safe.
My mother would take pieces of
balsa that were about this size and carve
them. I remember
many, many days of this and weeks of this happening, or maybe even
longer. And she would bring them to the Kitchen table.
And she would just. She used a tiny knife
with a very small blade. And she would
carve and shave these pieces with the family.
And it would be like another woman's knitting.
There is a drawing that Jean relates to, and it
is this. Can you put your hand. Jerry, I don't
know if it is. When the light is complicated.
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Jean Louis with the red shirt
has red hands. And Jerry with
the blue shirt has the blue. Blue hands. Right.
And this has to do with the
transportation of wounded people.
So the person sits there. You want me to sit?
Sit there.
This is what it represents. I don't know if Jay will be
able to. You see, I'm as light as a feather.
Definitely, right? Absolutely. Let's lift up.
Can we lift up a little? I'm as light as you pray there.
Okay, Your feet are off the.
Should we put the feather down? Okay.
So what's the moral of the story? Why are you interested in this pose again?
What made you think of that? What's that metaphor?
No, no, it's not a metaphor. It is a souvenir. It was
done in the trenches during the war, since my father was in infantry
and he was used to. It was used to do that.
What I recall are trains after trains after
trains going from the front to the inside of
the country full of wounded people,
so that the civil population would not see it.
They traveled by night. But you could
hear the siren of the train passing by.
So this is where it comes back. How do
you take care of. How do you take care of wounded people?
Okay, so that's it. And your father was wounded,
right? Yes, he was wounded, but he was evacuated to
Chartres. He had a wound in his arm and was never transported, spotted like
that. Was Josephine able to visit him in Chartres? Yes.
Yes, she was. Yes, of course. Did you go
with? Did you go with? Yes, we have lots of photographs. Louise, you went to
the flood lines, didn't you? No, never. No women were allowed
in the flood, but we were allowed in the hospitals. Well,
you can tell how old. There's a picture of Louise in shop. And here's
the weaset chart. 1953. Four.
Well, it must be more than four. There must be six. No, but she was
born on Christmas 1911, and this is 1915.
I was born in Paris at the outbreak of the 1914 war.
And the first thing I knew is that my father left for the war.
And it made my mother very nervous.
And I remember. I remember her
nervousness and I remember my pain at the
time, even though I was very little and she was unhappy.
And she started to follow my
father from camp to camp. And my
brother and my sisters were left home with my grandparents.
And I was carried around by my
mother to meet him in different places
in France. Well, when the war was over,
as happened in many couples, he had
changed and he was going to enjoy himself. And. And from
then on, you run after women. It is not uncommon in France.
It is even very common.
Men are frantic and women are saddo.
Jutana Sa Ra
what I think is interesting in order to establish the American school and the American
family. So the question here
would be, what do you want? You have asked me. What did you
want? What did you want?
What did you want to be useful?
What I wanted is to have an itinerare. Unique.
That is it. Your own journey. My own journey.
This is it. For instance, if you had a map and
you have a.
This is the itinerary of life, right?
You're born here, you finish up here, and what have
you done? What have you done with the damn thing?
This is it. And I chose it. And every time there was a
turn, I made the decision, you go right or you go left or
you go forward. So it was my itinerary.
Unique. And when did you become aware of that? When did that
become part of your. Very, very. Lately, in fact, this year.
Because of course, there is here the Eminence Gris.
You know Eminence Gris? What it means? Yes. Are you the Eminence Grise?
No, he is.
He's always there, and nobody knows it, but he's there. He's in Eminence
Greece. You do not know him,
but you know him by the results, not by his presence.
Now, what's it we were talking about your own. There's a gallery across
the street called Max Hutchinson. This was early in the beginning of SoHo.
And so I worked there part time. One day, well, why don't you do a
show? So I decided to do this show called 10 Abstract
Sculptures. And I wanted to show Louise. Now, Louise wasn't
that known. She wasn't showing that much. Louise came down and she flipped out.
This is before the opening. She. She didn't like where her piece was.
And I thought, oh, God, you know, this woman's like a
difficult bitch, you know, like, she should be lucky she's in the show.
This is my first show. So it's like she threatened to pull the piece out.
I was like, okay, let's just go for
a cup of coffee. So we went to food, I think it was food.
And we sat and we talked because I had never met her before. I remember
walking back after, and she was quite forceful, Louise, you know.
But then she was walking back, and I think it was a cobblestone or something.
She fell down, and it just touched me the way that, you know, just slightly
she fell down. I picked her up, and somehow she
let the piece stay in the show. She sort of calmed down. Because Louise has
this thing, I think, when she's nervous, which I learned later, that when Louise
is nervous, she attacks. Shortly after that opening, she invited me to her home
in Chelsea. And so I
went to her house. And she had an incredible body of work
everywhere. You know, Louise is not into decoration. Apparently, when her husband died
after that, that was probably the last time she had anything. It was very functional.
Writing on the wall, clippings and this and that.
The whole house was really like one of her sculptures. I would come to learn
when I, you know, got a sense of it. But it was really that fusion
of her life and art that really attracted me in terms of where I was
coming from. As I said the 80s, there was a shift. The Greenberg
formalism was sort of on the out. My generation was interested in
narrative, interested in issues of gender and
sexuality, interested in mining a whole other kind of imagery. So Louise
had been mining that area for a long time time.
For me, Louise was the real McCoy. There was no separation for her
art and her life. You know, the relationship of self portraiture, the whole body of
work really is like a self portrait,
and you find it. Stand downstairs. Okay. Not downstairs.
No, don't. Don't stop now. No.
I clean up because you disturb me.
Well, you want me. It is fake.
It is fake. Yes, it is fake. To say that you see
the production, to me, it is excruciating to make it right.
And I'm not an actress. No, no. Try to
help me at this point.
Stand four feet high. You do come out.
So it is the making of a hairpin,
which I am always short of into.
You see, the hairpin is indispensable, and I never
have any. Right. Okay,
so that's it.
We just liked each other. I mean, it's as simple as that. I mean,
I call her my French mistress. Very good. And she is, in a way.
So we are almost ready. I mean, there's a
very direct, you know, emotional bond.
Honestly, I think it's. It's. It's her pain level that I got.
And you go full circle this way.
She generates Energy, and she generates psychological energy. She's also
a vampire, which means she sucks up psychological energy. And you have to be very
careful. She can be very wounding if
you allow her to be. So it doesn't work like this.
So you try the other side. She's done it to everybody one time or another,
more than one time, usually, if they stick around.
But most of the time, she's putting
energy out, you know, and she's creating a world that's
more interesting than it would be if she wasn't there. I met her in
1976, in December. I really remember it.
I remember walking down 20th street and there was a little bit of snow on
the ground and going up to her door and ringing the bell. A couple
of months before, I had seen two of her works when I
was visiting New York. I was living in Boston at the time,
and I saw her work at the Max Hutchinson Gallery. And for
some reason, it really drew me.
She was sitting in the front room and she had a slide projector on
with many trays of her work. And so we just
sat there and we didn't talk very much. But she just kept showing me different
slides of her work. And I just sat there and I stayed for several hours.
And I was totally taken.
I was like, in her power. I don't know how else to describe it.
I couldn't believe her work. I couldn't believe what she was like.
And I just left the thinking just.
It was a transformative event in my life, really.
So this is a scene of the murder. This is the parents room.
And here is the escape. I love that.
I guess my training and my thinking, you know, from having
studied in the 60s and 70s, early 70s, I think it was a
way of looking at art that had to do with the formal
aspects of a painting or a sculpture. Shapes,
color, line, texture, how those affected
the meaning. You know, the art world was pretty much like, if you were not
doing this formless abstraction, it was, like, considered passe or narrative
or whatever. Literary wasn't purely, you know. And I think that that's
why Louise was a little bit on the fringe.
You know, she really wasn't well known and you could even say ignored
for a certain time. In the mid-70s, I think that started to
change. What art could be was being explored.
There were all kinds of protest movements going on at that period. So there were
other kinds of things that came in art. For me, it really
occurred because of Louise.
It was the opening show, the opening show for the Downtown Guggenheim.
It was their inaugural show. So the Guerrilla
Girls had the idea to protest the show,
and we published this card. Do you want to read the card?
I wrote the card, so I should be able to read it.
Here's the card. We sent it to Thomas Krens at the Guggenheim
Museum, Downtown, 575 Broadway. And it was sent on January 23,
1992. Dear Mr. Krenz, welcome to downtown.
We've been hearing all about your opening show, Four White Boys at
the White Boys Museum. Lots of luck.
We circulated hundreds of these cards to
WACK members and art world people. A lot
of these cards ended up on his desk. Hundreds and hundreds of them piled
up on his desk. And at the very last minute, they added Louise Bourgeois and
changed the name of the show to be from Brancusi to Bourgeois.
So we thought that our tactics had been
successful. Evidently, it worked. Y also, Louise had been an icon
for the Guerrilla Girls. She was the subject
of one of the lines in our the advantages of being a woman artist poster.
Oh, where is that poster? Where is that poster? We brought that poster. It's over
there somewhere. One of those bags. Hold this up. Okay.
Can you read it? What does it say? It says, knowing that your career
might pick up after you're 80 is one of the lines. Yes. She was
a symbol of somebody who'd been around for a long time and then did
actually get some acknowledgement at later point in life. I think
that was very inspirational for many, for many people. Although she herself,
as I understand it, does not believe she is a feminist. She believes
she is an artist first and not a feminist
per se. That didn't stop us. Whether she likes it or
not, she's our icon.
Generally, I like my teachers by teacher.
I met people who were much older than I was.
So Brancusi was very old at the time. I think it was 50.
I know it was 53. He was very old at the time.
And it was a kind of crucial moment in his life where he was
first self supporting and a very strong man, you know,
lifting those enormous things, those pieces of lumber. He did that because he was
very tall and very strong. And then suddenly he became old and
he couldn't do it anymore. And that was the changing,
this changing time. I happened to meet
him when his studio was much smaller than my studio in Brooklyn.
It was very small, so he was cluttered. You see, he had a shape like
this and then suddenly he had something to do. So he put that shape on,
another shape and another shape. And that's why it's a series
of Vases that are put on top of each other. Pillars.
They were pillars. And this never came to his mind.
I don't know if he had one, but it never
came to his consciousness that they were pillars.
That's it. So like the endless column pillars in that
sense, valid? I didn't say that. You said that I
They were pillars because the pillars had a symbolic
reminiscences of those things that he
saw in his youth. And I don't know if
he realized that mother image of
the pillar, but he made it naturally,
it came that way. And then when you
are angry at the mother figure, you take the pillar, you know, and you cut
it in pieces. That I know. And so it becomes.
It reverts. It reverts to the origin,
original shape. That is a seed. It is a seed,
right? You push it sideways, it becomes. Comes another seat,
a little lower. And then when he feels good, when he
feels good, he feels that people like him and maybe he likes the people a
little bit. Then he builds up his spirits again. Okay?
So it is like the game of a child. You do it and
then you undo it, and then you redo it. And that's
the way I see him.
Form Marian,
Are we through Sa
and the new chapter is called the
Seamstress. The Mistress Seamstress. The Mistress. Right,
right. Seamstress and the Mistress. Right.
The theme of the Mistress are erotic drawings. But there
is another theme which is very, very deep, which is the seamstress.
I did not go around looking at the. At the needleworkers.
I didn't do that. But I would sit and watch the
seamstress. You know what she was doing?
She was repairing the pants of my father.
That was her job. She was repairing the pants.
She was repairing. She was doing little braziers for
me. She was seeing. She was cutting,
sewing and finishing some little
panties for me, right? And everything went into
that room, that linen room.
That was the most important room in the house.
Because probably you learned about.
In linen room, you learned about body
parts and sex and so on.
One day she goes, jerry, go upstairs and bring all the clothes downstairs
in the closet. Go upstairs. And so I bring down all these clothes. The next
thing I know, she starts putting the garments in order. And the next thing I
know, she's cutting, she's stuffing. And all of a sudden, this is the raw material
for the next body of work. So like everything
in Louise, it's coming from many points. It's also.
It's another form of a diary for her, I think maybe on
A very, you know. I know on a certain level, she knew if she processed
this as art, no one was going to throw it out.
There was a long desire, a long wish to work with Louise Bourgeois, to be
near her and sense her creativity.
Everything is hanging in this room.
Everything becomes a pendant. I would see these pools as trees
and the elements as fruits that are blossoming in these,
this late season of her life. They are like
sleeping elements. They don't stand by themselves to hang like a
winter sleep. They come alive,
I suppose, when people look at them and they tell their own story,
very much connected to her past. Like, for instance, this yellow
dress. Yellow representing jealousy.
It's a maternity dress, it seems, or at least a form of
giving birth, which makes me think of
Sadie, the mistress, probably very jealous of
the mother. She always, of course, remained herself an outsider,
and she could never really take the maternal
position that the mother had. So I think in the
end, they all. They all tell their little stories. But for instance, within this dress,
the pink dress, if people would have the courage to
look under its skirt. Should I do this? Should I show what's
under the skirt? There's hidden a
wheel. And in art history, the wheel would be connected to
Marcel Duchamp, a symbol for the male. And she
puts this under her skirt, hiding it under
the body, so to say. So again, there she fuses two genders together.
And it's always this transgression of boundaries, the putting together
of gender,
for instance, the bones indicate the remainder within
the layers of time. And the only thing that we can do is try
to interpret its meaning when we find them.
The origin of started with a verbal
slip when I said that the beautiful clothes were a bone
of contention between my two parents.
They bickered among themselves. Whoever would dress
me the best,
my father would say, ah, did you see that
little Pearl Quinn that I got for her? And my mother would say,
oh, it's not bad, but Coco Chanel
is better.
That is where it's all started.
Sa save
one question. Why is the piece of called confrontation?
Because all these boxers confront each other. And all these boxers
represent one of us. And they have
to take their place in the circle and face themselves
in front of the others. Nothing can let us escape
this confrontation. We have to come to terms with ourselves.
How bad we are. How bad we are.
How bad we are for
this performance. Well, the first time, when she sort of rounded up her band of,
you know, the Hole in the Wall gang that she created for herself of,
you know, you know, male stripper Woman performing
artists who caterwauls the. She abandoned me, all this stuff. And then she
invited the art world and she co ops and a number of people of note
into this sort of travesty of the fashion show and of the body and of
masculinity and femininity and so on.
And everyone just disappeared. Just like my
She abandoned me. She abandoned
me. She abandoned.
She abandoned me
on me.
You are not listening. You are not
listening to me because you are afraid of me,
Right? But I don't mind that. I understand it. I am going
to repeat. And then am I comes and said, no, you cannot
repeat it because the only version that is valid is the spontaneous
one. You're misquoting me. I'm quoting you.
One second, Justin. An wish.
Okay, then we'll record over it, okay? No, but you
see, it's still there. No, I won't put it in Louise. No, no, I don't.
She always was so almost self destructive in terms
of people who wanted to show her work or people who wanted to write about
her work. She just put up so many roadblocks. Even her
dealer, who was Xavier Forcard, didn't know how much work she had at
the time. And so he would ask me how much work and she would do
funny things like bring me down into the basement, really the lowest basement,
and turn on the light and I would look around and see all this work.
I couldn't believe it. And. And she would then shut the light and
say, I've showed you too much. I've showed you too much. And I had a
tremendous amount of research. And so I had the idea
of proposing that MoMA do a show. And I had only
been working here a couple of years at that point. And I just wrote a
memo to Bill Rubin that had been working on this and that
there was no book on Louise at this point, but I
didn't know at that time that I would be the one to do it.
A lot of people are so obsessed
by the past that they die of it. This is the attitude
of the poet who never finds the lost heaven. And it is really the
situation of artists who work for a reason
that nobody can quite grasp except that they might want to reconstruct something
of the past. It is that the past for certain people
have such a hold. The slideshow,
basically that was used at the Modern was the first time that the mystery story
came out as such. Because the supplement that she
did for Art Forum and the slide show that Gerald and I did was the
first time that the mystery Story really being discussed by her.
This is the mistress showing off all in white.
The story of Seyy is to me almost as important as the story
of my mother in my life. She was introduced in the family
as a teacher for people Pierre and myself. She slept with
my father and she lived in the house. She was there
for 10 years in the formative years of my sister and myself.
The motivation for the work is a negative reaction against
her. It shows that it is really the anger that makes me
work all my work of the last 50 years.
All my subjects have found their inspiration in. In my childhood.
My childhood has never lost its magic. It has never
lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.
My mother, who was a perfectionist, she was a tapestry
woman in Aubusson, repaired her tapestry with fast colors,
vegetable colors that she dyed herself.
This is why we lived on the Creuse in Aubusson and
later on the Bievre. Their water is full of tannin,
which is indispensable as a biting agent for
the fiber. This is the kind of tapestry we dealt with.
When it was washed, it was lifted up and then two
at one end and two at the other would twist the tapestry and it was
then set to dry and then repaired. It is
a signature style. The signature style is the twisting.
And many. You have it right there. Many,
many theme have come from the twisting,
the spiral and the twisting. The two things, same thing.
And so why do you think that twisting impressed you so much? Was it
frightening? Was it impressive? No, it was so
efficient, efficiently.
It's powerful too. Very.
And do you remember the colors coming out of the water? Did that.
The colors did not come out of the water. This is a crucial question
because the dying of the.
Is to look at it and say, gee,
you see? You see? Immediately they distract. Twisting. That is
to be a sculptor.
You know, I think in a strange way, looking back when Louise had the show
in 82, at moment she told the story of the mistress and Sadie and a
stranger is like. That was a big mistake because people use that to interpret the
work, which is crazy. The work is much more
complex than that story.
Sam Sa
first of all, she had had this very long platonic affair
was Alfred Barr, who was the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art.
Barr had to do with her meeting Robert Goldwater in,
I guess it's 38. Goldwater was in France. He was finishing
up his PhD thesis for Harvard, which was Primitivism in Modern
Art, which was a pioneering thesis on the relation of modern art to the
Art of children to the art of the insane and to the traditions of
tribal art.
My father was an extremely intelligent man,
a remarkable thinker and writer. And he was
interested in African art and was the director of the Museum of Primitive
Art for its entire existence before
it was incorporated into the Metropolitan.
Yes, I met him at the library and he
was interested. He was sent to
me by Alfred Bohr. Which one came first? I don't
And the war was declared and all the
Americans left. And Robert said,
no, I'm not leaving until. Unless.
I'm not leaving unless Louise comes with me,
right? Because I have no more mother.
And the mistresses were all around and no
reason to stay there.
The space in New York, I thought, was breathtaking. The sky was
so big and the skyline was so. So open.
And the space, the sky of New York is a very blue, very clear sky.
So it was a very beautiful landscape to me.
I suffered from an acute homesickness.
To recreate the family constellation
helped me overcome or endure this
nostalgia. So that whole period is about
la nostalgie, le mal du pays,
which is a form of mourning.
It reminds me of a period which follows my coming
to New York at a time when
a lot of father figures appeared on the scene.
As you all know, the surrealists came over.
Hamas, first Max
Ernst and then Marcel Duchamp
and then Andre Martin and then Andre Breton.
That whole group of people made me violent
because they were very close to me and because
I objected to them violently.
Maybe I objected to their lordly manner,
to their success, to their pontificalite.
Well, considering my running away from home,
from my country and from my father, it was obvious that any further figures
appearing from France onto these
shores was going to. Was going to rub
me the wrong way. And he did. It means that what you
want to say and is not said. Do you like your
father? No, I don't. I have not made peace with my father yet,
and I have not made peace with surrealism.
This is it. That is why I identified
with Francois Sagan. Francois Sagan
is a sister to me. Really,
this is almost my story.
Okay? Francois Savant is my sister. That's it. That's right.
Because it's about a seductive father. And she's.
She murders. She murders the mistress,
she manipulates. She organizes the
mechanics of the mistress. Death on the
road. And, And. And. And you see, the connection
with Came.
What was it about Goldwater that attracted you in
the beginning? That it was the exact opposite,
absolutely exact opposite of my father in a very
strange way, in temperament, he Reminded me
of my mother. Yes. And I have explained that when I talk
about the spiders. A certain
kind of temperament. Explain it.
Oh no. I have to talk so much about the spiders. The spiders
are all over the place and they have been. The spiders have been
my most successful subject.
So I must be convincing.
They must carry a message,
a message of the temperament I love.
The spider is my mother, believe it or not.
That is to say, the person who is totally reliable,
totally intellectual, totally logical, with no
burst of passion. I really don't appreciate the person fashion.
It is my mother. Not only that, but I try to
imitate her. I try to be as smart as she used
to be. So there are these things sticking out there,
right? So another quality of
this is that they can bang the ground, right?
I hope I'm not wrong, but they can be banged around and they
can take a lot. They have to take a lot.
Now, to be specific,
it took months. Let us say it took six months.
The spider episode was that long. But it had many
precedent. So you see, the fille.
The fille de la regnier is exemplified by this.
You see them, right? It is endless.
Say le fille de la regnier and le fille de la regnier
to au si surville c' est adire. Le fille qui control la
lumiere. I'm interested in people who,
instead of analyzing, put things together right.
They see something here and they see something there and
nobody sees any connection. But I see a connection.
And this is the value of my work. So hold
So hold me ma in
your automatic the
spider. It is an ode to my mother, to go a little further.
It represents a reconciliation
in your long arm. That is
to say, I try terribly hard to be the thinking
and calculating person that my mother was.
Unfortunately, I don't make it very well.
And I am much more gifted and happy with the
world of emotion that my father represented. This is
what I wanted to say. So I am a torn apart between the two.
I inherited my mother's intellect and
my father sick heart.
I suspect it happened just before her father died.
Louise cooked this magnificent leg of lamb One day her four
men were there and we did the stupidest thing possible.
We were speechless because Louise didn't cook
often. And Louise was furious. We lived three
flights up and she reacted by taking a
leg of lamb and throwing it out the window. So we
all went to the window and looked to see where the leg of lamb had
rolled. And I was dispatched, went to the right car and crawled
under and got the leg of Lamb. Lamb was absolutely studded
with gravel. And. And I brought it back upstairs,
took it over to the kitchen sink where it
was washed and we sat down and ate it without
a word.
So hold me, Ma.
In your automatic arm.
Louise, you don't allow yourself to waste time.
That's right. That's right. What would wasting time consist of?
Being ungrateful for the time which is given to you.
Does that sound make you grateful? Yes, it indicates
the time of the day. It means that it is 12 o'. Clock. Is that
right? That the kids are out there? Yes.
Yes. We might talk. Rajan is still here.
But all these drawings are done during the night.
Tell me when I can.
I'm just following your movements. So this is great. Okay.
They are all different.
And there is one which is a giveaway.
You see this one?
That. That is a giveaway which doesn't appear in
any of the others. Took me a long time to know what.
What they meant. It's the only figure in the whole thing. It's the
only figure in the whole thing, though. There she is. As cozy
as can be. Because. Because the world is in
order. And it says the world in order.
It is the title of the thing. And there she is. And she's resting
because all these houses relate to each other and she feels better.
But obviously then the night indicates a
certain fear of chaos.
So I do the houses until I feel.
I feel peaceful and I fall asleep. And that doesn't
surprise them. And they're all different.
I thought it was interesting. You mentioned Paris. That you had actually met Louise's
father. And I thought that that was quite interesting. Your first. You were very young.
You said the first time. But I remember you. Tell me your reaction to the
reasons following. You want to hear about that? Definitely. Okay. You were
living in St. Pauli. No, no. This happened at
the dinner at. At. At Saint Germain. On the famous
dinner was that picture. And. And he prepared. And there was.
There was no. It was a cute. No, it wasn't an onion's house. It was.
He was sitting at the head of the table. Someone else was carving.
So he was a big eater and you could not interfere with
his meals. The very first piece of meat that was carved. Yes,
beautiful. He reached all the way across the table and stabbed
it and ate it instantly. And it was this hunger,
this lust for protein was
extreme, I should say the least.
So he frightened everybody. Yeah.
But it is all around that time, 1551,
her father died unexpectedly.
This relationship had been bitter before and was recently more
bitter again. He had never taken her seriously as an artist, that is to say
the father. She had not taken herself seriously as an artist. I mean, I don't
sense that she didn't take her own work seriously, but she didn't believe she had
it in her to be an artist in a professional sense. And she was constantly
doubting her abilities. She had had quite a lot of success
by the standards of those days. She was in the moderns Collection as
of 50, 51. Louise was often the only woman in church
shows with other of the abstract expressionists and so on.
It's that same crucial years between basically 46,
47 and 53, when she pretty much
stopped showing.
But you read your diaries and it's full of self
questioning and anger and you know,
it's an enormous effort for her. Meanwhile,
she also wanted to be the perfect wife of an esteemed intellectual in
New York. She threw parties, she cooked, she dressed, she did all these
things. She was the mother to sons, but I think had a terrible
time doing it and not necessarily did it very well. And all
this together sort of converged, I think. And when her father died, it all came
unstuck.
She withdrew in her grief.
So she wasn't. She basically
went to bed for a long time. She just was
devastated and would
spend most of her days in bed for
quite some time.
Tangerine, the word is
a stimuli for me. If I start
drawing a figure on the tangerine,
little by little the past is going to re.
Emerge and I
will be able to verbalize it.
That's it. Now this is not my work of art. It was my
father's work of art. Around the end of the
dinner on Sunday, he would take his tangerine
and he would stand up and announce that he was making
a little portrait of his daughter. And he had a way
of, after drawing it, he had a way of cutting it,
right? So you have to be very careful
on the cutting. If you cut the wrong thing, you are in a bad way,
and I do not mean this as a pun.
So you lift up all these shapes that
you have drawn and then cut. So the drawing,
the cutting and the lifting, right?
And then when you reach the navel, the core would
come out. This is the moment you would look inside and the core
was fantastic. He would marvel at it, right? And we
were supposed to marvel at it too, right? Look, just look how
impressive. Then he would turn and say, well, I am
sorry that my daughter does not exhibit such
beauty because my little figure is very rich
and obviously my daughter doesn't have Very much there.
The little creature was just a girl.
Maybe the audience who never peeped since
they were being fed, they never peeped.
And maybe some of them felt sorry for us, but I didn't realize
that. I'm not saying that they were sorry.
I am saying that at the time, I felt that they were laughing at
us. They were not laughing with us. They were
laughing at us. And the pain was very great.
You can see that after 50 years. For somebody who doesn't
cry after 50 years, the thing is so vivid that
it is as if it had happened yesterday.
All these children gather up in the night, and what can they do
except cry? Cry in the night.
And it is completely useless. All I want to say is that
the people who cry in the night like this have a right to do so.
They don't do it to be clever, or they don't do it to disturb
the peace. They do it because it helps them.
And since you become very ugly when you yell,
you know, the parents bring up a mirror and they
say, oh, don't yell because you become ugly. But they
meet in the night because they cannot see each other's ugliness,
you understand? And still they feel each other's warmth.
So they cry all night, and nobody knows why.
I overcame this trauma through a dream. He was
telling his joke, and his eyes fell off on the
dinner table. And the cat jumped on the table and gobbled
up his two eyes. I had achieved my
revenue.
SA There
are my hands.
As you can see by the size.
It is his hands that are holding my hands.
Right? Is that the one? No, that's in that one. So we
took the wrong one and his hands. Then my
hands are over. Hands are like this. So this
is where it came from. So it is really our hands.
Why does it seem important for it to be your hands, yours and Jerry's?
Because it means it shows how much I care
about the whole thing. It shows how much the emotion that
Police expresses is true.
It's an emotion that has been lived and that is real. It's not
something made up.
I go back and I unwind the past.
And you can see by the work. There is a sequence to
the work which is visible in the
aspect of the earth, in the way the pieces look.
And they go on and on like that.
Everything is organized.
Go on and on and on.
Except that the anxiety remains. And the anxiety makes
me work more. But the work is for pleasure.
Because I feel better after having done this.
I feel stronger.
My experience with the towers happened over a year and
began with seeing a maquette and moved to another maquette and
another. And then a subsequent encounter
with the work was rolled out pieces of steel and
the beginnings of curves in
a very, very cold steelyard in Connecticut.
And my subsequent experience of the work was daily construction. Here it
go a little forward.
It we
finish these works about 10 minutes before the opening. Or depending
on 10 minutes before the press came in. And there was an extraordinary lull where
there was nobody around. The turbine hall was so
quiet you could just hear the hum of the transformers.
This was the end of an amazing project. The institution
was going to open within days. It was all finished. The towers were there.
Spectacular. And I thought, I'll need this one. Well, I'm going to do it.
I went up, I do.
I went very, very slowly and incredibly self consciously. And I
think that's one of the key things about these works right at the start.
They make you self conscious.
It's about rupture, the middle one.
And it's about travel, it's about the journey.
It's a very unyielding and very prison like
experience to come down that tower.
When you sit at the bottom of the tower and you look up,
the view from the bottom of the well, there is a kind of upward
momentum. There is something up there.
I then went up, I redo and
top of that tower. I became extraordinarily absorbed
in the mirrors, in myself.
Because I put my hand up like this. And as I did in the mirror,
another hand emerged here. Absolutely extraordinary
because Louise makes these double handed arms.
For me, the first encounters with Louise were really as a kind
of historic figure, a classic modern 20th
century artist. And then
subsequent encounters with her were encounters with a contemporary artist.
And for me, I think she's really the only figure in 20th
century Century art that I see in both these contexts.
I think as she has become physically older and
in a way more ambitious, her work has become
more universal.
The purpose of the pieces, whatever they are and whatever date
they are, is to express emotions.
Emotions for me are very bothersome because they
are completely inappropriate. My emotions are inappropriate
to my size. My emotions are my demons.
It is not the emotions themselves. It is the intensity of
the emotions are much too much for me to handle.
And that is why I transfer them.
I transfer the energy into sculpture.
This applies to everything I do. It has nothing to
do with the craft. It has nothing to
do with the skills. It has nothing to do with how
to manage materials. Materials are only materials,
nothing more.
The materials are not the subject of the artist.
The subject of the artist is emotions and
ideas both.
So hold me one?
So hold me ma?
And your llama in
your automatic arm?
Your electronic.
So hold me ma?
And your long arms,
your petrochemical in
your electronic.
So let's. Let us have a. Let's have a little something.
We don't deserve it, but we can see.
La femme de l' anglo et unglot?
La femme de la migot Et un amigot avec
sans pot el dansot La
chamote? La femme du chamot?
Il bukin el buquinot El
souffrot.
You are so great. You know something? You tell your husband.
Whose music is that? Mine.
That's the only music I've.
Souff?
Square and 2/3 float.