There is no natural light in the Hayward Gallery. The artworks are illuminated in a soft, artificial glow, similar to the flat light of dusk. Gallery visitors creep around in the crepuscular gloom and I watch their shadows flit across the weave of Louise Bourgeois’ fabric children.
These creations are curious and malformed. They invariably slouch or hang - anything but stand up straight - as if loath to keep their form. Even at their most structured, seams ripple and fabrics fray. I skirt around a headless devil of red linen and try to figure out what the exhibition's title, ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child’, could mean. ‘Weave’, and its synonym, ‘fabric’, has a double association with the domestic sphere and the world of women. ‘Child’ also further duplicates meaning - a comparison between Louise Bourgeois’ creative process and the birth and regeneration? Or perhaps the exhibition will explore motherhood and feminity? As I stare at a golden orb of twisted metal, feminism obtrudes its lovely head into my thoughts and I start to wonder how transgressive this exhibition aims to be.
Louise Bourgeois often remarked on the use of clothing within her work, explaining that “clothing is [...] an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that”. For her, clothes are “signposts in the search for the past”.
I wander past a carousel of white nighties and huge, glowing bones, and note the stains, rips and creases. This piece doesn’t just articulate a moment in the past - it also shows the patina of time that weighs upon it, distorting it. Moving through the first room of the gallery, this distortion is a constant presence, creating a sense of making and unmaking, mending and un-mending. The experience is disorientating. Even as meaning is found between the disparate elements, it falls away, leaving discordant symbols. If each piece is an ‘exercise in memory’, it is like memories uncovered in a dream. They shift and shuffle, resisting definition.
Read this article and many more by creating a free account. We’re like your other favourite publications but run by a small, independent team that is dedicated to growing a community of grassroots creators.
In Ari Aster’s 2016 short film C’est La Vie, Chester Crummings, a homeless man, speaks directly and combatively to camera about his life and society at large as he wanders the streets of LA, surviving, begging for change and casually murdering people. At one point, he says: “You know what Freud says about the nature of horror? He says it’s when the home becomes unhomelike. Unheimlich.”
In Sig...
Just over a year ago, then CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, sold his first tweet as an NFT for $2.9M. It wasn’t just his first tweet, of course, it was the first tweet, which as auctions go for Crypto- and NFT-heads was about as appealing as a hunk of sourdough to a famished goose. The nearly $3M sale was a welcome green flag to early advocates in the NFT space that the winds of blockchainge (sorry...
Note: contains spoilers for web series Local58I hate opening with statistics – unless of course, they’re jaw-dropping. In its first month, a recent found footage video called The Backrooms hit a staggering 15M views after its upload to YouTube. That’s a reach of roughly half a million hits every day. And let’s bear in mind, this isn’t the latest drop from Ariana Grande, or MrBeast putting main...
According to Fitzgerald, there are no second acts in American lives. That’s probably true, unless you’re bigger than America. Kanye’s career has gone through so many ducks, pivots and sensational conclusions, we can’t help but look on as the next step could be the last, as rapt as we were almost 20 years ago. The first half of my quest to understand the man through his music brought us to 2010...
