Bourgeois Reading
1. In reference to Louise Bourgeois’ creative approach, the benefits of confrontation are: 1. You are letting the person that affected you greatly, know how you feel. 2. When you use art as a form of confrontation, it can bring peace or healing, as you try to overcome the situation.
2. Three justifications Allan Schwartzman gives in reference to Bourgeois’s abilities are: 1. She gave a different view to the meaning of art. For example, the critic says she “shifted from art that is simply about art itself, to art that has content beyond itself. 2. Bourgeois’s art contributed to feminism. Her work played a major “role in transforming the male-dominated Modernist canon.” 3. Schwartzman justifies that her art “makes a shift in focus from form to content.” Basically as the critic, we get a detailed insight of this artist’s life.
3. What I think of art that has such an intensity of emotion is it helps us to understand where the artist is coming from better. A contemporary art work that I feel elaborates on its value is Temperance, by Christopher Nolasco. Here a “woman is pouring wine from a wine jug into a water jug, to water down one’s wine” The artist explains that; “eating and drinking in moderation is a virtue that I sometimes struggle with.”
4. The risks Bourgeois takes for the sake of her art, I think, can be seen as intense. She is forcing herself to bring back memories that she has never chosen to forgive. This can bring even more pain, and drive her to insanity, when she constantly replays that emotional memory in her mind. In addition it is almost like she is reliving it when she brings life to those memories through her artwork. I do not think it is worth it to take this risk, but if that is the point that she wants to get across through her work, then it seems worth wild to her. As an artist, I do not think going that emotionally in depth would be a risk I am capable of taking.
Leris Reading
1. What Leiris means, in regards to the secrecy of the meetings marked by the sacred, and is that Leiris and his brothers would share secrets and myths that were forbidden to speak of in front of their parents. For example Leiris says they were always “seeking answers to the various riddles that obsessed them.”
2. The ill-defined spaces that Leiris and his family would walk by were in the Bois de Boulogne or the public gardens adjoining the Paris greenhouse. Leiris and his siblings were told that if they stop to play, strangers could grab them and take them off to the bushes. A similar landmark from my childhood would be an abandoned house in my neighborhood. We were told that a crazy old man lived there, and to never walk by the house. Now the home has a nice looking family and it doesn’t look as creepy from the outside. Also we can finally stop by the house for candy on Halloween.
3. One of Leiris’s term, is the name Rebecca. He learned it from a story in the Bible. Leiris comments that when he hears that name Rebecca, it brings an image of a bronze-colored woman, wearing a tunic, and a long veil on her head. In this case, Rebecca also reminded him of something “sweet and spicy.” But when he thought of the “R” and the “cca”, it came forth as something more “hard.”
4. I believe that Leiris and Bourgeois would agree that self-reflection and confrontation are worth it, because they both express their memories with the greatest honesty. To me I do not think it is worth it because I think the end result would be a great deal of anger or sadness.
