Louise Bourgeois at the Mori Art Museum
The work of the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois is primal. Primal attachment and primal fear, harking back to her childhood, are intertwined in the tapestry of her work, sometimes literally, inseparable and inevitable. The mother is a smothering, fearsome spider (have you ever noticed that in our stories of dread the spider is always female?), and the angry, vengeful father is constantly on the verge of committing some kind of violence. Both are often reduced to their primal functions; mother becomes a predator with breasts, father is reduced to his sexual organs. Freud would have a field day, as they say, if only Bourgeois, who throughout her life spent countless hours in therapy, would let him.