Louise Bourgeois: Walking Through the Spider Woman’s Web

When French-American artist Louise Bourgeois passed away in May 2010, most remembered her as the “Spider Woman” thanks to her Maman series—giant metal spiders scattered all over the world in a macabre modern art gesture of maternity. Literally trapped in the shadow cast by those mammoth mothers of her own invention, Bourgeois’ other work done over her nearly century-long life has been sadly neglected. Germano Celant’s Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works brings together for the first time Bourgeois’ mostly non-arachnid art. Taken as a whole, Bourgeois’ oeuvre seems a complex web of personal and philosophical associations, but Celant acts as the perfect guide to lead you not necessarily to safety—for Bourgeois is never safe—but to a greater understanding of this complex and important artist. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Louise Bourgeois: Walking Through the Spider Woman’s Web."

[Image: Louise Bourgeois. Untitled, 2005. Fabric, 16 x 21 inches (40.6 x 53.3 cm). Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland.]

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with the image above from and a review copy of Germano Celant’s Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works.]

Members Only: Relics of the Age of Relics and Reliquaries

Those of us who lived through the 1980s remember well the phenomenon of the Members Only jacket. Whether you’ve found one in the back of your closet or not, you can’t help but look back and wonder what we “members” were thinking. A similar phenomenon surrounds the modern perception of the medieval cult of relics and the precious reliquaries that once housed them. In the exhibition Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe, currently at the Walters Art Museum through May 15, 2011, modern pilgrims can see that the cult venerated not just members (such as the arm bones once inside the arm-shaped reliquary shown), but any souvenir of the sacred from items related to the life of Christ to even stones or water taken from the Holy Land. Gaining an appreciation of the allure of such objects opens a window onto a medieval world at once very different than our own and yet somehow a precursor of our own cults and memberships. Please come over to at Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Members Only."

[Image: Arm Reliquary of the Apostles. German (Lower Saxony), ca. 1190. Silver gilt over wood (oak), enamel (champlevé). 51 x 14 x 9.2 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust, 1930.739.]

[Many thanks to the Walters Art Museum for the image above and to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of the catalog to the exhibition Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe, which runs at the Walters Art Museum through May 15, 2011.]

Leaving Them Speechless

When Piero Manzoni saw Yves Klein’s all-blue paintings in 1957, the direction of his own art changed forever—in the opposite direction. Born July 13, 1933, Manzoni decided to poke fun at not only Klein’s art but the whole conceptual art world. Manzoni created a series of works that he called “Achromes,” which were colorless works on canvas, rabbit’s fur, fiberglass, and even bread rolls. If Klein set out to say nothing in his works, Manzoni would say even less, taking his speechlessness and rendering the art world even more speechless with his most famous work—Merda d'artista (above, from 1961), in which Manzoni canned his own excrement, labeled it as such, signed it, and sold it for outrageous prices. Even today, Manzoni’s Merda d’artista sells for more per ounce than gold. Of course, we take Manzoni at his word that the cans contain what he says they do. Nobody’s ever looked inside one of them to check. (Would you?) If they were filled with something other than what’s advertised, Manzoni would have pulled even a bigger joke on collectors than if they actually did contain the artist’s, uh, personal oeuvre.

Someone did open one of Manzoni’s Lines of Exceptional Length (as seen above, from 1960). Manzoni drew a thick single line on incredibly long rolls of paper (the longest was 7.2 km), rolled up the paper, and placed it into a canister for sale. He dreamt of leaving a roll in every major city in the world. The lines, if ever joined, would circle the earth at the equator. Manzoni’s odd creations would span the globe, offering conceptual art to public ridicule at the same time it reached its highest point of financial success. Manzoni pushed harder and harder against the boundary of what the art-buying public would accept and came away time and again astounded by what he could get away with. At one exhibition, Manzoni sold hard-boiled eggs into which he’d pressed his fingerprint for the buyers to consume on the spot, ironically pointing out the absurdity of collectors who will purchase anything with the right signature on it.

In Fiato d'Artista (literally “Breath of the Artist,” above, from 1960), Manzoni blew up a red balloon, placed lead seals on it, and mounted it to a plaque bearing his name and the title. The idea of immortalizing something as fleeting as a moment’s breath shows the depth that Manzoni’s concepts could achieve when he wasn’t thumbing his nose at the critics and their public. Today, Manzoni’s Artist’s Breath is nothing more than a withered red balloon on a wooden plaque. Manzoni breathed his last in 1963. That same year, Piero Manzoni; The Life And Works appeared—an artist’s book consisting of the title page followed by 100 pages of blank, clear plastic. To the end, Manzoni said nothing, but said it with style and humor (however scatological).