Sweet Louise!

Today, Cristina took the reigns and mapped out our journey for today. This time we were going to La Proa an art museum located in the area called La Boca. As last week, we started out our day with cafe con leche with 3 medianlunas - a very tasty, sweet croissant. Afterward, we hoped on a train and took it to the end of the line. From there, we got a cab to get to La Boca. We were dropped off in front of the most touristy area. There were lots of street vendors and restaurants who had very persistent waiters trying to lure you in. It was a pretty colorful place. There were lots of dancers there that were supposed to be performing the Tango. Most of them were just kind of hanging out. They reminded me of the Peony Park dancers that performed when the amusement park was open in a way. However, these dancers were not nearly as enthusiastic and the ones who were dancing seemed to be kind of phoning it in. Oh, well. I wasn't necessarily there to see some tango. That is for Thursday. We were there to see the Louise Bourgeois retrospect at La Proa.

I've never seen a full on exhibit of Bourgeois' work, let alone retrospective one. It's always been a piece here or a couple there in a permanent collection. It was a WONDERFUL exhibit! Not only was there one of her ginormous spiders outside the musem doors, they had several full on installations of her work. The whole museum was dedicated to her work alone and who ever curated it did a fabulous job. It was really excited to see pieces that I've only seen via Art21 or Art City. One of my favorite pieces of hers is "Arch of Hysteria" - a headless, figurative bronze sculpture in a backward arch suspended in the air. Beautiful! They had quite few of her works on paper, but what was more intriguing were her soft sculptures. They were pretty freaking cool! I kept wondering if she ever made peace with her demons before she died. Maybe. Maybe not. A lot of her work gave me the impression that I was looking at the work of a woman that never really felt truly comfortable with herself as a woman and struggled with her relationship with her father. Perhaps that is why her work is so strong. It's good to have something to push up against - something that drives us to keep confronting and exploring whether painful or pleasurable. Some of her work was very straightforward while her installations were more ambiguous. I have to agree with Hennessy Youngman - I don't necessarily understand all of her work, but she kept doing her and that's all that matters. I felt truly inspired being surrounded by a lifetime of her work. I hope that I am able to live a long productive life of producing work that is meaningful and work that influences others like her work as done for me.