Louise Bourgeois and other editing distractions...

After having spent almost the whole weekend editing and re-editing my work, going back and forward between images and sound quite a few times, it is time to leave the current edit sitting there for a while and go out and put my mind to other things… But before I put pen to paper on that I have to dwell a bit on the editing process… Gosh, the last mile is so painful… I have now drafted a detailed storyboard with timings of the sound and which images should go where, choosing anchor images for each soundscape… but still a few pertinent choices to make… There are still two categories of choices: I have a few images that are quite similar, so I have to kill a few of them, and then there is the choice of sequence… It sounds trivial but it feels pretty daunting when it concerns work that is important to you… David Alan Harvey has written an interesting blog entry on the editing process. He still uses small prints for important edits, stressing the tactile nature of the editing process for him… He writes: ‘…be instinctive, be yourself....make small prints of your work and carry them around with you...spread them around...play with the sequence....tack them on a wall...play with the sequence...this is very difficult to do on a computer screen regardless of the program...be tactile with your work...touching your photographs makes a difference...’ (Source: David Alan Harvey blog entry as of 26 September 2007).

But what better way to leave the editing process behind for a while and go out and look at the work of other artists… So I went to the much-acclaimed Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Tate Modern (ignoring the stupid cracks on the floor in the main turbine hall, c.f. Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth exhibition there – well come to think of it, the cracks make nice backgrounds when you play around with a Holga – but more of that in a later post)… and I have to say, the Bourgeois exhibition is brilliant… Bourgeois’ work is rich and diverse, spanning a career of almost 75 years (she is now at 95 bound to her workshop apartment but still works as an artist, having commenced studying art in 1933 in Paris)… she worked with different materials on different subjects, often experimenting with materials that other artists would then come to use as well… Her main subjects explored her own childhood, the infidelity of her father and sexual ambiguity…

There was an interesting innuendo in the audio piece that came with the exhibition… Apparently, Bourgeois still holds court every Sunday at her New York apartment, inviting young and aspiring artists who talk about their work and get into a kind of conversation with Bourgeois… The audio piece suggests that depending on how the conversation goes, Bourgeois can be quite nasty or incredibly helpful… I would love to play fly on the wall at one of these Sundays…