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All right, I've been all over Cooper Unions site--where do you find their hometest questions? I was gong to steal some for next year's home works, etc. thanks
I found out about most of the prompts from past years looking through the Cargo search engine: |
Bourgeois was influenced heavily by the Surrealist Movement; looking to defy its heavily masculine approach.
Some of the Artists from this movement are: Max Ernst (above painting), Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp and André Breton.
There was also a very strong Feminist Surrealist tradition that followed which Bourgeois continued. Leonora Carrington (painting below) was one of the most celebrated artists from this group.
It is also crucial to note Borugeois’ heavy influence from Marcel Duchamp (Installation of “First Papers of Surrealism” below) individually. She did once say “Marcel Duchamp could have been my father” (1988).
(Below, Duchamp’s Étant Donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Bourgeois was also influenced by and an in turn influenced contemporaries like Eva Hesse who delved into feminism and experimented with Installation (Sculpture below).
♥ 1
→ 26 Feb 12 at 2 pm
→ 26 Feb 12 at 2 pm
Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture
A MoMA exhibition about the intersection of the two mediums
♥ 2
→ 26 Feb 12 at 2 pm
→ 26 Feb 12 at 2 pm
A Banquet/ A Fashion Show of Body Parts
For this performance at the Hamilton Gallery of Contemporary Art in New York, Bourgeois invited an audience of critics, art historians and scholars to watch their contemporaries model a series of costumes designed by the artist. The audience were seated in boxes around the perimeter of the gallery creating a narrow pathway for the models to pass along, between a table laden with forms in the centre.Whilst the models walked, a commentator, allegedly a former Playboy bunny narrated and Susan Cooper performed ‘She Abandonned Me’. For the duration of the performance Bourgeois destroys the critical distance of the professional viewers of art by inviting them into the space of the work for a specific duration. In this way each participant is invited to loose themselves in a space with definite categorisation or heirarchy. The central fixture, both banquet table and stage, references that in Bourgeois 1974 installationThe Destruction of my Father and Confrontation, a sculptural piece also from 1978. In the former work, the table is at the centre laden latex objects arranged as food but resembling body parts. In Confrontation a table is laid with similar part-objects but two longer poles extending from top and bottom reference a stretcher used for carrying the wounded or dead. The installation of this object with surrounding box-like seats becomes the stage for the performance of A Banquet. Bourgeois’ use and re-use of similar forms creates a chain of reference between food and the body and consequently referncing psychic states of attachment and abandonment, destruction and recuperation. The recurring table structure is ritualistic, denoting both everyday activities of eating dinner with a family and religious or cultic celebrations; Bougeois conflates the two creating a referential cycle which defies absolute meaning or categorisation.
