Elderism #2

October 8th, 2008

In the catalog to her currently-touring exhibition, 96 year-old sculptor Louise Bourgeois states:

        “The spiral–I love the spiral–represents control and freedom.”

A fairly innocuous statement, were it not preceded by these five sentences:

        “The spiral is important to me. It is a twist. As a child, after washing

        the tapestries in the river, I would turn and twist and ring them with

        three others or more to ring the water out. Later I would dream of

        getting rid of my father’s mistress. I would do it in my dreams by

        ringing her neck.”

(New York Review of Books)