Frances Morris: Well this is the first major retrospective of Louise Bourgeois’ work for really since the early 1980’s when she showed in New York. Well the exhibition is staged in a series of bodies of work so that each room you go into you encounter work with a different character. We have a chance to see seven decades of work which continues to be really vital and strong. Most retrospectives tend to take place long after an artist has peaked and the extraordinary thing about this one is that Louise Bourgeois in some ways is still an artist at the height of her powers. The story of her life, her early life in France is very well known. She was brought up in this culture of art and well being and design and if you look at the family photographs and we have got many outside the exhibition here, it looked like an idyllic childhood but when she was 10 her father, Louis hired a nanny from England, Sadie, who came into the family and was there for 10 years and was the source of a huge betrayal because instead of just being the tutor to Louise and her siblings she also became her father’s mistress so the trauma of betrayal and jealousy and envy and the kind of sexual tension of the household is something that in a way Louise has been confronting and re-confronting ever since and deliberately so, she sees this as very much as the source of her creativity. She nurtures her memories, she comes back to it, she doesn’t want to go beyond them and the memories of it are her life blood. She made her mark as a really powerful contemporary artist with her commission for the Turbine Hall in the year 2000 which of course was the very first artists commission that Tate Modern showed and she made three extraordinary towers in the west end of the Turbine Hall which visitors could actually go up and down and experience the space in a completely different way literally in the space but she also on that occasion made the wonderful mama, the mother, the mother of all her spiders which we had in the Turbine Hall for the opening six months and we managed to reinstall for this exhibition but this time in front of Tate Modern. When we were working with Louise on the Turbine Hall project, I obviously visited her for a number of occasions but we also on one occasion went in with the cameras and this was because we were going to make a sort of fly on the wall documentary about the putting together of Tate Modern and I think it was a very intimidating situation for all of us not least Louise herself because were being you know it was an intimate encounter that was being made public for the first time and it was interesting. Louise Bourgeois: There was a progress between this for many years and the difference is that happens many times that art is a guarantee of sanity, right, art is a guarantee of sanity, if you are an artist who you are not going to be cuckoo. You are an artist, you are cuckoo already. Frances Morris: Do you think of your towers that this piece or the three of them in some way like your early personage figures as having a…? Louise Bourgeois: No they are very simple the three personage as the father, the mother and the child. Frances Morris: Which is the father? Louise Bourgeois: I don’t care, I am the child and we are not going to be separated. These will make movements, wide movements do you disagree with me, you did this like that? Frances Morris: So they are a family affair? They are in a relationship? Louise Bourgeois: Definitely. A happy family affair. Frances Morris: Is it unusual for you to make happy work? Louise Bourgeois No, no, no. I transform nasty work into good work. I transform hate into love, that’s what makes me….that’s what makes me tick.
