'Words Called Up to Answer Image': At Los Angeles Review of Books B.K. Fischer Invokes Louise Bourgeois

Magnifique! B.K. Fischer writes all things Bourgeois including her many literary admirers at a most recent installment of LARB. We love both Fischer's incisive commentary on Bourgeois's art and choice inclusion of threads belletristic throughout.

IT'S HARD NOT to love an artist who can craft a bronze phallus, exhibit it on a meat hook, then tuck it under her arm and go. Louise Bourgeois’s feminist energy is contagious, and her art invites articulation — words called up to answer image. Her oneiric intelligence, equal parts bawdy and brutal, provokes poets to match her mixed-media oeuvre with verbal riffs. Carmen Giménez Smith invokes a Bourgeois sculpture as a figure for desire, a source of “milky, / blobbing […] star-fuckery.” Mary Jo Bang looks at Cell (Three White Marble Spheres) and sees “The crazy face / Of the day looking back with its blank / Brazen sky-high stare.” Camille Guthrie deems Fillette “accurate as the entrails of a rabbit.” Bourgeois’s messy, uncanny accuracy and her peculiar irreverence and disturbing scatology are for many contemporary poets a mother lode. In excavation of that lode, what follows is a rumination, a reading, and a review. [...]

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