In 10th Decade, Artist Louise Bourgeois Still Inspires

The last thing we expected to find at the retrospective for 97-year-old sculptor Louise Bourgeois at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art was a reason to go to our abs class. But after several galleries of her haunting and ambiguous work — multibreasted pink marble torsos, phallic vaginas, a guillotine hanging over a replica of her childhood home, two headless black knitted figures (one with a prosthetic leg) making love inside a glass case — we came across a work on paper that Bourgeois created just last year at the age of 96.

“It is not so much where my motivation comes from,” she wrote in cursive, “but rather how it manages to survive.” One can interpret that in far more high-minded ways, but what we took from it at 8 a.m. this morning was we didn’t need to find the motivation to go to the gym — we simply needed to go. And we did. For a sense of Bourgeois’ extraordinary vitality, well into her 10th decade, check out a couple of clips from the documentary The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine.

What’s your favorite way to indulge your creative side? What do you consider your “art”?

Tags: Arts, Conceptual artists, Los Angeles, Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, Louise Bourgeois, Mistress, Modern art, sculptor, Visual arts, Women artists