7pm
Lecture Theatre
Victoria & Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL
Influential American writer, essayist and journalist Gary Indiana will be reading from his latest publication To Whom It May Concern, produced in collaboration with the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010).
A collaboration between Louise Bourgeois and Gary Indiana, To Whom It May Concern pairs her beautiful colour-wash male and female torso images with his word-poems, creating a meditation on relationships, sexuality and physicality. Gary Indiana's short, visceral but lyrical texts form a conversation with Louise Bourgeois’ images, in an unconventional non-narrative, part of a broader dialogue about the barrier of flesh, about desire and intimacy.
Having initially trained as an actor, Gary Indiana went on to work at New York’s influential Village Voice as an art critic. Alongside satirical novels such as Resentment (1997), Three Month Fever (1999) and Depraved Indifference (2002), he has also written non-fiction on a broad range of cultural phenomena from Pasolini to Warhol.
Internationally renowned artist Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She lived in New York from 1938 until her death in 2010. Using the body as a primary form, Bourgeois explored the full range of the human condition. From poetic drawings to room-size installations, she was able to give her fears a physical form in order to exorcise them. Memories, sexuality, love and abandonment are the core of her complex oeuvre. Her work appears in collections worldwide, and in 2007 she was the subject of a major travelling retrospective organised by the Tate Modern, London, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
This event is programmed in association with Louise Bourgeois Studio, Violette Editions and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
To Whom It May Concern is published by Violette Editions.
Tickets £9/£6
Available from Victoria & Albert Museum
Box Office: +44 (0)20 7942 2211
www.vam.ac.uk/tickets
Louise Bourgeois and Gary Indiana
To Whom It May Concern (detail) 2010
Bound book of archival dyes on cloth
© Louise Bourgeois Trust
Gary Indiana
