Friday, November 09, 2007

On The Waterfront 2: A Bourgeois Spider



The recently produced Korean horror movie, "The Host," is set on the Han river that runs through the middle of Seoul, South Korea. After an American military man at the beginning of the film requires his Korean lab assistant to pour vats of toxic chemicals down a drain which empties into the river, a tadpole then mutates into a cross between Alien and Godzilla and mayhem ensues.



In a bizarrely appropriate bit of timing, the San Francisco Art Commission on Thursday was installing a metal sculpture by the legendary 95-year-old artist, Louise Bourgeois, of a huge spider, which looks like it just crawled out of the murky, polluted bay.



The sculpture is one of a series that Ms. Bourgeois has been creating over the last fifteen years, most of which are entitled "Maman," or "Mother," in honor of her own scheming, tapestry-weaving mother (shades of "Alien" arise once again).



The sculpture is being loaned free to the City of San Francisco for a temporary stay in the hope that a citizen with deep pockets will buy and keep it here, for the not insignificant sum of $6 million.



For an index and photos of more of Louise Bourgeois' work, which I find alternately fascinating and frightening, click here, and be sure to check out the sculpture in person. It's a wonderfully poisonous antidote to Don Fisher's clunky Oldenberg monstrosity, Cupid's Bow, further down the waterfront.

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