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Bill Beckley: You were born in France, but you
have lived a long time in the United States. What is the difference between the aesthetics of the two countries?
Louise Bourgeois: I’ll tell you a story about my mother. When I was a little girl growing up in France, my mother worked sewing tapestries. Some of the tapestries were exported to America. The only problem was that many of the images on the tapestries were of naked people. My mother’s job was to cut out the -- what do you call it?
Beckley: The genitals?
Bourgeois: Yes, the genitals of the men and women, and replace these parts with pictures of flowers so they could be sold to Americans. My mother saved all the pictures of the genitals over the years, and one day she sewed them together as a quilt, and then she gave the quilt to me. That’s the different between French and American aesthetics.
-- from Beckley’s anthology, Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics
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