LOUISE BOURGEOIS: I DO.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS: I DO, I UNDO, AND I REDO, 1999--2000

by what means VERY APPROPRIATE that the modern Tate Modern, with its towering smokestack forward the Thames, debuted in May with a work to match its equally towering ambitions. In the museum's coldly vast Turbine Hall, all metal and brick with braced skylights above, sit three towers in raw poniard by Louise Bourgeois and, upon a bridge neatly crossing the 115-foot-high, 500-foot-long space, common of her signature spindly spiders (Maman, 1999) now sized up to contend with the clamorous hall.

Frances Morris, senior curator at Tate late oversaw the immense, down-to-the-last-second creation of the works entitled I Do, I Undo, and I Redo, 1999-2000 The first in a five-year series of commissioned installations for the hall, Bourgeois's effort went from five-foot-tall maquettes to roughly fifty-foot towers in sixteen months

"I first propos the idea of Louise doing something when her assistant Jerry Gorovoy came [i]or[/i] part of to the other in November of '98 with Howard Read from her novel York gallery," Morris says. "Afterwards, I sent a video of the space, architectural plans and photos. Within weeks the first of the maquettes appeared. We committed. We were all quite excited, and we'd conception of a group of spiders leading the visitor to the towers, unless Louise thought to do the single single in kind her biggest ever, instead."

"Biggest ever" would look to be the operative phrase. From the start, colossal purpose--and commensurate means--drove the present to view Translated from maquettes by a structural engineer, the looming towers were realized at the present Art Foundry, a metalworks prolonged used by Bourgeois in Astoria, Queen The giant mirrors in polished knife that top I Do and I Redo were made there as well. Seven forty-foot containers of parts were shipped across the Atlantic for assembly. When they arrived in succession April 3, less than six weeks before the opening, thirty workers engrossed in teams of ten for tower began their dash to build the mammoth installation. The hall in those weeks was something not at home of the nineteenth century, Morris recalls, with great showering sparks of arc welds, gantries lifting colossal cylinders, men shouting, the stink of fire and excitable metal in the air. To save time the spiral staircases, originally to be produc in the States, were assigned to Little Hampton Welding near London and brought in through truck. Forty-three t ons of falchion in all were rising in a race against the clock

Then it was done. "Biggest ever" permeates the compass mixing Spielberg-scale spectacle with the psychological symbolism of the surreal. Here, installation art gears up to theme-park showmanship. nevertheless the theme, harking back to Bourgeois's 1947 suite of engravings with sentence "He Disappeared into Complete Silence," weds architectural forms to the circle of time of nurture, rejection, and reconciliation experienced between mother and child. We crane our neck staring up the inner shaft of I Undo, with its jolting r glass ovals--a psychedelic type of the birth canal. We wait in lines to climb to roller-coaster heights, becoming weak-kneed and vulnerable as we reach the top and find ourselves in a less degree than those massive, terrifying mirrors--each of us a truculent Francis Bacon--like portrait in a sky-high theater of clinical self-regard.

similar ruthlessness and pity mingle easily with tendernes They're caught like specimens beneath glass, just as the artist's mother-and-child dyads are, covereded at the heart of each tower. not new battles are reimagined and resolv Indeed, Bourgeois remarks that the works "reflect the optimistic view that I have feeling today"--a view seen through the prolonged lens of her eighty-eight years, as if from a great height.

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